You're lying in your tent in the dark. In the unfamiliar woods outside, a nocturnal cacophony. There's just one thin scrap of Nylon between you and whatever's out there.

So you have everything you think you'll need carefully arranged right next to your sleeping bag so you can reach it, all in order, just so. Your watch, your flashlight, your bear spray, your knife. Maybe your gun, if you're a wimp.

Before going to sleep you've practiced grabbing your knife in the dark. Don't try to tell me you haven't at least once. I know you have.

Well, Glow Rhino think they've got another solution for you with this, their Fermi.

I'm sorry, The Fermi. They consistently render it with the definite article attached.

This knife was kindly lent to me by a reader, which is such an astonishing turn of events I can still hardly believe it. I'm just chuffed to pieces. I won't name names, but the guilty know who they are. So thank you.

The Fermi is named after Enrico Fermi, the physicist who's famous for developing the world's first nuclear reactor. That, plus the Glow Rhino name and the fact that I wouldn't be showing this off to you if it didn't have some kind of trick might clue you in to what's going on here.

You see, this knife is radioactive.

The Fermi is an unassuming and somewhat compact liner locking folder that happens to have not one, not two, but three radioactive tritium glow inserts embedded in it: One each in both of the handle scales, and another titchy little one in the thumb stud. Note that the green ring in the stud is not the glowy part, that's just neon plastic which you can even order in a variety of colors. The tiny dot in the middle is the part that illuminates.

And yes, this puppy is nuclear. Tritium is a weak beta particle emitter, decaying into helium in the process, and this is what powers the Fermi's glow. Or rather, just like Doc Brown's DeLorean, this puppy is ultimately electrical. Beta particles are fast electrons, after all, and these are what excite a phosphor coating on the inside surfaces of the glass tritium capsules, which captures this energy and re-emits it as visible light. The phosphor stuff is apparently zinc sulfide based, but nobody seems willing to admit its exact formulation in any easy to find place online.

So the glow inserts produce a very small amount of wan green illumination, but unlike your typical glow-in-the-dark stuff they glow of their own accord, constantly, without the need to be charged up via external light. This also means they'll glow all night without your intervention.

That's not to say they'll glow forever, though. Tritium has a half life of about 12.3 years, meaning that in that time frame the emitted radiation and thus the brightness of these will be reduced by half. In 24.4 years it'll be a quarter of what it was when new, and so on down the line.

All that may sound like a long time but bear in mind I've shown you plenty of knives in this feature that are already twenty-plus years old. So it's up to you if you think this is worth it for a $100 piece of kit, versus just getting a normal folder of similar construction and, most likely, a significantly smaller price tag.

There is an evergreen temptation for sleazier manufacturers of these types of things to claim that they're "permanent" illumination but as we've just observed this is obviously not the case. For their part, Glow Rhino only claim a lifetime of 12 years, matching the half life of the tritium itself, but whereupon in reality the inserts should still be emitting some type of visible output. The output of the glow vials will constantly diminish more or less linearly until they reach whatever point the owner decides they're dim enough to be considered spent, but where you draw that line is up to you. The waters will be further muddied by the fact that while the raw falloff of the light output may be broadly linear, human perception of it is not.

Interestingly, when I received this in the mail it had clearly been opened and tampered with, then resealed by the post office. At first I thought this might be because we'd tripped some radiation detector somewhere along the line, no doubt installed in a bout of post-9/11 hysteria in some godforsaken sorting facility someplace.

But now that I've read up on it I think this might not be the case. Because while beta radiation is indeed a type of ionizing radiation, i.e. the bad kind, tritium is an incredibly weak emitter of it. It's throwing out beta particles -- electrons -- with comparatively a very low energy per particle. So much so, in fact, the beta radiation from this stuff is quite difficult to detect and has a range of only about 1/6 of an inch (just a hair over 4mm) in open air. And then, that light emitting phosphor layer should theoretically capture pretty much all of it anyway. In fact, the stuff is so weak that trying to use a Geiger counter to detect tritium emissions is generally considered to be futile. So it's more likely that they opened this to ensure, ye gods forbid, that it wasn't a switchblade, which for some unfathomable reason you're not allowed to send through the post.

This also dovetails neatly with the inevitable comment this thing is sure to garner, vis-a-vis, "You expect us to take this radioactive motherfucker and clip it to the inside of our pants?"

Well, the energy of the beta particle emissions of tritium is slightly less than, say, the electron emissions of a garden variety cathode ray tube as found in a television. Tritium throws particles with an energy of 0.019 MeV or if you prefer 19 KeV, compared to the typical emission energy of a typical boob tube at 20 to 35 KeV. You spent your entire youth staring at one of those and while the content on it may have rotted your brain, the particle emissions certainly did not lase your lobes. (In fact, basically none of it escapes the front glass, just like how vanishingly little-to-none of what these tritium capsules emit escapes their glass, either.)

So yeah. This type of thing is really fantastically unlikely to do anyone any harm. Even if you busted one of the capsules, I think the little shards of broken glass would be a bigger risk than the tiny quantity of tritium itself. The only real exposure risk with tritium is ingestion, which I think would be quite difficult to achieve not least of which because the amount of the stuff inside is really very small, but also because at the end of the day it's fancy hydrogen, which is far lighter than air and would surely go "paff" off into the atmosphere before you got a chance to have much of a whiff.

The Glow

The light that the Fermi's inserts emit is extremely dim. This is on par with various tritium powered thingies, both those made by Glow Rhino and others. You may be familiar with these via various glowing keyfobs, gun night sights, and other gadgets. Your gizmo having a tritium glower in it is sort of the peak of EDC nerd appeal, in some circles at least, so the Fermi certainly scores there. The only way it could do better would be to have superfluous titanium components and or maybe some fidget magnets in it somewhere.

If you've never played with one of these tritium emitters in person before, note that the light is completely invisible in even moderately illuminated ambient conditions. And forget about using the glow emitted to read anything or even find something other than itself in the dark. It's just about perfect for marking its own position, and really nothing else.

It's also remarkably difficult to photograph properly. I used a two second exposure for these.

Given the green shade of light emitted by the phosphor and how similar it looks to the classic glow-in-the-dark green, I had a hunch that whatever the material is might also be fluorescent, and glow under ultraviolet light.

And I was right. Boy howdy.

But even after shining a strong UV light on it the phosphor doesn't remain glowing any brighter than it started once the light is removed. (In this case the source in question is my little 1xAAA 365nm jobbie which is, yes, the same model Big Clive was showing off.) It can't be "charged" like a traditional glow-in-the-dark material.

But while we're on the topic of traditional glow-in-the-dark stuff, why not just use that and be, like, a zillion times cheaper?

Well, for comparison -- and for Science -- I lined the Fermi up with one of my Rockhoppers made in glow PLA and as an added ringer, a random tracer glow airsoft BB.

This is just after a couple of minutes of exposure to the ambient lighting in the room, nothing special, and nothing especially scientific.

This, however, is what happens if I give the entire arrangement a short cooking with my UV flashlight. When it's fully energized, traditional glow-in-the-dark material is miles brighter than the Fermi's tritium capsules. Enough that here you can actually use the raw shine coming off of the Rockhopper to see the outline of the Fermi below it.

But after ten minutes...

...And then an hour...

...And then three hours...

...The semipermanent glow of the tritium capsules demonstrably becomes a significant advantage.

Mind you, once your eyes are well adjusted you can still see the shape and outline of the Rockhopper for 8 or 9 hours, even if only just, which is tough to convey over the and still ought to be good enough for finding it in the dark over the course of most nights. Provided you don't live in Hammerfest or something, anyway.

The Knife Part

Other than its atomic party trick, the Fermi is otherwise a fairly unassuming liner locking ball bearing folder with modern looks, but a pretty spartan feature set.

It's fairly compact, 6-7/8" long when open and 3-7/8" closed with a 3" drop pointed blade. The usable edge length is just about 2-7/8", ending in an angular cut that's not quite technically a choil, I guess, but has the same function. So given all that maybe this isn't quite the best tool for fending off bears invading your tent, even if you can find it instantly in the dark.

There is no ricasso, nor is there a flipper heel on it. This is a pure thumb stud opener, and while the stud is ambidextrous it's only illuminated on one side. The other side is just a plain black screw head.

The blade's D2 and is flat ground, although it's not quite a full grind. There is a small flat spot near the spine for about half of its length. It's finished with a nice even PVD coating. Not a single part of this knife is shiny other than, you know, the parts that shine in the dark. This should make any tactical ninja operator happy.

The Fermi has flat G10 scales with full length steel inserts that have lightening holes in them. You'll have to take my word for that last part, though, for reasons we'll soon discuss. The blade's spine is plain and square, with no rounding and no jimping on it, either. Overall the whole thing is very plain-Jane.

It has a deep carry pocket clip with nice flush fitting screws in it, but this is not reversible for no particular reason I can fathom, nor is any option except tip-up carry provided. Beats me as to why because the scales and overall construction are completely symmetrical. I don't see any technical reason why the clip couldn't have been made reversible. They just... didn't.

Likewise, there is no lanyard hole. Nor any assisted opening or any other spring action.

One thing the Fermi does have is this groovy totally flat pivot screw on what's presumably the female side of the pivot. This gives the back side a very attractive minimalist look.

Here's a lineup of this plus a couple of likely EDC contenders.

It's smaller than not only the usual Kershaw CQC-6K, which isn't much of a stretch, but also a Benchmade Bugout -- but versus the latter, only in terms of footprint and not thickness and definitely not weight. That's because it tips the scale at 86.4 grams or 3.05 ounces, nearly triple that of a Bugout.

But on the bright side, the Fermi's G10 scales plus full length liners made it perfectly rigid, and the thicker construction -- 0.499" or nearly precisely half an inch not including the clip -- I think made it feel a lot nicer in your hand.

It may look like it only has partial liners, but that's because they're rebated into the scales with only the jimping sections sticking out.

The Fermi is indeed a ball bearing pivot knife, although you wouldn't know it by reading Glow Rhino's own writeup on it. One upshot of that is the near perfect blade centering, which is unusual for a liner locking knife.

The bearings don't make it any easier to open, though. That's because the Fermi has quite possibly the most ridiculously overdone ball detent in it that I've ever experienced.

Opening it is deceptively tricky. Overcoming the detent takes a lot more force than you'd expect. The studs don't stick out past the scales in the slightest and there's not much gap between them and the scales, either. Nor is there a scallop in them in right spot for access. So there isn't much of a space to work your thumb into, and if that sort of thing matters to you I think that'd make this near impossible to use while wearing gloves.

"Positive" is certainly one word you could use for the closed lockup. If you get the blade even vaguely near home the detent grabs it and snaps it shut for you.

On the bright side, the open lockup is extremely solid as well. As usual with a bearing knife there's no perceptible lash, wiggle, or rattle in the blade when the thing's open.

On Failure

I did ask its owner for permission to disassemble this knife. You won't see that, though, because it's with no small amount of shame I admit to you that I couldn't get it apart.

Not without resorting to barbaric methods and levels of force, anyway, which I wasn't comfortable with.

The main pivot screw has a T8 Torx head on one side, but as we observed earlier it's got nothing on the other side. It sure feels like it has an anti-rotation flat in it, but it's still not enough to do you a fat lot of good. The screw is glued into place with permanent threadlocker and anti-rotation flat or no, the whole thing just spins in its hole without coming undone no matter how you crank on it. You can feel it grab, and there's a distinct lobe where the flats should engage and keep the shank from spinning around in its hole. But it doesn't quite work, and the whole assembly eventually rotates past the hump before the screw will actually let go.

I have various tricks I could employ to circumvent this, and if this were my knife that would start with cooking it with a soldering iron or possibly just grinding a slot into the female side of the screw.

But at the end of the day it ain't mine, and I did pinky swear not to break it. So I won't.

We can see what we can see from the outside. For instance, here is my level best at capturing the speed holes in the Fermi's steel liners.

The handle halves are separated by an aluminum backspacer into which the clip screws and scale screws on both sides sink into. I think this also has threaded inserts in it, because some of the other screws spin forever without coming undone also.

To get that apart, getting in there and grabbing the inserts with pliers would probably be necessary. But that would require getting the blade and pivot screw out as well, and there's a darn hole in my bucket there; see above.

So the hell with it.

Cutting Observations

D2 steel ought to be a known performer provided the manufacturer didn't fuck it up.

Glow Rhino is not a known quantity to me; their specialty seems to be tritium-laced geegaws, and while they do offer several knives I can't quite be sure if these are made in house or outsourced, or if they're just a side hustle for these guys or what.

What I can tell you is that Glow Rhino's website is one of those damnedable cesspits that's constantly popping up (assuredly fake) "So and so in [city, state] added this item to their cart!" messages in the corner of the screen all the time in a limp-wristed gambit to either imply legitimacy or insinuate that these are flying off the shelves in a manner that would require them to be more popular than they probably actually are. Anybody who resorts to that sort of thing automatically gets a bit of side-eye from me.

But what their website doesn't do is specify the Fermi's country of origin, and nor is it marked on the knife anywhere. Maybe it says on the box, but I don't have that.

The marking here appears to be a model descriptor and not a serial number, since from what I can see of about a third of it on the pictures on Glow Rhino's site, the numbers appear to be the same on this example as what they're showing. That, or we got phenomenally lucky in getting the same unit that they used for their product shots. Do you know, somehow I'd doubt that.

And I know they specified both materials in the engraving just to be cheeky. D2 is the steel, obviously, but the H3 is tritium.

Anyway, the Glow Rhino logo is on the reverse and these are the only two markings on the knife.

As it was delivered to me I found the cutting performance of the Fermi to be pretty dire. It was not capable of cleanly cornering a Post-It note.

This example appears to still have its factory edge but I don't know how much its owner has used it.

The edge is also slightly out of true. One side is about 20 degrees and the other side is closer to 25.

I further don't know if this nibble taken off of the tip is how it was manufactured or if it was busted off at some point during use.

However, I did have explicit permission from this knife's owner to treat it as I saw fit.

So I dropped on my Ruxin Pro to reprofile, and sharpened it up real good. Nothing crazy, mind you; I maintained the factory edge geometry although I did reprofile the off edge so that now both sides are the same angle.

Here's what it looks like now.

I'll also mention that this is one of those darn silly arrangements that requires you to remove the thumb stud for a proper sharpening, otherwise it's in the way. At least this unscrews easily.

And lo, its cutting performance is drastically improved. I did not notice any diminishing of cutting ability after using it to eviscerate my last two Post-It notes, and there is no visible sign of burnishing in the coating around the edge so we can probably assume that there were no catastrophic fuckups with the Fermi's heat treatment.

This shouldn't be a praiseworthy attribute in this day and age, but somehow it still is.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I have the same opinion of this as I do of other people's dogs, and for that matter their children.

I'm glad to have had the opportunity to play with this, and it was a fun time. But at the end of the day, I'll be glad to give it back.

For $99 the Fermi's build quality seems a bit hokey to me. Sure, I know that the lion's share of its price tag is down to its included tritium thingamabobs and not the knife itself, especially given that Glow Rhino charge $40 just for a simple glowing keyfob.

There's also the point that the Fermi's main selling feature, just like a Nexus 6 replicant, has a built in lifespan. 12.3 years, if you care to think of it that way, or maybe just a little longer before it reverts back to being a normal knife.

I don't have much room in my collection for a working knife that can't feasibly be disassembled, and for that kind of money you could buy two CQC-6K's. Or a CRKT Cottidae and a glow-in-the-dark paint pen, with change left over.

But then, you wouldn't be able to tell all the ladies that you have a nuclear fuel rod in your pants.

Here, instead of shilling my own stuff let's shill something somebody else made for a change.

In my last actual column I mentioned in passing, and at the tail end of a very long wall of text, the possibility of a better value for a balisong trainer in today's market than even a Chinese knockoff. While we're at it, we can simultaneously answer a question nobody asked, namely which trainer knife do I actually use?

The answer is this one.

This is the Kershaw Balanza. It's brought to you by the color grey. I think this might be the most monochromatic set of photos I've ever taken that didn't involve black and white film. Not that you'd know by looking.

Note that I didn't say trainer version -- That's because for some twisted reason, no live blade version of this knife seems to exist. Kershaw do make a couple of other balisongs that come in both live and trainer variants, just... not this one. This comes as a trainer only. It's just one of those things, I guess.

The Balanza has list price of $60 with a real world street price of about $42, which means it's slightly cheaper at present than the knockoff I reviewed last week. So for once in history maybe it's a better idea to get this instead of the Ching Chow Special.

Even notwithstanding that, it's got a couple of highly attractive features up is sleeve which I think make it a genuinely good value for what it is. And in the bargain you can also buy it from an actual company you've heard of and might even like, rather than some anonymous shitheads.

Yes, I am well aware of the heat I am about to bring down on myself from the various balisong nerds all over the internet by defending this product. It seems that the Balanza is universally reviled. Everyone hates this knife, apparently. Complaints abound about it being "too heavy," or "handle biased," or allegedly "breaking all the time."

And yet, I like the Balanza. And for once not just for deliberately contrarian hipster purposes, either.

And it's undeniable that the Balanza is ostensibly constructed in much the same way as Kershaw's other balisongs, one example of which I own: That'd be the Moonsault, which I tore a new asshole in one of my very first writeups on here.

So what gives? With its ignominious reputation and our inauspicious start to things, can the Balanza ultimately be redeemed?

Sizing Up

It is inevitable when talking about this sort of thing that the comparison between this and a bunch of other knives will come up. Kershaw's other knives, sure, and my Moonsault in particular. But to use a technical term, there are a shitload of other popular balisong trainer knives out there in the world, all competing to be your entry point into the world's most sedentary extreme sport.

One of my knocks against the Moonsault is that it's too damn large. The Balanza is noticeably smaller, and much more in line with a "traditionally" sized balisong. It is neither comically huge nor uselessly tiny, and therefore doesn't achieve anything interesting in that department at all. I know this is heresy, coming from me.

When closed the Balaza is 5-1/2" long, and it's 9-3/8" or so opened with, once again, a groovy skeletonized blade that's completely symmetrical (almost) and also obviously not sharp. That puts it at "only" 7/8" shorter than the Moonsault, but that fractional reduction in bigness is actually very important for its usability.

It's actually noticeably slightly shorter than the Krake Raken as well, initially to the tune of a very deceptive 1/8" overall when closed. Its blade is almost the same length but the handles are quite a bit shorter, about half an inch, which also has the net effect of moving the pivots back by roughly 3/8".

Similar to most other balisongs, the handles are tapered. At their widest by the tail they're 0.486" across and up at the pivots they're just about 0.414". At rest the knife is noticeably flared in both the open and closed positions, about 15/16" in total at the narrow end and 1-1/4" at the tail, not including the latch. The handles are 0.406" thick, and achieve a very pleasing feel by being subtly rounded over on all the corners, slots, and edges. This means the profile is somewhat flat, but not excessively so. The assembled handles are slightly wider than they are tall (or shorter than they are wide, if you prefer). The entire knife has a satiny stonewashed surface over a finish that looks, at least, as if it's been blued. Kershaw calls this "blackwash," and it's a gunmetal grey that's not only attractive, albeit a bit boring, but so far also appears to actually hold up pretty well. Since as usual mine has left several craters in the Earth as a result of fucking around with and subsequently fumbling it.

All of this is in stark contrast to the aforementioned Moonsault, which feels slightly weird because it lacks the taper (although the inner edges of its handles are wavy instead), is more angular and less roudned, and also has a rougher, snaggier surface that seems to show scuffs rather than hiding them.

There's a lot to recommend about the Balanza's design, or at least it has a couple of features that I like which really ought to amount to the same thing. The biggest headline, of course, it that it's a ball bearing pivot knife. As such it's guaranteed to have consistently effortless and low-drag action, and head and shoulders above its similarly priced competition which is usually bound to have bushings or worse, just plain washer pivots.

Lots of trainer knives promise "no play, no tap" in their descriptions. The Balanza, meanwhile, actually achieves it. The pivots are authoritatively solid with no wiggle. There's only a small amount of flex in the handles themselves.

It has a kickerless mechanism with Zen rebound pins in the handles as well, rather than traditional kicker pins pressed through the blade.

One of these is shown here with the aid of my little Lumintop Tool AA 2.0 flashlight, because otherwise it's awfully dark in there between the handle scales. And while we're at it, just check out the texture on the sheet of paper I use as a background.

While its latch isn't zooty and spring loaded, at least the Balanza has one -- unlike a lot of trainer knives -- which not only keeps it from flapping open in your pocket but also opens up the possibility of using it to practice tricks that rely on the presence of a latch. It's also good practice if you plan to use it as a stand in for a live bladed equivalent that's got a latch, which if you'd like to not irritate the shit out of yourself you might want your actual daily carry knife to have. (I certainly do, anyway.) It's nicely tensioned on my example and easy to kick loose with your pinky without any undue effort, although it rattles around a bit on its pin.

There is no clip, but this is not unexpected given that none of Kershaw's balisong offerings have one, whether they're trainers or not.

Breaking Down

The Krake Raken knockoff we looked at previously is all aluminum, and is one of those flash high speed modern jobbies that weighs very little and is very springy. Which if we're honest, maybe makes it a little too lively.

The Balanza, meanwhile, isn't. It's constructed entirely of steel -- Handles, pins, blade, all of it. That means its heavier at 129.8 grams or 4.58 ounces. (Meanwhile, however, that is around 3/4 the weight of a Moonsault, which is a knife that I think is just about on the far side of being impractically heavy.)

It's a sandwich design, with each handle comprised of two steel slabs separated by some nice diabolo shaped spacers.

It's also a nice palate cleanser after our last disassembly debacle with that Krake Raken clone. The Balanza is gloriously easy to take apart.

It just comes apart with regular Torx screws and without even requiring a heroic amount of effort. No blowtorch, pry bar, or tactical thermonuclear warhead is required. The screws are factory threadlockered, but not excessively so. The body screws are all T6 Torx and the pivot screws are T8. Just watch for which side of the pivots house the male versus the female screws...

...Because the screws do indeed have anti-rotation flats on them and the female sides can't be unscrewed. This is unlike the Moonsault, which has plain round screws.

It's subtle, but the heads are slightly different on each side. The male ones, i.e. the ones you can actually undo, are a tiny bit flatter. If you know this in advance it can help you identify them. If you don't, well. Flip a coin.

The Balanza is extremely simply constructed but it has it where it counts. The kicker pins and the latch pivot pin plus its endstop are shouldered and just drop into holes drilled in the handle slabs. All of the spacer screws and pins are the same as each other, so it's impossible to mix them up.

And the latch does indeed have a built in endstop in the form of an extra pin to prevent it from contacting the blade. It's stopped in its travel in the other direction by bumping up against one of the handle spacers. This system is simple, but it's nice to see that Kershaw actually put some thought into it... unlike a lot of knife makers.

Of course, the ball bearing pivots are what we really want to see. Kershaw is very proud of these, to the extent that they're one of the few manufacturers who bother to even mention when one of their knives has got 'em. In fact, they never seem to shut up about it so they're probably making up for all the other manufacturers who don't.

Note also the subtle difference between the pivot screw holes in the handle slabs. There's a matching D shaped cutout for the anti-rotation flat on the pivot screws only on one of them, but it's also marked with an extra notch to indicate this. The pivot screws can only be put in one way.

The hardware lineup. For a budget toy, the Balanza has a pretty long bill of materials. Eight body screws, four machined spacers, four shouldered pins, the pivots, and four sets of nylon caged ball bearing assemblies. The bearings are steel, not ceramic. Whadaya want for $42?

All the markings are hidden here on the edge of the blade. It's up to you to decide if this edge is the "safe" or the "bite" side, but it's the side that faces the latch handle from the factory so I'm in the latter camp.

Also note all the gumpf and pocket crud stuck to the inside of the cutouts, there. Woof. I should have cleaned this off better prior to photography, but I guess this is what I get for this being my actual working... er, not-knife. It lives in my pocket most of the time.

Hidden like the proverbial rake in the grass is the Balanza's country of origin, laser-etched near the pivots via this near microscropic marking. Despite how I took this picture it's still visible when the knife is assembled, but you have to know where to look.

It's a little disappointing to see that this is one of Kershaw's imported models. I figure it'd be an even better and much more fitting Fuck You to the clone manufacturers if this were made in the US, but it isn't. The rest of Kershaw's balisong lineup is US made if that matters to you, though: Both the Lucha and the Moonsault, in both their trainer and live bladed guises. So search me why this one isn't, although the others (even the trainer versions) are all north of $200. That's probably got something to do with it.

Alas, at the Balanza's price point a US manufacturing origin is probably unrealistic. Oh well.

Flipping Around

If you believe the internet, a lot of people sure hate the Balanza. I'll be damned if I know why.

I mean, I can guess why -- It's a heavy, stolid, unassuming looking, and dare I say highly conservatively designed balisong whereas the current fashion is zany brightly colored lightweight aluminum or titanium thingamabobs apparently all designed mostly to look good in a TikTok.

The Balanza is none of those things. But it makes up for it by being extremely controllable, with a consistent center of gravity and a predictable rebound feel. On our last outing I complained about the aluminum Krake Raken clone bouncing off of its rebound pins like it was on a goddamned trampoline. The Balanza doesn't do this. When it hits its endstop, it stops. If you want it to bounce off, you have to make it bounce off. You've got wrists, don't you? You're in control, all the time.

This sort of thing is all highly subjective, of course. People like what they like and get used to what they've got. When your hobby is largely reliant on muscle memory, switching to anything that behaves differently is sure to honk you off at first, especially if any bystanders watching happen to mistake lack of familiarity for a lack of skill.

I get a lot of noise about the Balanza being "handle biased." This is a pretty rich sauce, considering "Balanza" literally means "balance" in Spanish.

Well, I've got news for you, chief. All balisongs are handle biased, and the very few that aren't wind up being nigh uncontrollable.

"Nuh-uh," comes the chorus from the comments. "My favorite knife isn't!"

Yes it is. But don't just take my word for it.

Here's a smattering of knives I've got lying around my desk. Yes, I am showing off. Quiet from the peanut gallery.

They're all balanced on their centers of gravity on a scrap of wood which is about 3/8" of an inch thick and an maybe 1-1/4" tall (note the shadow). It doesn't take much of a push to tip any of them one way or other, or just a small shake to make the entire ensemble fall over.

I am ashamed to report that this getup doesn't fit in my photo box, so this is taken on a trestle table lined up under my desk lamp in front of my keyboard. If this isn't pure journalism, I don't know just what the fuck is.

Amway, from left to right here is the Kershaw Moonsault, Benchmade Model 42, the Balanza, our Krake Raken clone from the other week, a HOM Chimera (with the latch retracted just because), and a Bradley Kimura. I'd say that's a pretty decent spectrum of both new and oldschool. The Kimura and Moonsault are steelies, just like the Balanza. The Raken and Chimera are aluminum, and the '42 is titanium; all different weights and densities.

Did you know that you can use a $549 professional graphics editing package as a screen ruler? I mean, while we're talking about value for your dollar and everything.

This allowed me to judge with ludicrous precision the proportionate distance from the tip (red) and tail (blue) to the point of balance (green), as well as the offset from the center of the pivots to the balance point (yellow). Note especially the similarity between all those yellow bars.

Here are the results, in my very first Lemmy markdown table ever. Will it render correctly on your app or device? Add a new layer of excitement to your day; spin the wheel and we'll find out:

Knife	Foward of Balance	Rear of Balance	Offset from Pivot
Moonsault	63.3%	36.7%	17.3%
Model 42	64.9%	35.1%	20.3%
Balanza	62.3%	37.7%	16.7%
Krake Raken	62.1%	37.9%	17.7%
Chimera	60.8%	39.2%	16.1%
Kimura II	63.3%	36.7%	18.6%

 

What did we learn, kids?

• Competently designed balisongs have similar ratios of blade to handle mass, to the surprise only of keyboard warriors.
• The Balanza is marginally better balanced than a Model 42, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
• It's also 0.2% less handle biased than the "mathematically tuned" Krake Raken. (Or maybe the Chinese copied mine inaccurately. Who knows.)
• Overall length of a knife has a lot more to do with how far in total distance the point of balance is from the pivots than much of anything else, including what its handles are made out of.

...So pick the knife with the length and total weight you're comfortable with, and don't worry so much, sport.

In real space, the point of balance of the Balanza is 1.588" from the center of the pivots, by my calipers. That's a negligible difference to the Krake, which is 1.518", and I find it is perfectly to my liking. Maybe that's because my actual carry knives are not neon colored and helium-filled fidget spinners with blades, but rather by preference my heavy and dependable BM51 clone or big steel linered Böker, or the Kimura. My other favorites are the dinky and short TGZUO titanium box cutter, or one of my Rockhoppers, or a Benchmade 32 Mini Morpho. All of which are either so damn tiny or strange -- or both -- they have no real analogue anyway, so they're all their own thing. Trying to use any full sized trainer as a stand-in for those is probably a fool's errand, so I don't even try.

One point to mention is that the Krake Raken's handles are overall longer than the Balanza's despite the proportion of mass being about the same. So if you prefer a handle that's just bigger, there you go.

Anyway, you like what you like and more importantly you get used to what you get used to. If you give me a minute to acclimate I can do thumb rolls all day long with my plastic Rockhoppers, with or without a blade installed, despite the fact that they weigh so little that if a stiff breeze comes by you'll never see yours again. And quite notwithstanding the insistence of any internet balisong bro that this is clearly impossible. (Proof. Suck it, physics. Slow-mo here.)

All this to say that the Balanza probably isn't everyone's cup of tea, and that's okay. It's got me written all over it, but your own mileage may vary. Maybe you really wish your knife's point of balance were right on the pivots. Maybe you want it to only weigh a quarter of an ounce. Don't let me tell you what to do.

(And of course, if you're only ever going to use your balisong as a working knife for some reason and never learn or attempt anything more complicated to open it than a double-windmill, you'll probably never even need a trainer knife at all, in which case the whole thing's moot. You've already let me waste your time over it anyway, though, and now it's too late.)

There are things the Balanza hasn't got but it'd be bomber if it did. I guess the only thing I really miss is not having a spring loaded latch. That'd require a rethink of the spacers to make happen, for sure, but there's plenty of room in there so they could have done it if they felt like it.

Oh, and you know. Maybe an edge.

It's got one other major thing going for it as well: It's actually pretty quiet. Certainly not silent by any stretch of the imagination, but the racket it makes at the very least manages to be pleasant. This is again quite unlike its sibling Moonsault, which is a dissonant nightmare of weird resonances, clangs, bongs, and vibrations. The Balanza exhibits none of this, and it's anyone's guess as to why since superficially it's constructed the exact same way. I don't know if it's just a fortunate coincidence that the Balanza is so much acoustically better or a terrible fluke that the much more expensive Moonsault is worse.

There is some jingle from the latch, which is not especially well fitted to its pin. But for the rest, just a single metallic click from each contact with a Zen pin, and nothing more. (Side note: Doing finger rolls is deceptively difficult while you're wearing rubber gloves. But not nearly so much as using the slippery silk liners I usually wear whenever I need to show my hands in frame, speaking of craters.)

If you slap the side of the Balanza while it's latched shut it does produce a tuning fork note. But it's short and subdued, lower pitched, and not nearly as long nor as harsh as the nails-on-blackboard buzz the Moonsault makes if you do the same thing.

Forging Ahead

If you want a decent budget trainer for your money, buy this instead of some random faceless clone.

There, the gauntlet is thrown.

Don't get me wrong, I like a good random faceless clone. I like them even better when they show up and they're not crap, but part of this is because I'm weird and I love the thrill of the chase even more, where you never quite know in advance what you're going to get. Normal people probably don't.

The Balanza is a known quantity from a known manufacturer. Like, with an actual warranty and stuff. Kershaw backs this with their same lifetime warranty as everything else they make, and my singular past experience with Kershaw's warranty is that if you ask them for one replacement screw they'll send you about 60% of the components to build yourself an entire new knife, ship of Theseus style. That's what happened to me when I needed a clip screw for a Brawler back in the day. I still have the extra entire clip, washers, pivots, and extra screws somewhere.

Consider the Balanza if you aren't an aspiring TikTok star, or you don't care what punters on the internet think. Buy it to practice. Buy it to use.

Just don't buy any of Kershaw's other balisongs, because they're five times the price of this and somehow they're worse.

There really needs to be a live blade version of this and I can't fathom why there isn't. That'd be clutch, and I'd happily buy one on the spot. Even in a cheap budget steel like 8Cr or D2.

...Maybe the Chinese will knock one off for us.

I am holding in my hands the printed proof of my -- or possibly our -- new sticker.

This is rather like playing Store when you were a kid. Having feelies available goes a long way towards making your pretend brand seem tangible.

I'll be finding various ways to give these away, I'm sure. At the moment, you can score one through my Patreon. (Yes, this is an ad.)

The other day, I caught the Brain Cell.

I presume most of you are familiar with my Rockhopper 3D printable utility knife balisong thing, and for those of you who aren't I will use this opportunity for yet another shameless plug.

It's fully printable, it's got a spring latch, a reversible deep carry pocket clip, and it's wholesome and easy to make at home.

I designed this by using the screw design from my marginally more popular but considerably less interesting (in my opinion) Adélie Axis locking Wave Opening utility knife jobbie. Those screws were designed with no particular specification in mind other than to be totally 3D printable.

But I realized that due to laziness on my part the thread pitch is precisely 1.0 mm, and the diameter is tantalizingly close to the same as a standard commodity M6x1.0 screw. But not quite.

So why not just make it an M6 screw, you say?

Why not, indeed.

One minor redesign later -- which has been up on Printables for a couple of weeks, actually -- and now there's the option to use either printed screws (for the lazy, purist, or impatient) or 12mm long M6 set screws (for the stylin', swanky, or possibly paranoid).

I will point out that I have never managed to break one of my printed screws once I got the design nailed down. I'm sure it's possible if you try hard enough, but clearly they're not the actual weak point. Even so, I understand that they skeeve some people out on general principle.

Going with metal hardware also makes the final product significantly heavier: 42.8 grams, versus 26.3 with the plastic stuff. That makes the knife feel more substantial and less like a middle schooler's science fair project.

This also enables stronger bushings with a slightly increased thickness, which means a more solid action and increased positivity to the lockup when latched. I made a few other minor design changes as well, like making the pocket clip mounting significantly less of a pain in the ass.

I'm also showing this off with one of several scale pattern variations, in this case my Replicator set. Astute readers may find them reminiscent of a certain knife. Don't you worry about the Chinese; I can make knockoffs of my own, right here in my own basement.

Once again with feeling, here is another example of how we can't have nice things.

Oh, never mind the knife. It's a fine knife, not a thing wrong with it. Well, not much wrong with it, really. It hasn't got an edge, so it isn't even a knife. But that's on purpose.

No. Rather, I only bought this a few short weeks ago and already it's doubled in price since I did. We all know why.

It represented an alright deal, back then, provided you knew what you were getting into. Now, though, it doesn't.

And that's extremely annoying.

In this incarnation at least, this is the "HDD-ZH-005 Generic Butterfly Trainer, Balisong Trainer, Practice Butterfly, Balisong Butterfly Knives NOT Real NOT Sharp Blade, Black Dull Trick Butterfly, Butter Fly Training."

Drink every time these dweebs say "butterfly."

It's a balisong/butterfly knife trainer. Not sharp. Did you get that? The seller wanted to make sure you got that, so they don't get banned.

"Wait just a damn minute," I hear you cry, "That's clearly a knockoff of the Squid Industries Krake Raken!"

Er, well. Yes it is. Here is the object in question, with a picture furtively stolen directly from Squid's website:

The resemblance is undeniable. There's a key difference, though, as you'd expect.

Squid Industries are rather unique in the balisong world in that they manufacture very few actual knives. In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they don't -- I did, at first. The majority of their lineups are trainers, edgeless, and specifically for practice and showing off. This is kind of the opposite of most other makers, and their incarnation of the balisong (and they have quite a few) is quite a bit closer to belonging in the the yo-yo or fidget spinner worlds than knives. So fervently do they separate their product lines that they even have different web sites for their live and trainer models; never the two shall mix.

They're also one of the current darlings of the balisong trick-spinning world, and for that the real deal (trainer) Krake Raken is the thick end of $220. In its aluminum incarnation, anyway. They also do a titanium one which starts at $350.

The HDD-ZH-005, meanwhile, is worth $20. Never mind that at the moment it currently sells for around $45; it's worth $20.

I bought one of these for two reasons, broadly related. First is that I would love to own a genuine Krake Raken, because I have no doubt it is a very fine piece of equipment. But I really can't justify it at the moment when $220 will buy you an entire matched set of Böker's tactical balisongs, with change left over for a trainer.

Second is that I keep seeing these bloody everywhere. When you travel in my circles of the internet it seems you can't escape the damn things, so I wanted to pick one up to see if they were any good and finally put the whole affair to bed. There are no end to the places and means by which you can (attempt, at least) to score one of these, depending on which bunch of wretched charlatans you'd like to do business with and/or their level of audacity. (And get a load of some of those product descriptions. "Sea Monster." Nudge nudge, wink wink. Yeah, okay, sure.)

All this to say, don't take what I write as advice. I'm sure somewhere in China there is a factory pumping out a billion of these and they're all the same regardless of who's hawking them. Or then again, maybe they aren't and there are better and worse made examples. It's unlikely that I'll ever know, and even if I figure it out it's tough to tell in advance anyway, what with all the butterfly-edc-training-balisong-trainer-not-sharp-no-edge-trainer-no-edge-trainer, et. cetera.

What You Get

Or what I got, anyway.

I probably shouldn't be proud to say that I've bought a handful of clone balisong knives by now, and therefore I know very well how this is supposed to go. The HDD-ZH-005 follows in the exact same tradition as many others in that its box contains many "value added" items, the actual value of which is in fact rather dubious.

In its little presentation box -- which arrives completely bereft of any markings or brand names -- you get all of the above. As is very common with Chinese clone knives, you get a set of replacement pivot hardware which in this case is enough to replace both sides, two full pivot setups, but no replacement zen pins. There's also a faux velvet drawstring pouch in which no self respecting individual would actually store their knife in a million years, a little L shaped Torx driver ostensibly for tuning or undoing the screws, and a tiny bottle of blue stuff.

Here's the full spread:

It all looks quite comprehensive at fist blush. Just, never you mind that all of these things are completely useless.

I'll start with the unlabled bottle of goo, which appears appears to be screw threadlocker. (At first I thought this might have been intended to be some kind of lubricant, but it turns out I was wrong.)

Whatever's in there is very thixotropic. I'll point out that I laid the little bottle down on its side for this photo and within the time it took me to fiddle with my tripod and dial in my focus and all the rest of it, the gunk inside had only flowed as far as you see. Here, just look at this:

I can't assess the qualities of the product inside because it's impossible to actually squeeze any of the stuff out of the bottle. No joke. It's too unctuous and there isn't enough of it in there for you to actually get any out of the nozzle no matter how hard you squeeze. And it won't even dribble out of its own accord no matter how long you leave the bottle upside down. Believe me, I tried.

But it's doubtful you'll ever get a chance to use it anyway, because the included Torx driver is made of softer steel than the screws. If you try to attempt use it on your knife it'll just round off instantly.

What It's Like

For $20, the HDD-ZH-005 is great. It only took a thousand words so far to get us here.

It alleges to be a complete and utter clone of the Krake Raken V3 and is therefore identical in size. There's actually a slight cosmetic difference in that the channel milled into the outside faces of the handles was done after the anodizing rather than before so it shows through shiny whereas the current version of the Krake Raken does not. Possibly this follows suit from some prior version -- The Raken is on its fourth incarnation to my knowledge, despite what the V3 on the end would have you think. Apparently, there was a version 2.5 between 2 and 3.

Anyway, that means the HDD-ZH-005 is a full competition sized flipper at pretty much exactly 10" long, open.

Here it is (center) compared to Ye Olde Model 42 (left) and I think what is the biggest balisong I own at the moment, a Kershaw Moonsault (right).

The HDD-ZH-005 -- You know what, can we give this thing an easier to type name?

I'm going to call it "Horven." That seems appropriate.

Horven is 5-3/4" long closed with a "blade" of 4-3/8", which is of course totally unsharpened although the edges are all chamfered.

The blade is some sort of steel, evidenced by a magnet sticking to it. The handles aren't -- they're definitely aluminum of some description although whether they're T7075 like the original is anyone's guess. It is at least competently hard anodized and not painted. The finish on mine has already demonstrated its durability by hitting the floor quite a few times.

All those slots milled into the blade aren't just for decoration, by the way. They're an essential weight reducing component. It's maybe not obvious at first blush, but a real sharpened knife blade has a good deal of material removed as part of its taper, which this hasn't got. If you just had a flat slug of the same steel of a consistent thickness all the way through with the same footprint it'd be much heavier and throw the point of balance way off. So you'll find that pretty much all trainers follow this same methodology of taking huge decorative bites out of the blade. This also presumably alerts anyone who is paying attention that this isn't a "real" knife and is therefore not likely to do anyone any harm.

Still and all, maybe don't take this to an airport or school.

Thus with all the machine work in the blade, Horven's point of balance is right where you'd expect it to be, which is about 1-5/8" behind the pivot point when it's open or just slightly forward of the first hole drilled in the handles. Altogether it weighs 106.8 grams or 3.77 ounces which is pretty in line with the weights of all the high speed/low drag aluminum and titanium tricky buggers the cool kids all seem to be wielding these days.

That weird slightly brown mark on the blade is not an optical illusion, dirt, nor any kind of photographic bug, by the way. It really is there in real life, and on both sides. I don't know what it is, but it won't clean off. Maybe some kind of burn mark from when it was machined, but I have no clue why any of that would have been done after the rest of the surface finishing. Oh well; Maybe that's what you get for saving $200. It's easy to overlook until someone points it out, so I'm not too worried about it.

It's a kicker pin-less or Zen pin design and also latchless, both of which also seem to be the current fashion. The handles are unitary channel milled billets, 0.504" thick, and tapered: 0.525" thick at the tail and 0.424" at the pivots. There's a machined concentric crosshatching pattern on the faces...

...And some decorative channels in the sides, plus some wide jimping down at the ends.

One thing Horven didn't come with was anything to mark the bite side handle versus the safe side, and while it's somewhat academic with a blunt trainer and the handles are otherwise completely symmetrical, the blade isn't. So maybe you'd like to keep track of such a thing, but if so you get to provide your own solution.

You can see that there are bronze pivot washers, and Horven has a bushing pivot system in keeping with its list of trendy bullet points. Or, more prosaically, the original Krake Raken does as well so this has ripped that off wholesale along with everything else.

It's tough to argue with the action, and whoever made this copied Squid's homework closely enough that the "mathematically tuned" balance of the original is probably sufficiently faithfully reproduced.

Horven's pivot action is 100% satisfactory, the next best thing to having ball bearing pivots. However...

...While it's not possible on my example to get the blade to strike the inner surfaces of the handles ("tap") there is still a noticeable amount of lash in the pivots. So it definitely doesn't compare with a ball bearing knife in that way.

Horven is also very loud. It makes not only a ton of racket but has a decidedly weird rebound action which is probably related.

This is getting deep into wine-snob territory, here. But Horven is a lively one -- There is a ridiculous degree of bounce off of the Zen pins, much more than any other knife I own including similarly constructed (and similarly cheap!) all-aluminum channel milled jobbies. I don't know why.

You can see that here, where just plain old gravity is enough to make the free handle bounce like a pinball right off the Zen pin, to the tune of, what, 10 or 15 degrees? If you're not ready for it I found this can actually cause you to miss catching the handle in some situations, which will leave you looking totally uncool to anyone standing around watching you.

There's also some kind of tuning fork resonance going on in the blade, and the thing not only clanks like a bell but continues to sing for some seconds after coming to rest if you listen to it carefully.

I have no idea if the original exhibits any of these quirks, what with not owning one. Give me a raise and I'll buy one, then we can do a side-by-side?

Well, it was worth a shot.

What's Inside

Look, I've been intentionally avoiding this subject for many paragraphs now, but there's no getting around it once we've made it this far.

Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to take your Horven apart. It's damn near impossible.

The blasted thing comes with spare washers and threadlocker and even that little screwdriver all just cheekily implying that you're expected to tune it or be able to dismount the blade. Well, forget it. It's unlikely that mere mortals will succeed at this, because the pivot screws are beyond overtorqued from the factory and they've been glued into place with permanent threadlocker. Thanks a lot, assholes.

Luckily I am a bird of phenomenal skill and talent, not to mention a lot of tools and a penchant for fire. In the spirit of journalistic integrity I gave it the old heave-ho anyway and damn the outcome.

To get this apart I had to blast the screws with a pencil torch for some minutes, and apply my high quality Wiha T8 Torx bits to both sides of the pivot screws simultaneously, and put one of them in a 90 degree driver just to obtain enough torque. I thought for sure I was going to strip the screw heads, but I ultimately persevered.

...Until the next problem.

Note here how I have both pivot screws removed and nothing up my sleeves, nor in my hat. But look, it's like magic -- the fucker still won't come apart, with the blade remaining resolutely locked into the handles as if the screws were still there. (Maybe they've turned invisible.)

Just look how hard I have to yank on this to get the handles off.

The problem is that the Chinese failed to copy one very critical dimension, which is the space between the handles. I imagine this was to compensate -- or more likely overcompensate -- in an attempt to reduce the amount of wiggle in the blade. But if that was their intent they didn't quite succeed.

The play between the blade and pivots is actually down to the clearances between the bushings and both the blade itself and the pivot screws, not the handles. That's evidenced here by the amount of daylight you can see showing through in this arty silhouette shot.

Getting the blade, washers, and bushings assembly out of the handles is difficult enough, but getting them back in would surely stymie anyone who didn't already know exactly what they were doing.

Not only do you have to cram the parts into a gap that's slightly smaller than their assembled dimensions and literally bend the aluminum handles apart slightly to do so, but then you have to get two washers and the bushing near-perfectly lined up with the holes in both sides of the handle with no inbuilt aid. I successfully got mine apart and back together -- twice -- but this necessitated a... small amount of violence.

You can see what we're up against by peering down the channel of one of the handles here. There is a stairstep in it where the pivots are, which is carried over from the Squid original. But the clearances are slightly wrong.

To determine just how wrong, I really went reaching for that Pulitzer and got out my calipers. Here's what I found:

The bushing outer diameter is 6.97mm but the holes in the blade are 7.07mm, so either the bushing is undersized or the holes are oversized by 0.1mm. That doesn't sound so bad, but the bushing inner diameter is 4.83mm and the outer diameter of its matching pivot screw is 4.77mm, so there's another 0.06mm. All told that's 1.6mm of overclearance per pivot, which is obviously noticeable.

But the stack of washers and the bushing, which all together comprise the true thickness that the handles must account for (the blade is irrelevant because it's thinner than the length of the bushings by design) is 4.20mm exactly. And the channel in the handle is only 4.12mm. So this is the only dimension that's undersized, and boy does that make things a faff and a half.

So to get the whole sandwich back in there you'd better be either very mighty or very clever. I know which one I am. You can take your own chances.

While we're in here, this is the usual hardware lineup. You might notice that this is minus the Zen pins, and aren't those Torx screws as well? Yes, they are, but just like the main pivots they have no anti-rotation flats, and they're torqued to hell and back just the same as the big screws. There's no way to even have a hope of undoing them without grabbing them hard with pliers and destroying their surfaces to the point that even if you got them busted loose they probably then wouldn't clear their own holes.

So again in the spirit of journalistic integrity, I bravely gave up.

So What?

Horven is a broadly competent little (maybe not so little) balisong trainer that's perfectly acceptably built provided you never have occasion to take it apart.

And let's be honest, other than showing off for ninja cred and writing long-winded tripe like this, there's really no reason for most people to do so. So don't.

The real headline here is that you might never know what you've got until it's gone.

The genuine Krake Raken is already untenably expensive for what amounts to a fidget toy, at least for most normal people. (Balisong people are not normal people, as I have opined many times before. I mean, hell. Just look at me.) But the way things are going these days it might soon turn out that things like this might become unreasonably expensive as well. And what a pisser that's turning out to be.

For $20 or so this is a fun little toy that'll save you either lopping your fingers off or throwing one of your near-kilobuck collector's items on the floor. Or, if you were a budding little waddler just starting off and with only your allowance money to work with, it could be the perfect cheap entry point into leaning how to do the whole balisong thing. There are, it must be said, certainly far worse values available for the same money (or more!) wherever shonky Chinese goods are sold.

So all that's cool. But for $40 it's already questionable, and if it touches $50 I think that's the point where its cost completely exceeds its worth.

At that rate there are better values for your money in a trainer balisong.

Maybe I'll even show you one of them eventually.

Looks like a Climber, but has no hook and nothing on the scales. There is a mark where there was a triangular loho.

In my last column we took a long, retrospective look at a little Camillus knife that was a big part of my life. I own a whopping total of two Camillus knives, and this is the other one. It is simultaneously slightly more interesting (mechanically) and quite a bit less interesting (historically) at the same time.

But it'll also allow us to explore how the mighty have fallen, and that sounds like a good time.

For us, that is. Not them.

Camillus Cutlery's story arguably began as far back as 1876, but they became an actual manufacturer of knives, rather than just an importer, in 1902. You can learn this by reading the back of any of their modern packages, because their current owner still harps on it as if they deserve the credit. This despite not having a damn thing to do with any of the original 130 years' worth of operation.

Camillus made a lot of knives for a lot of years in their factory in the town for which the brand was named in New York. They produced knives under their own name as well as several other sub-brands over the years, including the Camco brand of my little jack knife, and were also an OEM manufacturer for some other labels behind the scenes.

But in the early 2000's, Camillus was in trouble. It's the same old sad story we've heard a hundred times before: Pressured on one side by cheap imports undercutting them and boxed in on the other by failing to keep up with the times, Camillus' sales were declining and their financial situation was becoming increasingly untenable. By 2006 they could not afford to pay their workers and there was a strike. The shutdown certainly didn't help matters but it's probable that even without it they wouldn't have fared much better for long. Ultimately their creditors called in all their loans and Camillus ceased operations entirely on February 28th, 2006.

You can read more about the whole sordid affair here, once again thanks to the excellent Collectors of Camillus web site. It's beyond the scope of me recapping in detail here. I'm no historian. I certainly wasn't an expert back then and I'm still not now, and arguably I wasn't even paying attention at the time.

Camillus was definitely a name that was around back in the day when I was getting into knives good and proper. There are now just as much as back then people who were into collecting their knives big time, but I certainly wasn't one of them. They just didn't make anything that interested me, and I'm sure that sentiment -- though not from me personally, mind you, what with my insignificant pocket change -- probably didn't do them many favors towards the end.

You can take a look at this 2005 catalog, to see what I mean, even beyond the little excerpt above.

Modern options were fairly few in Camillus' lineup. But modern was on the up-and-up in the 2000's, and tactical was in. We wanted black knives with fast draws and tanto points and spring assists and trick mechanisms, and Camillus was that company still making solid old stag handled grandpa knives. Their slim selection of modern-ish offerings weren't looking too attractive compared to, say, the Benchmade Skirmish and Osborne, Cold Steel's Ti-Lite and Recon, or hell, even the crusty old SOG Trident -- All of which were their contemporaries. And lots more besides.

Camillus did have a couple of offerings that looked like they ought to at least belong to the 20th century even if not quite the 21st, and I'll bet I handled most of them at least once back in the day. As far as the folders went, anyhow. And my takeaway at the time was that, allegedly fine though they may be, they didn't feel any less plasticy than the Chinese competitors that were allegedly eating their lunch. Meanwhile, Cold Steel knives had ninja cred. Benchmades were bad ass. Our soldiers were kicking ass in the desert with SOGs. So who wanted a boring old Camillus?

After Camillus closed up shop, ultimately the brand was acquired by the Acme United Corporation but what rose from the ashes is not the same Camillus that once was. Not a single blade marked "Camillus" is made in New York anymore -- And ironically, every one of the knives you see branded Camillus today are exactly the kind of largely indistinguishable disposable cost-cut Chinese made crap that helped put them out of business in the first place. Things destined to do nothing more than hang on a peg in Walmart.

The Knife

Which brings us to this.

This is the Camillus Cuda Mini. Or, perhaps, "CUDA," since it's supposed to stand for "Camillus Ultimate Design Advantage." Cuda therefore isn't really a model as such, but a moniker applied to various Camillus knives both now in their zombified brand form and also historically, from the before-times.

I got the Coyote Brown version, because black is boring.

It unavoidably raises the question of whether or not, or perhaps why, any garden variety chump with the better part of $30 burning a hole in his pocket ought to buy this rather than the veritable galaxy of similarly-priced-or-better run of the mill budget Chinese knives.

The answer turns out to be probably no. But that's not going to fill all these inches.

And then, it also demonstrates that there really is nothing new under the sun. Since here we are still asking that same question that was raised -- and ultimately answered -- at the time of Camillus' downfall.

Anyway, I was of course drawn originally to this because it is, yes, slightly weird.

That, and I wanted to see just how bad modern Camillus knives really are, since everyone seems to say so all the time. Well, they do in my circles, anyway. I don't know what you normal people talk about at parties.

The Cuda Mini is a compact folder with quite a few modern design elements. The back of its card lists a G-10 handle (scales), liner lock, "Carbonitride Titanium(R)" stainless steel blade, and the "Quick Launch Bearing System." More on that in a bit. First, the packaging.

Because there are several things to, er, unpack.

First of course is the aforementioned paragraph at the top full of chest-beating over Camillus' history, as if their current owner didn't simply write a check for the name and stuff the corpse into an ill-fitting suit, held up with a broomstick up its butt à la Weekend At Bernie's.

The second thing I would like to draw your attention to is the "Lifetime Warranty," promising to repair or replace your knife -- provided if and only if you return it in its original packaging. So you'd better not throw out that card.

(Yes, eagle eyed readers will note that I slipped the knife back into the card for the photo above. I still have the card, partially because of that stupid warranty clause but mostly because I retain the packaging for almost all of my knives, no matter how silly it is.)

The third thing is the prominent "Designed In USA" next to the flag. This is probably the oldest dirty trick in the book, since designed here obviously doesn't mean made here, even if they're wishing hard you'll think it does. The real answer is the little "Made In China" mark further down. All this combined with the capsule history at the top is obviously meant to bamboozle the uninitiated into forking over their money under false pretenses, believing they're about to do the wholesome thing by purchasing a knife with a little American flag on it -- as if this means anything other than some rat bastard's printed a flag on it.

There's nothing wrong with a Chinese knife, per se. I like a good Chinese knife, as we all know. But at least be honest about it, for fuck's sake.

There's also a stern Proposition 65 warning indicating that this knife may expose you to Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, presumably from the scales, which may kill your sperm or perhaps shrivel your balls. Fuckin' A.

Anyway, you can view a more legible scan of the card back here, if you're so inclined.

You've probably also noticed the Cuda Mini's weird thumb stud thing. Here's the deal with that.

The Cuda Mini is not, surprisingly, a spring assisted knife. It's a plain liner locking folder with a 3" blade length, so it's probably devised with widespread legality in mind.

Instead, it has its oddball little opening system which is yet another entry into our Technically Not Legally A Switchblade series. It seems a bit counterintuitive, but you open it by pushing the stud forward, not up, whereupon it automatically follows its track and snaps the blade open once you've overcome the traditional ball detent in the liner.

Despite at first blush appearing to be laid out a manner that'd make opening it physically impossible, it's actually not that difficult to use, although it's a trifle weird feeling.

This is one of those things like the mechanics of steering a bicycle, where if you asked someone right on the spur of a moment to describe what action they perform to open their knife, what they tell you would probably actually be wrong. You might think you press the thumb stud on your normal knife forward, too, then up and around. But you don't -- You actually push it down, away from the knife's handle, or possibly somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 degrees at most, in order to get the blade to move.

On a normal knife the push-forward strategy would be rather like trying to lift your fat friend on a seesaw by running up to the fulcrum and giving it a right kicking. Yes, a sufficient amount of force is theoretically there, but it's not quite going in the right direction.

This doesn't work like that. Once you figure it out it becomes easy to use.

The long and short of it is that this all works because the stud is actually out in front of the pivot point at all times, and never passes behind it at any point in its travel. This is more akin to a front flipper knife, and unlike a traditional thumb studded one.

The Specs

The Cuda Mini does, at least, manage to live up to its name. It is 6-3/4" long precisely when open, 3-3/4" closed, and you win no points for guessing it has a 3" blade. It's 0.463" thick across the scales, so neither slim nor exceptionally chunky, 0.628" including the opening stud and 0.803" at its thickest including both the stud and the clip. With two full length steel liners it rings in at 78.8 grams or 2.78 ounces.

The blade is hollow ground, 0.108" thick at the spine, drop pointed with a false edge on the back for about half of its length, and is made of AUS-8.

Sorry, "Carbonitride Titanium(R)" AUS-8.

Acme, speaking through Camillus using them like a sock puppet, try very hard to make this sound much more technical than it is. AUS-8 is very nearly identical to 440B and functionally interchangeable with the same, so in our current cyberpunk dystopia where you can score D2 folders for ten bucks it's actually quite a low end steel. It might've cut it back in 1999, but these days our tastes run a little more refined.

The titanium carbonitride coating, aside from having its name reversed so it can be trademarked, is in fact identical in composition and application to what other manufacturers simply term a "PVD" or physical vapor deposition coating. There are various coatings that can be applied this way and they're not all the same, but TiCN is quite common and definitely not unique to this knife or any others like it.

TiCN is more scratch resistant than silkscreened, painted, or epoxy coatings. But it's still nothing special.

The Cuda Mini has a deep carry pocket clip with trendy Bechmade-eqsue side screws flanking it, although it's got one and only one mounting position which is tip down, spine forward for a right handed user. There's only an opener stud present on one side, too, because otherwise it would conflict with the clip. Left handed users are instead encouraged to inflict an airborne indignity on an ambulatory baked confectionery product; whoever designed this clearly wants nothing to do with you.

And despite the gimmick opening setup, the Cuda Mini is otherwise a very plain Jane liner locker underneath. The lock is completely bog standard, although there is a generous cutout in the opposite liner and scale to help you reach it.

There's some jimping set into the liners on the spine, but strangely far back. If you hold the knife in a natural manner, this actually winds up quite a ways behind where your thumb wants to land. There are ostensibly some jimping cuts on the back of the blade as well, but when it's open it actually rests so far sunk in between the liners that these are inaccessible, and therefore pointless. I'm not quite sure what's up with that.

The Parts

It's likely nobody expects you to actually take the Cuda Mini apart. That probably says a lot more about the people expected to buy it rather than whoever designed or manufactured it. I had a hunch the opener stud, which is sunk directly into a hole in the blade itself, would be a bugger to remove. And it is.

Unfortunately, it also holds one of the scales captive. So I left it like you see here.

Inside there's a liberal slathering of grease all over everything. Maybe that's where all the Di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate is.

Here's that "Quick Launch Bearing System" the back of the card was talking about. The Cuda Mini is indeed a ball bearing opener, and this probably goes a long way towards explaining why its goofy layout still results in a folder that's actually possible to use. With it you get all the usual thrust ball bearing benefits like buttery low resistance action, very decent blade centering despite being a cheap liner locker...

...And a near zero amount lash in the pivot when the blade is locked open, which helps the knife superficially feel much more premium than it is.

Here's the back side of the opener stud where it goes through the blade, and it appears to be peened in place after installation. That, or it's possibly glued. Or both. Removing it without marring it in some capacity is absolutely impossible, so I left it alone.

Everything else is a normal Torx screw: T8 for the pivot, T6 for the rest. For maximum cost savings the pivot screw does not have an anti-rotation flat in it, but if you're never expected to take this apart I guess that doesn't matter.

The Catch

Regardless of anything else you can say about it, the Cuda Mini actually has a decent feel in the hand. It has a nice weight, its assembly is very rigid, and anyone who didn't know any better would be led to believe, just via the usual method of hefting and frowning at it, that it must be a nice knife. That's how they get you.

Is it actually, though? To find out, I did a little cut test.

I don't normally go in for this sort of thing in my writeups because I know that the factory sharpness of any given knife is really just an entertaining opening argument to what kind of edge it ultimately could achieve once you've had your little way with it. And if it's a novelty thingamabob, as so many of mine are, you're never going to actually use it for anything anyway. So what's the point?

But I had at it with a Post-It note anyway, just to get the lay of the land. And I immediately ran into a snag. Literally.

Those two cuts were as far as I got before I determined something was wrong. It failed to even complete the second one, as you can see.

Why? Well, for the most part, the Cuda Mini has an edge grind on it that's almost exactly what you'd expect from a budget knife.

The grind is reasonably even down its length, and the point profile is actually pretty good.

But in accordance with the rites of ancient prophecy, it is inescapably out of true. One side of the grind on mine is precisely 40 degrees, and the other is steeper at about 45. That's not the real issue, though.

The issue is that mine arrived right out of the package with a nasty ding in the edge. It's a diabolical one, too: Tough to spot with the naked eye but you can feel it with a fingernail, and right from the factory it prevents you from achieving a clean cut.

Here it is under magnification, where it's much more obvious.

It seems something struck the edge of this before it was packaged, and that means we can make two troubling assumptions. First, this happened somewhere along the line and nobody noticed or cared. Second, this isn't a chip but as you can see the edge has been rolled over, so it's a sure sign the steel at the edge is very soft.

Another clue is the burnishing in the coating behind the edge, the whole way down its length. This is most likely a telltale that the edge has been "burned," i.e. when the edge was ground the metal was allowed to get too hot and thus its lost some of its heat treating -- and its hardness -- as a result.

On a lark I put this on the ol' Spydero sharpener. It sharpened up quite quickly, another sign of soft steel, and after a just couple of quick lashes on the stones it looks like this:

I went just far enough to knock the rolled steel off of the edge where that nick was, which naturally improved its cutting performance dramatically.

But even by the time I was done feathersticking a second Post-It note it was already obvious that the sharpness was diminishing. Make no mistake, paper is definitely an abrasive, and it'll send you back to your stones eventually. But no modern knife should be fazed by a mere single sticky note.

This is an edge retention result so poor I wouldn't even bother to piss on it.

The Inevitable Conclusion

So here we are, right back where we started.

It's kind of fitting, actually, in a twisted sort of way. Camillus started off as an importer, manufacturing nothing. After a long and shining heyday, a rise and a fall, now their husk is back to doing exactly the same thing: Just bringing in and branding any old thing, all made by somebody else.

And, alas, to little fanfare and not much benefit.

It's a shame, really. The Cuda Mini has a neat design. It has cool features. It's a nice size. It has ball bearing pivots.

It's too bad it's crap.

Between the knife and that brick, I'll take the brick, thanks.

It was just after dawn and I was awakened by a thunderstorm.

That by itself was another novelty; at home, back East, storms were solely the purview of the afternoon. If it rained in the morning rather than sundown you knew it was bound to be rain all day. Slow, miserable, grey, and boring.

But not today. There, for just a few minutes on the side porch of my older brother's cabin in the shadow of Jelm Mountain outside of Laramie, I watched the world disappear. The sky shook, the wind blew, and rain lashed against the windows. Mist closed in and drew its veil nearly up to the edge of the house, swallowing up the mountains and sagebrush and the prickly pair cactus, then the barn, then the truck. We floated alone in a roaring grey void.

And then, ten minutes later, it was over. My brother slept through it entirely. Didn't even budge.

The storm passed on, curtaining the town in sheets of rain on the horizon while a blue sky shone in the west and eventually, the sun rose over the tops of the anvil headed clouds and punched through, slicing the sky itself into ribbons of shadow and pillars of light. The mountains and the sky were perfectly reflected upside down in the puddles in the mud outside which quickly become mirror still, and steamed.

I was very nearly ten years old.

Today was an important day.

---

Every summer for five years running, my mother packed me up and shipped me out for no reason I was ever able to comprehend to stay with my brother for a few weeks, until the year he died. I think it was five trips, anyhow. You don't pay attention to that sort of thing when you're seven, because you're a self absorbed little shit and for you every day is a new universe and time may as well be infinite.

Maybe she just wanted me out of her face for a while. Or I suppose she might have thought it would force me to "build character." Well, it did. Whether she wanted it to or not.

Permissivity was the puzzler. I was forbade just about everything at home but my brother, ostensibly the adult in the situation, did not give a single flying fuck what anyone else thought I was or wasn't allowed.

So those summers were years of firsts for me. I ate my first bowl of Captain Crunch (with Crunchberries!) on the tailgate of my brother's dusty old Ford Ranger, in the middle of nowhere, using powdered milk made with ice cold river water. Sugary cereal wasn't allowed at home.

The first river caught trout I ever ate. The first time I drove a car -- my brother's truck, actually. With a manual transmission. My first time able to ride a bicycle completely out of the sight of any adult, all on my own, down the mile long dirt track to the main road and the mailbox and back, bringing a month's worth of mail with me including the very much coveted Cabelas catalog, which we did not have at home. It was my brother's mountain bike which was far too large for me. I had to stand sidesaddle on one of the pedals to even reach the ground with my feet, but I didn't even fall over once.

My first time lighting off a firework. I was barely even allowed to watch my father do that, in the few short years I was cognizant of anything and both of my parents were still living under the same roof.

My first time firing a gun, my brother's little .22 revolver. Guns were very very evil and definitely weren't allowed at home. Not even to be talked about.

It was easy to guess what my mother disapproved of because it was practically everything. If it was fun or any type of activity that was not preordained, it was not allowed. Things I was not allowed included nearly all television and radio (but NPR and PBS were okay, most times); all music that was above the level of about Raffi or, curiously, show tunes; having friends or being around the "wrong" type of people (which was basically everyone); privacy; any type of personal possessions; anything written, drawn, or typed with the expectation that it would not be rifled through and criticized relentlessly. Oh, and certainly knives. Those weren't allowed, either.

Approved activities largely consisted of studying, reading (approved books only), and getting good grades. Preferably where I could be seen doing it and therefore make her look good by association. Any good creative work I produced was shortly no longer mine. It was hers, taken away and to be paraded in front of her friends and associates, never to be seen by me again. And if it wasn't any good by her standards she'd sure let me know it. Frequently, and at great length.

---

On this day my brother was taking me out into the field. This was something we did every year, after a couple of days bumming around town with his friends and packing. After this, it was goodbye to civilization (more or less) for a little over a week. And he was very adamant about one thing, when you ventured forth into the bush: You had to have your knife, your matches, your canteen, your compass, your map, and good boots. Really, he was an early forerunner to the modern EDC mindset.

Calling my brother an outdoorsman would be the understatement of a lifetime. He was a conservationist working for the local university. An actual conservationist, as in the scientific research and protecting trees and prairies and animals sort -- not just paying lip service to "protecting" parts of it so we can shoot at it later.

His work generally seemed to me to involve little more than traipsing out in the wilds all over hell and creation to remote ponds and gullies to take pH readings of the water and count frogs. Frogs were a bellwether species, he told me -- there's a new word -- in that tiny changes to their environment can have huge impacts on their numbers. If there's some new pollutant or subtle change to the climate we ought to know about you'll see it in the frogs first.

He lived in a little cabin out in the middle of nowhere, almost completely out of sight of everything. Just him and his dogs, and his falcon that he housed in the rickety old barn he'd converted into a kind of rookery. But where he was at home was not at home -- it was actually outside. I gather that he mostly thought of his house as a place to keep whatever stuff he did not have on him at the time.

He did not, in fact, teach me how to put together a tent. My dad did that. But this was different: with my brother all those years ago I spent my first night outdoors completely out of not only sight but also hearing of any type of civilization whatsoever. Not at a Good Sam or a KOA with yokels blaring warbly country music on shitty cassette players in the next bay over. No one crunching up the gravel drive a 2:00 AM. No trucks downshifting on the highway half a mile off. Instead, absolute silence.

And he always had his knife on him: the main one being a big fancy Swiss Army knife that I was immensely envious of just about ever since I could walk.

I vividly remember one time when I must have been about five, and my brother was visiting for a family birthday party. We were at Showbiz Pizza -- This was before they became Chuck E. Cheese. Someone picked up a slice of pizza and the cheese streeeeetched. My brother whipped out his Swiss Army knife and, literally, cut the cheese. Not with a knife blade. This motherfucker used the scissors. I still have no idea how he busted them out so fast. He must have been lying in wait.

Our mother gave him A Look. I was sternly told afterwards never to repeat such a thing so long as I lived. So you bet your bottom dollar it became my life's ambition to do so, right at that exact second.

So truth be told, at first the knife aspect of the knife didn't hold much interest for me. It was the sheer variety of things that Swiss Army knife could do that were fascinating. You could have handed it to me without the knife blades on it and I probably wouldn't have cared one whit. It had screwdrivers for taking stuff apart (my brother used it to fix stuff on his rattly old truck all the time), a can opener for preparing dinner at camp, a little magnifying glass for looking at interesting rocks or bugs, tweezers for getting out splinters, a toothpick for looking cool, a corkscrew for... some reason, and one of those leather punch awls with the hole in that nobody ever seemed to use for anything but still it was there and it was one more thing.

But today we were going out into the field, and I already had my compass and my canteen and my matches and my boots. This year my brother decided I was responsible enough, quite contrary to my mother's perpetual insistence, that I could have a knife.

So as a slightly early birthday present, he gave me this. It was just a little old unregarded trifle from the bottom of his tackle box. It was already quite well worn by the time he passed it on to me, and to him it was probably worth practically nothing.

But you could have saved a billion dollars and cancelled NASA right then and there. Just strap a camera to me and I'll take pictures on my way by, because I was headed to the moon.

---

I strutted around that whole summer with that knife in my pocket just as proud as a cat full of sixpences. If anything needed cutting, by gum I cut it. Or pried it, or scratched at it, or carved runes into it, or whittled it into a point. And I took it home with me.

I flew to and from my brother's place every summer, ostensibly on my own but under close supervision of whichever stewardess was unlucky enough to escape being cornered by my mother and browbeaten into taking responsibility for me. They let you do that sort of thing back on those days, just bundle up a 7-to-11 year old and stick him on a plane by himself. The return trip was considerably more liberal, and unsupervised. When in doubt, be a precocious ten year old who knows a lot about planes, or can at least talk a good game about it. They'll let you sit in first class for free, give you a pair of wing pins, and let you see the cockpit. And you'll get all the peanut M&Ms you can stuff into yourself.

But first at the airport I ambled right up to that damn metal detector and stuck my knife in the tray along with my watch and my Gameboy and all my loose change. The security guard picked up my knife and looked me up and down, me in my denim jacket and khahki cargo shorts and ballcap, patches and pins, and a bandana around my neck.

"You in the scouts or something?" He asked me.

"Sure," I lied.

"You be careful with this," he said, and gave it right back to me.

What a time to be alive.

Through that arch I passed on to the rest of my life, forever changed but surely without any clue whatsoever what I might go on to be. Backpacker, adventurer, writer, deliverator, programmer, collector. In that moment, it was all possible.

I hid my knife in my sock before we landed. I had correctly predicted that my mother would snoop through all my luggage and brusquely rummage in all my pockets as soon as she saw me with barely even a hello.

In retrospect, it's a goddamn miracle I managed to hang on to this thing to be able to show it to you today. If she'd found it at any time she'd have thrown it away after first calling me on the carpet over it and probably grounding me for a month, and certainly would have utterly failed to understand its significance. It'd be a half hour screaming telephone call to my brother as well, long distance charges be damned. No hiding place in my room was safe; Ultimately I resorted to tucking it in the rafters of the disused shed on the corner of our property along with all the other stuff I didn't want to lose forever, until I moved out.

---

I knew nothing about this knife, really, except that it was old and it was my brother's and he gave it to me, therefore it was priceless. I didn't get into-into knives until a little later in life, well into teenagerdom and a time where such a lad could charitably pass for legal age to a suitably disinterested store clerk and purchase cutlery of his own.

And I did eventually get my damn Swiss Army Knife, but a little too late.

This is a Camco Model 522. Camco was one of two historical sub-brands of the Camillus Cutlery Company, from back in the good old days before their 2006 bankruptcy and subsequent acquisition by Acme United, the following restructuring, and infamous descent into being a clearinghouse of imported low grade junk for Walmart.

In its heyday Camco was their budget line, opposite the Sword brand which contained their high end offerings. Its origin is displayed via this engraving on the heel of the main blade. Camco, I imagine, is short for "Camillus Company." The brand was introduced in 1948, just in time for post-war prosperity.

The 522 is a fairly traditional jack knife, bearing a pivot on only one end rather than both, and Camillus specifically called this variant a "Pony Jack." It's arguably a swayback design, evidenced by the prominent wiggle in its handle profile. The 522 Pony Jack contains a long clip pointed blade:

And a short sheepsfoot that Camillus called a "coping pen" blade:

The handle is "Nu Pearl," which is a translucent plastic faux-pearl material -- Plastic being a novel material at the time of its introduction, and quite distinct from the stag horn that Camillus used on most of their knives up to that point.

As a side note, the reason small knives like this are still called "penknives" by some regardless of their configuration is because similar small knives were originally intended to shape and trim the point of a quill pen, back when that sort of thing was relevant. Even well after quill pens fell into disuse the name stuck. This is surely where the "pen" part of the description of its smaller blade comes from. A coping blade has a narrower point profile than a traditional sheepsfoot and is supposed to be better suited to finer, more fiddly tasks at the expense of having a more fragile point. And it's certainly possible that Camillus might have expected you to trim a quill point with it, but I'd doubt it -- a pencil is probably more likely.

I don't actually know the date of manufacture of this knife. It's not marked on it anywhere, and the only published reference I can find to this model specifically is in the 1957 Camillus catalog where it appears twice. Page 5 contains as full of a description of this model as it appears we're going to get:

And two pages following you can see it as part of the lineup in their No. 56-12 display case, revealing that this was part of the Camco "Dollar Line." It is therefore definitely a budget model. Perfect for bestowing on a grasshopper who probably wouldn't treat it with much care.

I don't know how long Camillus kept this knife available and in production, and it's certainly likely that it was available beyond 1957. Just as well, because '57 was certainly before my brother was born (I'm not that old, and neither was he), but I can just picture him picking this up from a hardware store in some dusty one horse town somewhere where it may have been lying around for god knows how long. Or it's even possible that it was given to him in turn and then given to me; that raises the tantalizing possibility that I am this knife's third owner but at this rate I'll never know.

I found this catalog and many others like it at the excellent Collectors Of Camillus web site, by the way, which is a veritable treasure trove of info run by people who know way more about this stuff than I do. Without it I certainly would have been scratching my head much longer in figuring out anything about this knife. I found various similar eBay listings for knives like these, for instance, most of which were quite inaccurate.

I've shown off knives here before that were time capsules of their era, but none of them are a patch on the 522. It is a very traditionally designed pocketknife, and when I say that it really means something here. It's a slip joint folder with no locking mechanism. A pair of springy prongs on the spine press against the heels of the blades and allow them to detent into position but they are not locked there in any way.

Its steel alloy is unspecified, but I can tell you for sure it's a carbon steel and not stainless. Nowadays we assume any given knife no matter how cheap is bound to be stainless, and if you want a carbon steel blade you have to deliberately seek one out. None of the knives in the 1957 catalog are specified as being stainless, and when Camillus came out with models in later years that were it was a big enough deal that each and every one had a flashy "stainless" marquee over its listing.

These days we hyperfixate on specific steel alloys and the minutiae of their properties, but back in the day people were much too occupied actually using their knives to worry about that sort of thing.

And my example is definitely well used. The rather pronounced dish in the edge on the main blade is not original, and is a clear indication that somebody got an awful lot done with it at some point in history. Some of that was me, but much of it wasn't.

The 522 is riveted together with steel pins that are functionally nonremovable. A real expert could probably dismount it and put it back together again, but I'm not inclined to try. Mine has suffered much neglect over the years what with being hidden in sheds and down in the bottom of drawers and so forth, and at one point it was underwater for some length of time after my house suffered from a basement flood. As you see it now is after my inexpert attempt at restoration; I gave it a damn good brass wire wheeling before taking these pictures to shine it up and get the rust off of the bolsters and out of the Nu-Pearl scales. I mostly succeeded. The blades have developed a patina and some pitting, particularly on the smaller one, and I decided that by and large I'd leave that as it is. I got all the cancerous red rust off and oiled everything up real good, but I think going around trying to mirror polish the blades would be silly.

Both blades are spaced by a simple brass partition in the gap between. The long blade on mine is actually very slightly bent -- no doubt the result of some youthful misadventure -- and I straightened it out as much as I dare try. It's not perfect, but at least the blades don't clash anymore and I've seen worse even in new production knives if they're cheap enough.

---

The sky was turbulent all that day. Big tall clouds came and went, sweeping across the sky one after the other. We met up with my brother's friend Mark for lunch, out on some rocks on a pine covered hillside somewhere. He prepared tortellini on a little pump up white gas camp stove on the tailgate of the truck, with a can of red sauce he opened with his knife.

We let his dogs out to run in the brush and hunt mice and voles, which was their favorite game aside from rooting out grouse. You'd hear just one bark from the bushes and suddenly there'd be a tiny rodent sailing over the low pines and sage, looking quite surprised and indignant. The dogs never killed them, they'd simply catch them and fling them into the air so you could see that they'd got one. My brother could actually even get them to bring their quarry back alive, and this was how he fed his bird.

The pasta was done. We sat in the shade under the pines and ate as the wind rattled the dry branches. My brother glanced up at the sky.

"Get in the truck," he said suddenly. It seemed quite out of the blue to me.

We got in the truck. Just a minute later, a deluge of marble sized hailstones were bouncing and pinging and shattering all around us. And here came the dogs, rocketing out of the bushes and yelping. They got in the truck, too.

The chaos only lasted a couple of minutes and I did my best to catch a few of the ice balls by tentatively hanging my camp mug out from under the safety of the pickup truck's cap. I only got two or three, and they melted quickly.

To this day I have no idea how he just looked at the sky like that and knew it was going to hail 30 seconds later. That was the kind of thing he did. He was in tune with the land. Anywhere he stood, that was his land. It didn't matter what any signs around it said.

That summer we went everywhere. Hundreds of miles all over the state and beyond. We went to the Four Corners, just for the heck of it. We got lunch in roadside biker bars that a ten year old had no business in. You'd get looks at first, but my brother -- scrawny, liberal educated, and beardless -- could be friends with anyone in any bar in sixty seconds flat. His dogs knew tricks. He'd dazzle the denizens hunched over their beers with trivia, or win small bets along the "bet you a quarter you can't do X with Y" variety, or once he taught me a few he'd let me do it instead. (For instance, he taught me the trick I've recounted here before of uncorking a wine bottle with no tools, just physics.) Anywhere anyone was from, he'd been there and he could prove it. He knew people that you knew there. He knew people everywhere.

And then, we were gone. Probably leaving everyone inside wondering just what the hell just happened.

We camped on mountainsides in the middle of nowhere. Fished in remote streams -- Well, he fished and I watched. On those nights, I saw more stars in the sky than I'd ever seen in my life. And he seemed to know the names of all of them.

---

It's funny, but the Camco 522 is exactly the kind of knife that doesn't interest me now. I own precisely two traditional jackknives, and this is one of them. We all got preoccupied with spring assists and thumb studs, myself included, and I developed my now famous predilection for balisongs as well as the most off-the-wall mechanisms I could get my hands on, but the 522 has none of these. It's also seriously tiny -- It has no tactical appeal at all. All you have to grab the blades for opening are traditional fingernail nicks, and the action is quite stiff. I recall it always was.

It's a mere 2-3/4" long closed, just like the catalog says. The main blade is just 1-13/16" long, probably well within the legal limit anywhere, and the little one is 1-5/16". It's just 23.8 grams or 0.84 of an ounce. All that together means this would probably give any modern urban micro-carry knife a run for its money. The diminutive size is surely why my brother chose this one to give to me. It's tough to get into too much trouble with, but it'll still teach you not to nick your fingers just as good as any other knife.

I was going to try to find a Wyoming quarter for scale since it'd be appropriate, but I pawed through about 40 bucks' worth of quarters I've got lying around here and I'm ashamed to report I didn't find a single one. You get this land conservancy commemorative one instead, as second prize.

---

I visited my brother one more summer after that, a trip during which I turned eleven. On this trip my nephew was sent with me (he's almost exactly my age; my family tree is weird) and we had a grand old time even though I had to leave my little pocketknife at home. We had other toys to play with -- hatchets, now, and my brother let me carry his Buck knife while I was there because he had yet another new knife to replace it. And I had a little half height small headed D-handle shovel I found in the barn and took it in my head to use as a walking stick, prybar, and general purpose snake-fender. Any bears or coyotes or rattlesnakes that messed with us had better watch out because they were going to get a good thrashing. Luckily for them they all kept their distance and remained un-whacked.

---

One night that winter, my mother woke me in the middle of the night so in tears she could barely talk. She told me my brother had just died, having been killed in an avalanche on the side of some mountain someplace. It was one of the few times I ever saw her display anything I could classify as a genuine emotion which wasn't just being angry at me or my dad.

What a thing to lay on an eleven year old in the dead of night. It's the kind of bullshit that happens in dreams; it can't be real. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. I get the impression that this was the wrong answer.

In the morning it was real -- it wasn't a bad dream. I never saw my brother again, and I think it probably took years for that to fully sink in. He may as well have lived on a different planet at that time. The West was disconnected, separate; Life there wasn't the same life as here. You can't see over that horizon no matter how tall of a tree you climb to try.

He did, at least, go out doing exactly what he wanted to do, exactly where he wanted to be. He was in his element. And I can't imagine him ever getting old nor slowing down.

---

I didn't have much to remember him by, and I still don't, at least in a physical sense. I had pictures, taken with a succession of wind-up plastic disposable cameras, all whisked off to somewhere by my mother. Those were her memories now, not mine, to be scrutinized and locked away; at the time they were her way of keeping tabs on me even when I was elsewhere. After all, I was told, she paid to have them developed. I didn't deserve to keep them -- I wouldn't be "responsible" enough anyway. I didn't "understand." Instead she used them to criticize, as usual. I didn't get my brother's face in focus in this one. In that one, I wasn't wearing my coat. I wasted two pictures on that same mountain when I should have only taken one. What was I thinking?

I don't need pictures to remember anyway. I have real memories, and they're better.

The only actual things I had left were this box and the knife.

The box originally held watercolor pencils. These were another extravagance my brother let me keep, and something I didn't get to reacquire at home after I'd used up the originals until much later. When he gave it to me it was plain, just a drop-fit lid and nothing else. The bird printing on it is original. I sealed the wood and added the hinges, the latch, and the corners later, when I was older and after it was clear this was now a memento.

And his knife.

My knife.

I have a lot of knives, now. Some have memories attached, most don't. Many of them have seen more use, and a couple of them have seen none. But none of them will ever be equivalent.

All of them are my knives. Some of them are really my knives; the ones I designed.

I have to imagine he would have been interested in that, too. But this little Camco is Genesis and it always will be.

As people, living in civilization as we are, it seems we're hard wired to ascribe significance to objects. People don't last forever but objects can. Maybe this is why we're always so keen on preserving them.

This is probably why museums are full of things, and they aren't just one old guy in a rocking chair who was actually there, recounting his story in person to anyone who'll listen. Instead we see these old things, often personal effects -- someone's powder horn, someone's pen, someone's pair of spectacles, a monographed snuff tin, whatever it is -- and we think that's what history is because we know they belonged to somebody.

Maybe it's true.

Everyone has a story. Maybe a banal one, not an important one as far as capital-H History is concerned. But everybody still does nonetheless. You never can tell what significance things have to someone, or how they remember the people, the places, the events that are important to them. Why do any of us do what we do? We all have our reasons.

Think about that before the next time you're about to call something stupid. Before you say it's "just" a knife and what's the big deal? Or maybe it's not a knife and it's a baseball card, or an old hoodie, a stuffed tiger, or a page torn out of a book.

I have hundreds of knives by now. Several of them are "worth" tens, even hundreds of what this one is just in base dollars and cents. But not a single one of those is locked in my safe.

This one is.

It is said that people are never truly dead until what they leave behind is gone, and the last mark they've made on the world is forgotten. My brother certainly left his mark on the world, in all sorts of places. And of course he left it on me as well. We can all still live by his words of wisdom: When you venture out into the rocks and pines, keep your canteen full. Know where you're going and know where you've been. Watch out for snakes. Always have your knife.

---

My brother died getting on for 30 years ago, now. I'm slowly turning into an old man, much older now than he was when he died. He'll never grow old, but I'm working on it whether I like it or not. That's how it goes.

Part of what he taught me is what he taught me by his absence. It's the knowledge that you should plan for the future, sure, but always live in the moment a little bit.

Some day we will all do something for the last time. One trip will be your last camping trip. One ride will be your last ride. One knife will be the last knife you buy.

One time you see your brother will be the last time. And you won't know that's what it is.

Well, kids, it finally happened. Old Uncle Knifey ordered some shit from China and got taken for a ride.

I know, right? Say it ain't so.

This, insofar as anyone can identify or describe the thing, is a "Paodin 'Resurgent' 6061 T6 Aluminum Alloy Handle D2 Blade Bushing System Pocket EDC Tool." I bought it off AliExpress from the just fantabulously named "Paodin KnifeSplendy Store."

Paodin is an online clone knife seller, or possibly maker, or both, of at least some repute. This apparently notwithstanding that all of their listings mysteriously disappeared from the internet shortly after I bought this, and then just as inexplicably resurfaced again a while later. And I still have absolutely no idea what the hell "Splendy" is supposed to be.

Anyway, this whole odyssey requires short look at the Alibaba balisong knife buying experience. You see, it's really weird.

I am assuming due to either some asinine contortion of Chinese law and/or Alibaba's policies, it's not that you can't technically sell balisong knives on the platform, it's simply that you just can't depict anything as being a balisong knife. Distributing is okay. Just don't admit it. See? It totally makes sense.

So what you get to work with are hastily edited product pictures that just not-so-artfully have the blades excised from them. By all appearances you're just buying a pair of handles, but the sellers take pains to insinuate, but perhaps not outright state, that their products are in fact "complete." Nod's as good as a wink, say no more. (All of these sellers further also plead that you don't post pictures with your reviews so they don't get busted. Eagle eyed readers will also notice that one of the handles in the picture above is wrong, and has the texture flipped around. Who knows how much of it is actually real...)

Combine this with the usual sterling product descriptions consisting of terse Engrish and containing largely only irrelevant details and it makes it a trifle difficult to ascertain just what, exactly, it is you're buying. And that's before you even get into the ever lurking potential hilarity inherent in direct ordering Chinese junk from fly by night sellers, vis-a-vis the possibility of thing showing up the size of a toothpick. Or the size of a boogie board. Or you might just wind up with a picture of whatever it was supposed to be on a 5x6 postcard.

Sure, these guys all claim that if you email them they'll send you more complete product photos. And sometimes they do. But usually you may as well just stand out at the edge of the sand and shout into the ocean for all the good it'll do you. You'd better like playing the surprise game.

So this thing. I specifically ordered the "black live blade" option. Note that "live" means a sharp blade. You know, like, a knife.

Well, what I got instead was this.

I think it's some kind of Dwemer artifact.

This would be just right at home gently spinning on a loading screen, wouldn't it? I know you can just picture it.

I don't exactly know how to classify the "Resurgent." It's a balisong knife, obviously, but only for suitably small values of "knife." That's because it has no edge on it whatsoever. The listing claims it's made of D2, which it may or may not be, and a fat lot of good it'd do anybody even if it was. It's no sharper than a butter knife with deliberately rounded over edges, and that normally ought to mean that it's a trainer: An unsharpened practice stand-in designed for Gud, the Gitting thereof. Or for showing off balisong tricks you might be too chicken to pull of with a sharpened blade.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure unsharpened was the one thing I was not supposed to get. But AliExpress provide only two options to rectify situations like this, which are to wit: Pay to ship the thing back to China and try again, or go fuck yourself.

Well, for 20 bucks I'm positive I can't be bothered. And what I wound up with is damn interesting all the same, so here we are.

I wasn't planning on getting a trainer knife just now, or at least not this one. But on the topic of that, I don't think there are too many trainer knives out there that can do this.

The Resurgent doesn't have an edge, but it does have a wicked point on it that's every bit as real as, for instance, most of the throwing knives I've ever owned. So it's useless for any cutting task but quite pointy enough to do yourself a mischief if you toss it into the air and it lands point-first on your palm. If you ran someone through with it they'd be bound to notice, as well.

So it's sharp, without being sharp. A trainer blade, except not. Monkey in the middle, just what are you?

This is also one of those things that you'd think is guaranteed to be a clone of something else. But if it is, I'm drawing a blank. I racked my brain for any past or present brand name balisong or trainer this may have knocked off, and pawed through pages upon pages of Google image results trying to find a match with no success. Maybe somebody knows; I sure as hell don't.

You won't get any help from the packaging, since it showed up in a completely unmarked plain white box. This contained no documentation, no leaflet, no packing materials other than the baggie the knife was in (with the latch components rolling around loose inside), and certainly no branding. This knife didn't even come with the obligatory and by now familiar useless Torx screwdriver made of cheese nor customary pair of spare pivot screws.

The Resurgent's party trick is obviously this.

The highly detailed blade is heavily machined with various pockets and sweeps, but it's hard to miss the centerpiece which is the array of quite fine featherlike grooves that follow the contours of the blade. It's possible, I suppose, that the blade is cast or possibly metal injection molded to get these shapes somehow, but I don't think it is. If it's machined then the work is actually pretty good. Whatever the blade is made out of is some kind of steel, since it's magnetic. Possibly D2 like the description says, or 440, or 3Cr, or something. But definitely not zinc or any other potmetal.

It's a damn shame not only that they didn't go as far as putting an edge on the friggin' thing, of course, but also that since the texture is parallel to where the edge would have been it kind of impedes you from trying to sharpen much of its length even if you wanted to. But still, it's neat.

The handles are indeed aluminum, and fairly competently anodized at that. They're machined with radial grooves with a kind of art deco vibe. And it's real anodizing, not paint. I've proven this by fumbling it onto the floor many times already where it's withstood the abuse handily. There's nary a flake or chip in it, and hardly even a scratch.

In lieu of a crossguard or the traditional nubbins you might find on a balisong, you get this pair of hooks. I'm pretty sure these are shaped with the intent of being used as a bottle opener. I'll bet you it'd work, but I don't have anything to test it on at the moment so you'll have to just use your imagination on that one. You'd only be able to hook a bottle cap with the blade deployed, for whatever it's worth, since the cutouts recess into the handle slightly when you have it in the closed position.

The blade's surface is stonewashed and has a nice gunmetal sort of finish on it. I can't tell you how well it'll hold up long term, but my example shows no visible signs of wear in the near term of the few weeks I've been messing around with it.

What drew me to this in the first place was the presence of a latch. This is going to sound stupid, but it's surprisingly difficult to get your hands on any of these kinds of clone knives that've got a latch. Even the ones that are knockoffs of originals that did have a latch near-pathologically omit it for some reason.

I understand some highly technical show-off operators prefer to have no latch on their knives, but I certainly don't. I generally carry my balisongs to use, so it's kind of an essential feature for me.

Probably in deference to those types, though, another quirk of this thing is that it showed up with the latch, but dismounted and rolling around separately in the box. I had to install it myself.

The latch is unusually also a two piece design, with the head threading into a tubular shank. The head and shank (and their pivot screw) all arrived in this disassembled state. Weird.

Either way, the latch is perfectly effective and positively drops into pockets machined on either side of the safe handle.

It's actually little too effective, but not in the way you'd think. Rather, its edges are geometrically square; the thing's been lathed into an almost scissorlike edge. This means it can catch on the inner lip and dig into the softer aluminum of the opposite handle slightly, which makes the knife hang up in that position.

It's not difficult to avoid but it feels like you've just experienced a glitch in the Matrix every time you encounter it unexpectedly. You can see in the picture above how it's chewed a bit of the anodizing off of the very corners of the handle, which is a trivial thing (especially for a trainer you're bound to drop on the floor nine million, three hundred and fifty eight thousand, four hundred and six times), but it's still kind of annoying.

This could be fixed readily, and I plan to do so, by just taking a file or a grinder or something and zipping a little chamfer into the inside edge of the latch head. The outer edge already has a chamfer on it, so I'm not sure why the inner one doesn't. I'm doing all my photography first, though, so you all can experience in all its accurate glory how things are rather than how they ought to be.

The latch is not spring loaded in any way but falls free of its own accord if you squeeze the handles together hard enough. It has no endstops so it can strike both the opposite handle as well as the blade if you're not careful. Since there's no actual edge to ding, though, this is unlikely to actually do any harm.

Oh, and there's no clip either. I'd doubt anyone cares; You're not going to EDC a blunt knife.

Weights and Measures

I think the best way to describe the Resurgent's size is "intermediate." It's not as long as a traditionally sized balisong or a competition flipper, nor is it as short as a compact EDC balisong. This may be of some interest to anyone with small hands who finds the bigger popular options to be too unwieldy, but who's also already discovered that there's kind of a minimum threshold for handle length required in order to pull off certain types of finger and wrist rolls that all of the EDC sized options typically fail to meet.

When closed the Resurgent is precisely 5-1/4" long. It's 9-1/8" open, with an effective/ineffective blade length of 4-1/8" past the forwardmost tips of the handles. The handles themselves are 0.505" thick, basically exactly half an inch, and nearly square in cross section. They are tapered, though, with the tips being wider (0.522") than at the pivots (0.441").

I understand that tapered handles are possibly out of vogue in the trick-spinning balisong world at the moment, and people are probably gearing up their double pivoted siege engines for the holy war that's about to commence on the topic. But I prefer a tapered pair of handles, and this thing has got 'em, so that's nice.

If it matters one whit, and it probably doesn't, the blade itself is 0.149" thick at its meatiest point which is on the flats up around the pivot area. It weighs precisely 120 grams or 4.24 ounces fully assembled, including the latch.

All of this puts the Resurgent right in between, for sake of argument, the ultra-compact Benchmade Model 32 Mini Morpho, and the hyper-traditional Model 42.

It's quite a bit shorter still than a BRS Replicant or a Squid Krake Raken (yes, I am aware mine is a fake, hush), which are probably among the current trendy benchmarks for this sort of thing.

Screws, and The Undoing Thereof

The Resurgent continues my streak of mild surprises, wherein the last several rando Chinese knives I looked at actually came apart without any drama.

Its construction also reveals yet another lie in its product description. Paodin said this has "bushing system" pivots.

Well, it doesn't.

It actually has ball bearings instead, which is better.

The pivots themselves are machined Chicago screws, with anti-rotation flats in their very tips. These follow the tradition of putting useless Torx heads on the female sides of the screws which actually have negative value, because you can crank on that side until the cows come home and you'll never be able to undo them. The male side screws came out fairly easily although they were lightly threadlockered into place. Maybe be gentle with it until you ascertain which side is which, since the heads are indistinguishable from each other.

The Resurgent has single piece channel milled handles which are made of aluminum through and through. In order to prevent this from being a predictable disaster with the hard steel kicker pins bashing into the soft aluminum all the time, there are steel insert plates on the inner faces of the handles around the pivot area.

These not only comprise the surface for the kicker pins to strike, but one each of them on each handle also has the matching D shaped cutout for the anti-rotation flat on its respective screw. Its opposite is round. Thus the pivot screws can only go in one way, and you can decide which way this is if you feel like it by swapping the plates around. This also handily prevents the steel screws from wallering out their holes in the softer aluminum over time.

Rude Mechanicals

The Resurgent of course has a traditional kicker pin design and doesn't have fancy kickerless Zen pins.

The pins are very nice, though. They're a larger diameter than you normally find on a cheap knockoff knife: 0.157" or, more likely, nearly exactly 4mm. They're pressed through very evenly and dead straight, and their ends have even been machined flat.

Thanks to its ball bearing pivot system the Resurgent is rock solid; far more than you'd ever expect at first glance. It has zero blade tap whatsoever and practically no lash in the pivots at all. Owing to their single piece design with fully machined in backspacers, the handles are also very rigid and don't offer much flex at all up and down. Therefore it scores extremely favorably in the old Wiggle Test, above.

The pivot feel is fantastic and as you would hope, very low friction. There's enough mass in the handles to offset the weight of the blade even with the mismatch in materials. The point of balance is just about 1-1/4" behind the pivots which feels pretty good to me and gives it a pleasingly intuitive feel while you're manipulating it.

The one hangup you'll find is possibly a literal one. The bottle opener hooks take up just a tad too much of the knife's length in my opinion, and they're a just a smidge pokey. You're only faced with the points on them in the specific instance of having the blade closed up against the handle you're manipulating, but if you're doing anything that requires choking up on the handles around the pivot point you might find that they graze the web of your hand and tend to unexpectedly push the knife away from you a tad. It's not common, but you have to be cognizant of it in very specific circumstances. If you're the type of person who notices when some rat bastard slips a pea under your mattress, for instance, you may find this a trifle disconcerting. I had to deliberately look for a problem to notice this, though, so it's probably trivial.

If you removed its latch the Resurgent would probably be dead silent. Its pivots make no noise, and even on rebounds the material and shape of the handles plus their utter lack of holes or cutouts means that they don't resonate at all. It doesn't clang, ring, sing, ding, or anything else ending in -ing. If you have people in your vicinity who are hypersensitive to the dulcet tones of your fidgeting with your knife all the time, switch to this. It'll reduce the risk of strangulation in your environs significantly.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I suspect, but can't prove (not without wasting another $20) that if you try to order one of these for yourself you probably won't get what I did.

Or you might. It's anyone's guess.

That makes the Paodin "Resurgent" tough to recommend. Mechanically, objectively, it's great. Well, not if you plan to use it as a knife, that is, in which case it's beyond useless. But as a trainer balisong its humble origins give it no right to be as good as it is. There's a rough edge -- just one, literally, on the latch head -- but other than that it's tough to beat for the price.

And that's what makes the clone balisong space so damn tricky. There are great values to be had here, if you know not only where but how to look, but also if you manage to get lucky.

And that's stupid.

You shouldn't have to get lucky. It shouldn't need to be a guessing game. There's no repeatability with these things because they don't have model numbers or real names, nor will anybody admit who makes the damn things, and their titles are all interchangeable meaningless SEO hodgepodges that tell you nothing. This knife was supposed to have bushing pivots, but it showed up with bearings. One point. But it was supposed to have an edge, and it doesn't. One demerit.

See what I mean? When it's impossible to know what you're getting when you put your money down it's easy to see why any sane person would just declare the hell with it, and not even try. There are many fine points to the Resurgent but one big unavoidable one, which is 't ain't what I friggin' ordered.

You have to be a special kind of nut to put up with this sort of thing, and to be willing to take the good with the bad. Maybe a special kind of nut with a lot of empty slots in his knife drawer still.

I wonder if that reminds us of anyone we know.

This knife had been in my pocket for around 5 years with regular use (and sometimes abuse). Would recommend, it's a good selection of actually usable tools to have on you for those times when you aren't carrying a toolbox. Sometimes I've used the pliers even when I do have my toolbox with me, which is not something you would consider with a lot of cheaper multitools.

Over time the casing did become more silver than black and I did manage to break a few things - the can opener didn't like taking a chain link clip off, the precision screwdriver didn't like being used to pry at something (part of inside a door lock from memory), and the large flathead failed when popping a partition cover port off. I thought that last one wasn't something that should have broken the tool so after a few months I finally got around to sending it back for warranty over that and they replaced it without question.

Warning: The following is not financial advice. But you know how it is.

I have waxed at great length in the past about the Böker G-10 balisong "large" model 06EX228 and also the tactical balisong "small" model 06EX227. The latter of which being, in my not-so-humble opinion, one of the best value (and better built) EDC sized balisongs available, bar none.

Well, previously available. Because back with that post we determined via what BladeHQ told me these were discontinued. And it came to pass, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Well, I just discovered that all four of Böker's spring latch balisongs are currently available and marked down on their web site. Heavily.

06EX229 Tactical "Large" (Ball bearing pivots, spring latch, D2), @ $40: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-tactical-big-d2-06ex229

06EX227 Tactical "Small" (Same as above, but EDC size), @ $36: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-tactical-small-d2-06ex227

06EX228 G-10 "Large" (Regular pivots, spring latch, D2), @ $40: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-g10-large-d2-06ex228

06EX226 G-10 "Small" (same as above but EDC size), @ $36: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-g10-small-d2-06ex226

As usual (and despite my best efforts) I have no affiliation with Böker whatsoever so I don't gain anything if you buy one of these or if you don't. But if you're into this sort of thing I would consider giving any of the above a serious look. Get them while they exist... I am positive these are still in the midst of phase-out.

The "Tactical" models in particular (the 06EX229 and 227) are an appealing alternative to anyone who's been wishing they could get their hands on a Benchmade model 32 or 51, especially given that they are similar sizes and made of the same steel, have the same kind of spring latch, and have ball bearing pivots.

Сколько лет, сколько зим, Comrades. I am back once more.

Here is an NKVD NKD, with a special credit going to user @[email protected] for bringing this particular knife to my attention.

It may surprise you to learn that I don't reflexively buy an example of every knife that crosses my desk these days. But I did with this one, because it has something that is, if you squint at it in the right light, a pocket hook opening mechanism like the Wave opener on my beloved Kershaw CQC-6K. I am, naturally, all about those. So I got out my $60, and down into the rabbit hole I descended, feet first.

This is the HOKC, or NOCKS or even KNOX as they are sometimes rendered, Finka-C. This is a knife designed by one Alexander Biryukov, who is certainly an individual I wouldn't know from a hole in the ground. HOKC or however they're Romanizing their name at the moment is a Russian knife company who outsources much of their production to China. I understand this sort of thing is out of vogue these days, perhaps doubly so, but nevertheless I found this knife pretty interesting.

Since these knives are made in the PRC, it is a given that they have been ripped off and cloned in great quantity by the Chinese. That was apparently the fate that befell our friend Squiddick, and while I can't prove my knife is the genuine article it sure as shit showed up with a lot of Russian on the box and you can view our subject on the manufacturer's web site here, verbatim, which leads me to believe that mine is probably real.

This is broadly a reimagining of the Soviet NR-40 combat knife used throughout World War II, only with a modern twist and converted to a folder. These were colloquially known as the "scout's knife," or "finka," so no points for guessing where this knife got its name.

This is turning into a big wall of text, so here -- I'll break it up with another photo. Damned if this knife doesn't look cool. It's available in a few finishes but I absolutely had to get the most ostentatious one available. HOKC describe this as "brown" but the highlights on its G-10 scales are in reality very orange.

HOKC of course make a tantalizing array of knives, most of which I predict will be damn difficult to get your hands on in the West. In addition to several variations on the Finka theme, other points of note are additional hook openers, this groovy tanto arrangement, and a Finka balisong rendition that I think just became my primary mission in life to obtain.

The first thing that will probably leap out at you regarding the Finka-C, other than its sheer size (it's 10-1/4" long when open) is the funky integrated crossguard. This has the one forward, one back style that mimics the original combat knife from which it was derived. They're built into the blade so their positions reverse when you open it. The lowermost one becomes an effective finger guard, and the one on the spine of the blade serves as a hook opener so you can, with a bit of practice, snap this off of your pocket hem and have it automatically open when you draw.

This does in fact work, I am pleased to report, which is a damn sight farther than most other presumptive non-Emerson/Kershaw pocket hook openers manage to get. This is because HOKC have basically completely ripped off Emerson's design, with the cheerful knowledge that where they're located there probably isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it.

It's not as nice to draw as an Emerson/Kershaw knife, though, and that's because of this:

The Finka-C positions itself as some kind of fighting knife and therefore has very deep machined channels cut into its scales, presumably for grip while Spetsnaz operators or whoever the hell are using the thing while wearing gloves. But that makes the scales snag on your pocket just a little too much, when the only thing that should be snagging is the hook. The clip is also not nearly as nice as the one on any of the CQC Kershaws, is a trifle too small, the recurve in it is too narrow, and it's too tight. I ameliorated matters somewhat by grabbing the clip and giving it a hearty bend away from the handle, loosening its preload. But really it could stand to maybe have a spacer added beneath where it mounts. Or in the extreme, maybe it just needs the one ridge directly beneath the clip's contact area to be ground off. Kershaw, Emerson, and Zero Tolerance solve this by eschewing the scale altogether on the clip side and just presenting a smooth flat surface. This... doesn't.

It's likely to work better on heavier, stiffer fabrics. But I only wear lightweight hiking pants these days so it's kind of a raw deal for me. The clip is not reversible either, by the way. It's set up suitable for right handed users and that's all you get.

The Finka-C's other trick is having a hold-open for the lock. That's the little switch thingy just forward of the pivot here, with the grip knurling in it.

This is a deeply stupid feature.

The Finka is a regular liner locker at its core, just like the Kershaw and Emerson CQC's. So once again, nobody's managed to pair a novel locking mechanism with a pocket hook opener. But its lock is quite positive, a bit stiff, and nearly completely recessed into the handle. Therefore the chances of it "accidentally" becoming unlocked during use are so close to nil they're probably negative.

By the way, this is very much like unto the one on some variants of the the CRKT M16 (a knife which this in some ways superficially resembles), and other LAWKS safety equipped knives, although it's fully manual so is not equivalent to the AutoLAWKS system. I've always felt that the genuine LAWKS was dumb, too, for what it's worth. Nobody's knife needs two locks.

But nevertheless, there it is. Slide the tiny toggle upwards (if you're holding the knife edge down) and a small hook rises into place blocking the liner lock from moving far enough to disengage with the blade. A near microscopic "on" inscription on the blade just forward of the pivot indicates the locked position.

The lock does not detent in either position and is very easy to move with basically no resistance. Fortunately it's tiny, so it's unlikely you'll engage it by accident, and it thankfully also can't be manipulated at all when the knife is closed so at least you can't lock it shut.

It's also trivially easy to defeat if it annoys you, which it probably will. We'll get to that in a bit.

The Finka-C has HOKC's rather distinctive giant slotted screw on its pivot. The inscription in addition to HOKC's logo and "Series 'T'" is the model designation in Russian, and "Design by A. Biryukov."

It is a flipper and/or pocket hook opener. "But wait," you say. "There is a plainly visible thumb stud right there, you nerd."

That's not a thumb stud. This is something else strange about the Finka. The studs (there's one on either side) are way too close to the handles for you to get any purchase or leverage on them. You can thumb open the knife if you prefer, but only using the hook.

The studs are actually the endstops for the pivot, and rest in two opposing semicircular pockets on either side of the handle, one each for the open and closed positions.

This is once again eerily reminiscent of the CRKT M16. It's a clever idea, regardless of whose it is, because it removes the weak point of the traditional end stop pin which in this case is sure to be repeatedly hammered by a longer (and thus heavier) than average blade with the wielder snapping it open of the pocket all the dang old time.

The Numbers

Somehow, we haven't gotten to these.

The Finka-C is huge.

As stated, it is every bit of 10-1/4" long, opened. It has a massive 4-7/8" long blade made of D2 that HOKC describe as a "Bowie" profile, and it very nearly is. The blade is 0.140" thick at the spine, fullered, and be still my heart, it is even flat ground. It's not the absolute beefiest of boys, but it's still definitely above average and the increased thickness is welcome to add durability against the likewise increased length. The blade's spine is square but its corners are chamfered, so while it's a little more comfortable it will alas be useless for striking your ferro rod. There is a choil at the base of the blade, though, the forward half of which may just be sharp enough to do that job. It also means the entire edge is theoretically usable.

The Finka is of course quite large when closed as well. 5-3/8" by my measure, and a hefty -- not to mention possibly auspicious -- 0.666" thick not including the clip. The crossguard arms are of course the widest point, at 1.916". It is needless to say a very meaty lad, a total of 162.4 grams or 5.76 ounces. Believe it or not this is actually helped along by only having one full length steel liner; the majority of the non-locking side of the knife is just comprised of the G-10 scale. I don't know if this is a weight or cost cutting measure, or both.

Largely because of that, though, I would not rate the Finka as suitable for duty as an actual trench knife. This despite the fact that at its length the Finka-C is probably just about at the minimum I would personally consider truly suitable for a pure "combat" type of knife. That's not polite to say in public anymore, of course, so I'll also point out that it'd make a dandy camp knife if you had a particular desire to make such a thing a folder rather than fixed. The crossguards or finger guards or whatever you want to classify them as do introduce the age old problem of precluding you from bringing all of the edge down on a flat surface, but the blade is long enough and has enough of an upsweep that even so the forwardmost third or possibly a little more can be used for cutting board work. That's an overall usable range of just over 2" by my measure, which to be fair is pretty much the entire edge length of a lot of lesser knives to begin with.

For EDC use, it's probably a shade or three too large for most people. But perversity breeds all kinds; don't let me tell you what to do.

In addition to its clip the Finka-C does have a lanyard hole. Given how finicky it is to draw and deploy via its Wave, finding something to fill this with may actually turn out to be advisable. Some fluorescent orange paracord would be favorite in this case.

Here's the return of an old friend we sure haven't seen in a while: My Kershaw CQC-6K, which has no doubt been sorely missed as the obligatory comparison object in many of my recent writeups. In case in particular it seemed especially fitting to welcome it back.

The Finka absolutely towers over it.

Side by side like this, you can see that the pocket hook on the Finka is significantly larger than on the Kershaw CQC. I guess theoretically this might help it work better on thicker fabric, but I don't have a way to scientifically prove that to you. It sounds good on paper, though, so we'll roll with it.

Devils Lurking In The Details

Or rather, are there any?

Given the famously sterling reputation of Russian manufacturing -- boots that dissolve in the rain, stationary tractors, and cars made from old pants -- I don't blame you if you enter into this with, let's just say, some doubts. To be honest, I did too.

And then being made in China for the Russians? There may never be a more textbook example of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Well, here's the thing. The Finka-C is actually perfectly competently built.

I'm just as astounded as you are, really.

The fit and finish on the components is all just peachy. The blade is nicely centered, too. There's no lash, nothing wiggles, nothing scrapes, nothing rattles, and none of the fasteners arrived stripped. The lockup is positive and appears to have been hand tuned. Yes, I realize that getting excited about this is kind of a low bar, but it is cleared nonetheless.

The edge grind is quite serviceable out of the box, and is sharp enough in my opinion to be put into duty right away. Producing julienne shavings off of a post-it is no problem. I don't see any telltale signs that the edge has been burned, but time will tell if it retains its sharpness as D2 should. The entirety of the blade has a pleasing tumbled finish which is consistent and looks quite nice. It's had a nice finishing pass done on it and doesn't show any machine marks on the faces.

The point profile is good, with the grind carried through consistently all the way to the end on both sides without any weirdness.

The edge is of course mildly out of true, with the left side of it (looking down on the edge from above) observably shallower than the right.

This is to be expected given the origin and price, and not at all unusual even for budget models from the brand name makers. It would be a little nicer if it weren't, of course, but the Finka's simple geometry and refreshing lack of anything in the way of your stones (including thumb studs!) ought to make it as easy as it gets to reprofile to your preferred angle when the time comes.

What's Inside

I'm just chuffed to bits to report that my Finka-C came right apart with no fuss. All of the above adds up to my conclusion that I must have received the genuine article. Fakes of this are quite prevalent, which is how this whole odyssey got started in the first place. At present I think the best indicator of a real one of these versus a fake -- other than the price, of course -- is the presence of the clip. HUAAO and some others are hawking knockoffs of this, which is a pretty damn rich sauce given what this is and its origins, but all the fakes I can identify universally lack the pocket clip. So if you spot one without it, run.

All of the fasteners take a T6 Torx bit, except for the pivot screw. You will want a large slotted driver for that. You can just about undo it with a dime, but the slot is straight and not dished, so a proper screwdriver is probably better.

Inside you get brass pivot washers and a generous helping of what appears to be silicone based lubricant all over absolutely everything. The handle halves are separated by a single piece G-10 backspacer, and it's nice to see that while this comprises part of the lanyard hole, it's also reinforced there with one of the steel liners.

Underneath the right hand scale is this surprise, which is what I alluded to earlier. There's a partial length substructure under here housing the pivot, and it's anchored on the other end by engaging with one of the scale screws. But most of the length of that side of the knife consists only of the G-10 scale and the liner does not extend the full length on that side. The other liner is full length, the scales are very thick, and G-10 is actually fairly stiff stuff, so there are no noticeable rigidity issues. However, the jury is still out on whether or not this will be a weak point if you try to inflict some kind of heavy duty use on this knife.

This is how e.g. the Kershaw Skyline successfully does it, and many others besides. But usually knives that try this trick are much smaller EDC jobbies that are not positioning themselves as the spiritual successor to a Soviet fighting knife. If nothing else, their much shorter blades can't apply nearly as much leverage to their pivots even if they're used unwisely.

Here's how the safety lever works. It's a simple single piece, and just rotates around the main pivot screw. It's trivially easy to defeat by simply not reinstalling it; its thickness is not necessary for the proper reassembly of the knife and the head on the pivot screw is more than wide enough to bridge the gap it sits in without it. If you were truly paranoid you could replace it with a plain washer.

The female side of the pivot screw has an anti-rotation flat, and there is indeed a matching flat on the hole it goes through on the liner side of the knife, so for once it's not just purely decorative. I'll bet you a dollar the fakes don't bother broaching the anti-rotation hole in the liner correctly.

Maybe this serves to better illustrate how the Finka's lockup and endstop not-thumb-stud works.

The hardware. There are two screw lengths: The shorter ones go through the scales directly into the steel liners, and the longer ones go into brass inserts in the G-10 backspacer in between the two halves of the handle.

Unboxing

Since this is a new knife, the box is still on my desk. We'll have a look at it while we're at it.

Knife boxes are generally not terribly exciting, my bona fide milk crate full of the damn things notwithstanding. But the Finka-C is the only knife I've ever bought that showed up in a box -- not on a hang card -- in the open position.

I suppose that's not terribly interesting, but the large block of authentic Russian bumf on the back might be:

The long paragraph at the top repeats the marketing blurb which notably name drops not only the Lawks safety but also the Wave opener, verbatim. Somehow, I'd highly doubt that either of the above have been dutifully licensed from their respective owners.

It also lists the Изготовитель, manufacturer, as "Linear Group LTD., Room 1412, Tian Plaza, No. 49 North Yunnan Road, Nanjing, PRC." So that answers that.

The smaller block down in the lower right corner is the typical set of care instructions and admonitions. Do not use for throwing, do not give to children, that sort of thing. But it also goes out of its way to note (on the top line), "This is not a cold weapon and has no restrictions on circulation (distribution) or carrying."

This "cold weapon" thing is a wrinkle of Russian law that I don't pretend to understand, and the internet tells me the definition is rather complex. What an idiom, though.

Still, how nice to know that this doesn't count as a "weapon." One wonders just what the hell does, then. In my US state the Finka is more than large enough that carrying it concealed in public would require the same permit as a firearm. (Maybe the Ruskies are cooler in at least one respect than I thought.)

The front of the box is considerably less amusing, although the logo and web address are printed in shiny silver foil.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I really like the Finka-C.

I like it so much that I wrote this entire column without making one "In Soviet Russia, X Y's you" joke. You probably didn't even notice, did you?

I don't know if the Finka is the absolute superlative largest Wave opening knife you can buy, but it's definitely got to be getting there. If that's what you want and you'd like it without spending an insane amount of money on a Zero Tolerance or an Emerson, maybe give HOKC a shot. It's a shame about the lock, but it's easy enough to discard. A CRKT M16 would be an easy substitute for this if you'd like something from stateside, but none of those have a Wave on 'em.

And there is no denying that the Finka-C both looks and feels bad ass. Well deserving of the space in the middle. That's got to count for something.

I just received my aluminum model Exo-M in the mail today, and I absolutely love this knife, but it's so damn loud! I feel the urge to fidget with it, but I worry that I'm annoying my neighbors. It's so loud and piercing, it sounds like a Garand ping every time I open a package.

Does anyone have advice for noise reduction on knives? I thought about maybe putting a thin layer of epoxy or silicone or something along the ends of the frame that make contact with the blade, but I feel like the tolerances are so tight that any amount of material being present could possibly interfere with opening/closing the knife, so I don't want to risk something like that just yet. I suspect that any kind of coating I could apply would also just peel off almost immediately, anyway.

Any ideas? Or should I just learn to live with it?

I Ate'nt Dead.

Here's the UPKnife UPD-D4, the "Eclipse Ring2," which is a entry in their lengthy and baffling spread of near identical almost-knives from their (D)efense series. It is, verily, weird.

This D4 variant is the most knifelike thing in their lineup, so that's what I got. This version is steel through-and-through, 440A on the blade and an unknown alloy for the handle. Every other part is steel of some description, too, by way of a magnet readily sticking to all of them.

Made of steel? That sounds like a stupid thing to say about a knife, doesn't it?

Well, that's because all those extra words and letters on the model name designate what this is and what it's made out of. You can get these in a dizzying array of materials, shapes, and construction types depending on what you plan to do with it and how much you want to spend.

Half of UPKnife's D-Series is their "Pocket Sai," which is exactly what it sounds like. You can get this and indeed those in polymer, titanium, aluminum, steel, and various combinations thereof. Most of them are unsharpened, save for the steel versions where you're offered the choice, but you can also get them with carbide steel cutting tips just at the point. UPKnife obviously expect most of these to be real-deal self defense martial arts weapony things, which I suppose is interesting, but I have to say I haven't found myself beset by rogue samurai, cutlass wielding pirates, or any other swordsmen in years, personally, so stuff like that is probably of limited utility for me.

So I got this one, which encompasses: A ring on the end, full length, made entirely of steel, a perfunctory crossguard rather than sai prongs, and fully edged. In the sliver finish, not black. 'Cuz it's shiny, duh.

Actually, more on the "fully edged" in a moment.

The UPK-D4 is a slider opener, if you hadn't figured that out based on the picture of it partially deployed above. UPKnife call it "self sheathing," and when it's at rest the blade sits flat against the handle with a generous 3/16" or so all the way around the perimeter to keep it from acting like a parmesan cheese shaver against your fingers. To deploy it, you press the wide oval shaped button on it to unlock it, and...

...It extends with a snap of the wrist into this 12-3/8" long dagger with a snick that would even make James Howlett flinch. The blade is every bit of 0.185" thick at the root, double edged, and every little thing about the UPK-D4 broadcasts to the world that it is absolutely not fucking around. The whole thing not including the clip is 0.425" thick.

There are a few shorter compact versions of these, but this isn't one of them. I went with the whole enchilada, because why the fuck not? Even when closed it's a full 8" long. It's 183.5 grams or 6.48 ounces, and I would not be surprised if anyone told me my steel version is the heaviest of the bunch. All those polymer and titanium and whatever-else jobbies have got to be lighter than this.

There is a clip on the back side and be still my heart, but it's even a deep carry one. Even so the ring sticks up above the hem of your pocket, I suppose providing an easy draw while it's at it. And you need very deep pockets to trouser this.

It is still, however, possible. All of the edges on it except for the one on the blade are it are chamfered and rounded over, so it is snag free and actually draws quite cleanly and easily. There are some gripping greebles on the handle and it's got a nice bead blasted satin finish all over.

The ring on the back is very generously sized and anyone should be able to fit a thumb through it. Its presence and proportions ought to bring a smile to the face of any ninja anywhere. There's a little glass breaker point on the very tail end of it which is probably superfluous; I'll bet if you whacked a piece of glass with just about any part of this knife you'd break it easily. The glass, that is. Not the knife.

The UPD-D4's mechanism, and indeed everything else in its series, consists of this sliding track arrangement. When you press the button it pushes the head of this locking lug up and out of the pockets on either end of the track, allowing the blade to slide freely until it hits the other end.

From here the blade goes snicker-snack into your choice of overhand...

...Or underhand grip positions.

The blade's kept straight at all times by not only the locking lug, but also these two beefy screws that act as guide pins. Overtravel is prevented by both the lug and the guide pins, and the blade hits home on both of these simultaneously at both ends of its travel.

You might think at first blush this setup is both suspect and a little flimsy. Everyone else probably thinks you will, too, because the internet is just rife with videos of people bashing, prying, twisting, and jumping on these to try to get the mechanism to break. Especially with this all steel version, suffice it to say that this seems extremely unlikely. The bolts are all seriously skookum for what you'd normally find on a knife. The heads on them are no mere T6, T8, or even T15. They're T20, all of them, and the shanks on them terminate in an M4 thread. Even a dinky class 4.8 M4 bolt has a minimum tensile strength rating of something like 840 pounds-force, and you'd probably bend the blade before you got to that point.

And UPKnife have this to say about the alloy:

Optimized for throwing and melee impact, made in 440A high carbon martensitic stainless steel with a hardness of HRC: 45 makes a tough resilient stainless. It can take extreme abuse and offer a point of bending where harder alloys will break, making this ideal for throwing when the worst abuse takes place.

Optimized for throwing, huh? Well, don't mind if I do.

The point of balance is somehow precisely in the middle of this, too, aligned right where the button is.

And yes, 45 HRC is ridiculously soft for blade steel, even for 440A. For optimum edge retention you'd expect it to be at 55 or so. The UPK-D4 is more like a leaf spring than a knife in that regard, and in light of that you'd expect its edge retention to be pretty poor.

And it probably is. And that's probably why its edge angle is what it is, too.

The UPK-D4's blade is chisel ground which in this case I think is excusable since it needs to sit against its handle when retracted. The back of it is dead flat.

Its taper is about 45 degrees, which is ridiculously steep. It follows that its actual edge angle must be steeper still, and it sure is.

We like superlatives around here: Whatever's the biggest, the thickest, the lightest, the heaviest, the sharpest. Well, the UPK-D4's sure got one -- I don't know if it has the most obtuse edge angle of any knife in history ever, but it's certainly the steepest out of anything I own. 60 full and glorious degrees, by my reckoning. I think that means it just barely even qualifies as a knife.

Make no mistake that you can cut things with this, but in some cases it's really a matter of interpretation. It makes a dandy letter opener, for sure, but to successfully slice most other things you have to come at it with the blade tilted at kind of a reverse angle.

This is not a knife made for shaving, whittling, carving, or slicing tomatoes wafer thin. It is a designed for blocking strikes and stabbing fools. And while there are very few knives on the market where it's truly wise to use them as a prybar, this is probably also one of them.

The Obligatory Disassembly

The UPK-D4 is refreshingly easy to take apart. Just three screws, or five if you include the ones for the clip.

Mind you, all three of the big ones are threadlockered and I found they were also quite thoroughly torqued. The dinky driver handle in your precision bit kit probably won't do it -- you'll want something with a right angle on it, like a Torx socket on a ratchet handle.

The hardware. The mechanism is quite simple, too, with the lock button supported by these two springs and simply raising and lowering in its hole. The locking surface itself is the interface between the head of the locking lug (which is also a screw) and the two pockets it falls into on either end of the track. That's all there is to it.

Here's the lock button's pocket, with its two little locator nubs for the springs.

The Inevitable Conclusion

A lot of pocket knives from the various big name manufacturers, especially those marketed towards the police-fire-rescue types, bill themselves as Specialty Purpose Combat Tools.

Well, they're not. This is.

The UPK-D4 is probably also along the lines of the many folding knives that try to masquerade as fixed blades, a task at which typically fail. And again, this doesn't.

It's precisely what it sets out to be: A dagger that needs no sheath, a fighting tool that actually can cash the checks its looks -- not to mention its product blurb -- try to write. And when we say "dagger" we don't mean "dinky knife that's got double edges so now it's illegal in California." No, we mean it's genuinely suitable for holding in your off hand alongside your rapier if you wanted to.

The only question is, as ever, why? Certainly most people don't actually have a real use for such a thing. But that's never the point.

It is humongous, ostentatious, and unapologetically disregards any notion of practicality or general purpose utility.

That's bold. So for that, I love it.

Am eyeing a knife around the $100 price range but idk whether to go with the aus 10 shark cub or the ad 20.5. Seems $90 is a bit steep for aus 10 but the $150 for 20cv also pricey. With the AD 20.5, I feel it won't be that compact anymore and that the handle isn't as ergonomic.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/50529080

Note: I'm cross-posting this on behalf of the OP (see link above)

This is a VERY cheaply built knife, so much so that it's barely worth keeping, let alone carrying. There's not even a pocket clip on it.

BUT, this combination of form and features is EXACTLY what I've been looking for (with a tip-up clip, that is) in a daily carry folder. The handle and finger protection is there, the blade and handle length fit a perfect middle ground for fighting and practicality, it even has a fuckin Emerson style wave that they don't even bother advertising.

Unlike most wave openers, this one is set VERY far back, is slightly oversized, and doesn't have anything forward of it (discs, pegs, etc) to prohibit getting your full blade length.

So if this wasn't so GODDAMN TRASH, I would call it perfect. I haven't seen anything yet, but if there is a brand-name, high(er)-quality knife that is basically this, PLEASE let me know.

Circumnavigate the wax tadpole. Tremulous! Indeed, the tuning fork does a raw blink on Hari-Kiri Rock. The deft jackdaw revolves in conclusion.

While we are on the topic of counterfeits, here's this. The oddity of this knife is a double-whammy because it is not only mechanically interesting, but it positions itself explicitly as a knockoff.

And there's a twist there, because I'm almost completely certain that this knife is an AI hallucination. Or the real world equivalent, anyway; a physical artifact you can hold in your hands that's a clone of an original that doesn't exist.

Let me back up and start at the beginning.

This is the "AKC Coltsock II," which is of course endlessly resold under a variety of guises, often including the words "Mafia" or "Stilletto" in the description somewhere. And the distinct "Leverletto by Bill DeShivs" inscription on the blade is pretty hard to miss.

Bill DeShivs is a very real knife designer who is the originator of the Leverletto design and trademark. This has of course been knocked off wholesale and many times over by various Chinese counterfeiters, a point about which Bill himself has become a bit acerbic, and deservedly so. His genuine knives are quite collectible and command a high price, which certainly hasn't gone unnoticed by those wacky Chinamen who are happy to horn in on that particular market with oodles and oodles of cheap fake knives.

Here's the thing.

This "Coltsock" knife has a fake DeShivs trademark on it, and even bills itself as a "Leverletto" (even though the mechanism is actually different from a genuine Leverletto) but near as I can figure it doesn't resemble any original DeShivs design at all. And despite also saying "AKC" on it, nor does it look like anything I can find that AKC -- who is also a real knife manufacturer, and for whom DeShivs has legitimately designed knives -- has ever sold.

Maybe my internet sleuthing skills fail me, and maybe I'm wrong. But to the nearest decimal place I can't find any reference to this thing that isn't clearly yet another knockoff. And it is cheerfully described as such, but a knockoff of what? I can't even find any evidence of any other knife design that's been copied and had DeShivs name simply transferred to it. The best I can do is that apparently one was sold in this auction, featuring no details other than a picture of a knife that looks damn similar to mine, up to and including the slightly sketchy markings, and raises the hilarious possibility that some poor bastard got monumentally ripped off.

So there, the trail goes cold. There's not even anything that even looks remotely like this in Bill's quite extensive online museum, nor his catalog of previous designs.

But if this is a bespoke design, why attach someone else's name to it? This whole thing makes no sense.

What drew me to this knife in the first place was of course it's wacky double-mechanism design. This is a side opening automatic, fired off by means of the large square button on the left side. But it's covered in other toggles and controls, like a toddler's busybox, and you know damn well that sort of thing is right up my alley.

The sliding thingy on the back is a safety, what for to prevent you from setting this off in your pocket.

This is superficially a stiletto design, and has an "Italian style" lockup that works by way of a pin machined into the back of the blade falling into a hole in the flexible spring loaded bar in the spine of the handle.

How it unlocks, though, has nothing to do with the button, unlike most side opening autos. Instead it's with this lever on the side. When you press this down it pushes the locking bar upwards just a smidge by with the help of a little folded-over prong, releasing the blade and allowing you to close it up.

One other random thing of note is that despite snapping open with vicious alacrity...

...The spring only engages with the blade for the first little bit of its travel. Let's say 20 degrees or so. For the rest, it just flaps around freely. So again unusually compared to a lot of automatic side openers, it also allows you to half close the knife for a gratuitous glamor shot.

Like this.

The Numbers

The Coltsock, or whatever it actually is, stands at 7-3/4" long when open and 4-3/8" when closed. It has very modern injection molded scales which various ~~sources~~ sellers sometimes describe as "FRN," i.e. glass filled Nylon, and that seems plausible. The liners, lock bar, and so forth are all steel and there are no wonder-materials to be found anywhere in it, all adding up to a net weight of 92.5 grams or 3.26 ounces.

It has a 3-1/4" long blade as measured from the forwardmost point of the handle which is incessantly described as a "stiletto" profile, although in reality it's basically just a drop point that's got a narrow footprint. It's hollow ground and not to an especially fine degree. The final product is bead blasted and satiny, but still has a visible pattern of machine marks in it. It's the usual 0.110" at it's thickest point, so you probably won't be using this for your next bushcraft knife even with the best will in the world.

All added up, the Coltsock is a pretty chunky number for its proportions and despite its wafer thin blade. A total of 0.634" across its handles, not including any of the bits of its user interface sticking out. If you include the unlocking lever, which is its widest point, it's 0.857". There is neither a clip nor a lanyard hole, so you're on your own figuring out how you want to carry it.

Oh, and as you can see the blade in my example isn't quite centered.

The steel itself is pretty straight and there isn't much lash in the pivot, but it just sits in there a hair cockeyed. And while it doesn't wiggle at the pivot noticeably, the blade is thin enough -- especially on its forwardmost half -- that it's quite easy to make it flex noticeably.

I did not take this apart because it is undoubtedly full of small fiddly springs. At least you can see from the outside that it has brass, not bronze, washers around the pivot .

Messing With It

The Coltsock is certainly a mechanical oddity. It's a damn sight easier to bust out than put away, for whatever that's worth. And I'm not super sold on the inclusion of the safety, honestly. The button takes a pretty concerted push to set off the mechanism, but on the bright side it also takes a deliberate effort to set and unset the safety, too. So it's unlikely to get accidentally activated, either way.

Fortunately, at least, the safety has no effect whatsoever on the unlocking lever. You can also fold the blade up even with the safety engaged, so it appears to work by blocking off the fire button only and not by jamming up the entire mechanism solid. So that's nice, and not a dumb as it could have been.

The Coltsock is a pretty good cutter for light duty tasks, despite itself. That's probably down to the thin hollow ground blade geometry. That's also true of lots of other small, thin hollow ground knives as well for the same reason, of course. And I'll bet you most of those won't also be illegal to carry in 99% of the world, and you might even be able to prove who actually made a lot of them.

Here's the edge. The factory grind certainly isn't spectacular. It has this weird compound angle thing going on, which is going to have to be ground out if you want to properly sharpen it. If we're feeling charitable we might theorize the manufacturer did this on purpose, rather than through ineptitude, to preserve what sharpness the edge does manage to have knowing full well the strengths and limitations of the steel they used.

But do you know, I'll bet you they didn't.

And you'll be grinding away anyway, because as expected the edge is quite out of true. It's actually not bad towards the middle of its length, but it gets progressively worse towards the tip until it culminates in what you see here.

It's not as awful further up.

As a "fighting" knife, the Coltsock probably leaves a lot to be desired. All the marketing hyping up its stilettotude, plus the pseudo-tactical black injection molded scales with their high tech slots and runnels in them, are obviously trying to tell a story to the mall ninjas and whackers in the audience. As a fast opening auto with very easy to locate controls, it'd certainly be better than nothing for self defense. But it also hasn't got any kind of cross or fingerguard on it, not even the perfunctory one usually found on an Italian style stiletto, so you'd better hope your opponent is unarmed and you probably also ought not to stab him too hard lest your hand slide right up and off the handle.

On the bright side, not having a guard on it means you can almost kinda-sorta bring most of the cutting edge to bear on a flat surface. So it wouldn't be completely hopeless for cutting up your peppers and onions at camp.

Of course, your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell this is made of. There's nothing marked on it to say -- nobody's even thought to engrave a creative lie on it. It's probably 440C. That should be fine for what it is provided it's heat treated correctly. But if I were you, I wouldn't go around grinding too shallow an angle on the edge.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I'm still as baffled as you are.

If this is a knockoff, I still don't know what it's a knockoff of. And if there is no original, is it still actually a knockoff? Philosophers might argue over this until the end of our days.

I'm considering picking up a fixed blade, and usually don't wear a belt, so I'm looking for low-profile clips that would work along the waistband or pocket. From what I can see, UltiClip seems to be the highest-regarded in most areas, but I can't bring myself to wear Christian iconography, and the cross logo seems to be laser-cut out of the product so I don't think I could just Sharpie over it or something.

I usually don't like any visible logos on anything I wear, but I especially don't like religious ones. Maybe my reason for looking for an alternative is petty, but it's my reason. Was hoping to see what people's thoughts on other brands are!

Has anyone else noticed a huge uptick in the fakes there the last month or so?

I'm used to seeing a handful of any given brand, but it has gotten ridiculous the last little bit, and not just cheap clones from china being sold cheap. We're talking US addresses selling them for just a tiny bit under full price.

And eBay does not care at all. Less than half of reports end up with anything done, and they're using "ai" to process reports.

I dunno what I'm really saying beyond it being a problem, and for folks to watch out with Christmas coming

It's been a while since I've actually made a post here. @[email protected] has the lock on entertaining content here, so I figure I should come in with boring and bland (both the knife and the post!) ;)

Earlier this year, in addition to my normal (aka way too many) knife buying, I went down the rabbit hole a bit on inexpensive knives on Amazon.

Now, you can't throw a dust mote and not hit a dozen cheap knives sporting blades made of pot metal (or worse) on that hellscape of a site.

But I was after bigger game: a usable, decent knife for about $10.

That lead me, first to the Duratech liner-lock which I discussed here: https://lemmy.world/post/12442733

That knife is still in use and has done reasonably well, despite the terrible detent. (I never did take it apart). I have not been kind to it, including batoning wood to make some kindling.

Shortly thereafter, Duratech came out with their own cross-bar locking knife (aka Axis lock) which ended up being just under $12.

The quality was greatly improved for sure, but it's also a bunch heavier than the liner-lock which itself was already too heavy for my normal EDC.

One of the knives I also purchased around this time was the Watchman W001 (or as the box says: Watchman W001 Pocket Knife Folding Knives Traditional folder Wood Handle Material Collection). Strangely, you might also see it as the Watchman WM001.

Watchman as a brand offers a number of knives on Amazon. I have no idea the quality of any of them but they are sufficiently inexpensive.

The W001 is, according to Amazon, a non-locking knife despite the fact that all the photos show a rear-mounted lockback. Rest assured that this is indeed a locking knife.

For $10 you wouldn't expect much in terms of steel, but honestly 7CR17MOV, which is the same as 440A, is way better than a lot of other knives for even more money. (Assuming Watchman have a decent heat treatment on it).

Fit and finish is predictably not great but certainly not terrible. Some gaps between scales and liners and one of the pins is just slightly proud of the scales. But the lockback provides plenty of snap. There's side-to-side blade wiggle but nothing worrisome. The wooden scales are nice and smooth and appear sealed but I wouldn't want to test it.

The grind (of which I do not have a good closeup) tapers in thickness from back to front on the blade and for sure more aggressive on one side than the other. Sharpness out of the box was ok but nothing to be excited about. I stropped it but haven't sharpened it yet.

Curiously, there's another knife out there that looks strikingly similar. The Rough Rider RR1708. Someone posted a video on it a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKv36gDGx4I The Rough Rider is marketed as having 440A steel. (The video says it's 420A but that's incorrect).

This knife has sat on the desk since it arrived. My youngest kid gut-punched me the other day when he looked at all the knives and said "you sure have a lot of knives you never use"

Brutal takedown.

So the W001 is being put to use. I'm going to 5th-pocket carry it and it will be my only knife for the next two weeks or so. We'll see how the 7CR steel holds up and if I can stand not having a pocket clip.

I'm sure, at the very least, it'll be great at opening more packages containing new knives.

It's clear that we have, as a whole, a certain fixed fascination with the objects and machines that grant us what we perceive to be superlative experiences. Foundational ones, even. Those which set the bar, against which all other things of their like are inevitably compared.

Your first ride in a Bugatti Veyron. Feeling the F-15's scream over the stands, barely 1000 feet off deck. Firing a 700 Nitro Express.

Well, all of those things can move over, because I have this. It's a transcendental religious experience.

It must be, because every single person I've handed it to so far has immediately uttered the same two words:

"Jesus Christ!"

This is the S-Tec TS004M-SL. I saw it in the Top Quest catalog months ago, and from the moment I laid eyes on it I knew I absolutely had to have one. Come hell or high water, storms, locusts, tariffs, or recessions. It must be mine.

Just looking at it, it's easy to dismiss this as just another meritless run of the mill knockoff knife.

But, you see. Well.

No.

The Numbers

That only lasts right up until the moment you hold it in your hand. It weighs not a single whisker less than 459.4 grams. Normally at this stage I follow up with the same reading, but in ounces. Fuck that; This thing weighs just over one pound.

The TS004M-SL is 10-1/8" long when open and 5-7/8" closed. It's also 2-5/8" wide when closed, from the bottom edge of the handle to the peak at the top of the blade. It's gargantuan. It's now the biggest folding knife I own, and none of those specifications matter.

That's because its blade is 10 millimeters thick. Well, 9.92 if we're counting. But I have no problem believing that the slab of raw steel this was made out of was a full 10 before machining and finishing. That's over 3/8" of an inch. That's right, your truck is held together with bolts that are skinnier than this thing's blade.

It's phenomenally absurd.

This is the S-Tec, in the middle. To its left, a Zero Tolerance 0630. To its right, a Cold Steel AD-15. Both of those are massive knives that are considered by many to be simply too big to carry.

And the S-Tec positively dwarfs both of them. Whatever you have to say, whatever point there is to make, it's all irrelevant. Never mind that shit, here comes Mongo.

Just look at it. It's so hulking enormous, I couldn't even fit all three of those knives in frame when them laying flat. The S-Tec is too wide and crowds out the shot.

The TS004M-SL is a through-and-through flipper opener and lacks a thumb stud or fingernail nick. The latter really doesn't matter; If you want to open it via the traditional two handed method, there's obviously plenty of acreage for you to grab. There's the flipper on the rear for one handed opening.

Defying all logic, there is a pocket clip on the back side. It's not reversible, leaving only this one tip-up position available. Defying expectation as well, the clip is actually pretty good. On my example, at least, it has an excellent balance of retention and draw. It's not difficult to stow at all owing to its upswept tip, and you can pull it smoothy, easily, without snagging. And somehow, it still manages to maintain enough retention that if you dangle the knife upside down by its clip -- at least when I tried it just now, using the bottom hem of my shirt -- it won't fall off. If you're right handed the knife will stow such that the flipper isn't oriented so it'll catch on your pants, either.

It's not only a flipper opener, but a ball bearing flipper opener. That fact alone instantly makes it like 30% more awesome. There is a rather strong detent built into the frame lock, done the traditional way, but once you overcome this the blade will easily fly or even just fall open of its own accord owing to the low resistance of the bearing pivot and also its own massive heft.

The chances that this will fall open in your pocket without your intervention, at least until the detent is significantly worn, appear remote. But I will point out that it is just barely possible to get the blade to swing out by holding the knife upside down and shaking it very vigorously. So maybe the possibility is there, but even so it seems unlikely you'd have a pocket big enough to allow this thing to open very far.

The blade is a Wharncliffe or possibly pseudo-reverse-tanto design and is hollow ground. It is not, unfortunately, a full flat or convex grind. Nor is it a distal taper all the way down to the edge, which would have been phenomenal. But given that this retails for a paltry $35, none of the above was ever going to happen. And as you'd expect, the blade is only 440C. For this price, you certainly aren't getting this much of anything else.

All of this is a trivial price to pay for the knowledge that you can easily demonstrate to anyone that their knife is made for knee-high pantywaist girly men, no matter what it is or how much they spent on it. Chris Reeve, Zero Tolerance, Emerson, or Benchmade? Ha! None of those could crush a soda can flat by smashing it with the spine of the blade, could they?

And then, TS004M-SL has remarkably competent build quality. Superficially, at least.

The blade centering is nearly perfect. There's no perceptible lash or wiggle in the blade when its locked open in any direction, which probably isn't too surprising owing to the ball bearing pivot. The handles are pretty simply machined but they're done so nicely, with no blemishes, apparent casting flaws, or pock marks -- even on the back sides where you'll never see. The only rough bit of finishing work on my example is on the inner face of the slot in the frame lock, which is barely noticeable given that it's also concealed under the clip.

You can get this in multiple color variants. Well, "silver" and black, anyway. Mine is the "silver" version which is actually an attractive grey satin finish that appears bead blasted, but I suspect is helped along with some kind of paint or coating. It feels great, but somehow has an uncanny ability to pick up and show fingerprints.

Dork Smash

Imagine my surprise when I found out just how easily the TS004M-SL can be disassembled.

Usually with cheap and nasty Chinese knives their nature becomes readily apparent as soon as you take a screwdriver to them. You're bound to either find screw heads stripped at the factory, one or more screws glued into place so firmly they won't come out, or maybe even a couple of them cross-threaded but reamed in anyway. It's always as if the Chinese are pathologically incapable of just doing it right all the way through.

Well, I didn't find any of that. Every screw on this thing is a regular T8 Torx head and they all just... came out, normally, without any fuss. And they all went back in again, too. I know that's not a high bar to clear, but a lot of the time whatever I have on the bench can't even manage that.

The heads on these pivot screws are the widest I've ever seen in my life. I've said that before, taking apart various fat knives. This time I think it might stick. They're easily 3/4" across -- slightly bigger than a penny.

The pivots on this are so fat that it's the first time I've ever seen thrust ball bearing carriers like there where there are two concentric rows of balls. The blade is pocketed nicely for the bearings, whereas the inner surfaces of the handle slabs are just flat. It all fits together and works fine.

Okay, so there's no anti-rotation flat on the pivot screw. Big deal; just stick one T8 in each side and twist. You can't get it wrong. You have got two T8 drivers, haven't you?

All of the hardware is a standard M4 thread pitch which, to be fair, is one metric size up from what we usually find. If I were a gambler I would still predict that the point of failure on this will inevitably be the screws, since the ridiculous thickness of the blade will surely entice careless users to try to use this as a big fixed blade or even an axe rather than a folding knife. Batoning firewood, chopping trees, prying crate lids, and all the rest of that may ultimately wind up in this knife's superficial beefiness tempting the user to write checks the hardware can't cash. I think my main point of concern is the dinky little stump of thread sticking out of the male pivot screw's pie-plate head, which could theoretically apply an awful lot of leverage if it were twisted hard.

The two handle halves are separated by a pair of thick (7mm) threaded barrels that are also shouldered and drop precisely into their drilled holes, which should help with their strength. The end stop pin is also shouldered and just rests in its holes, with no screws.

It's also distressingly close to the edge of the handle slabs. Possibly close enough that there isn't enough meat left behind it to prevent it from eventually breaking free after many, many bashings of that heavy blade against it. Only time will tell.

Using The Thing

The manufacturer of this -- S-Tec, Top Quest, whoever they are -- market the TS004M-SL as a "cleaver." That says maybe, although its monumental heft should definitely help it excel at chopping tasks just from a physics perspective. Anything you bring this down on is likely not only to know about it, but remember it forever.

But there's very slight, small, tiny, teensy-weensy, massive problem with the ergonomics if that's the intended use case. I'll illustrate with the long edge of my Official Block o' Wood, what with I normally sink knives into for those cool action shots:

If you're cutting against a flat surface, you know, like how normal people typically do it with a cutting board or what have you, the flipper is completely in the way.

Normal cleavers have their handles mounted up high at the spine of the blade precisely for the purpose of leaving the full length of the edge unobstructed, and also to provide the maximum amount of cut depth they can achieve without you whacking your knuckles on the work surface. But the TS004M-SL doesn't do that. At all.

Instead, this is laid out more like a typical general purpose pocket knife which to some extent rather defeats the purpose. Now, it works just fine for any task that doesn't require working against a flat surface or, if you can manage it, by positioning your work at the edge of a table or what have you so you can keep the handle in empty air. But failing that you actually can't get any significant length of the edge onto your worktop, so you're left smashing things with the last 3/4" or so of the tip.

There's also the issue of the blade geometry, which is a bit limiting as well. For instance, the chopping-on-a-surface issue could also have been mitigated by giving the blade a strong upsweep, but that's what it hasn't got. There is a very slight belly to the edge but overall it's near as makes no difference to straight.

Zombies, then, you say.

Fair enough, and the TS004M-SL is pretty fast to deploy with its bearing pivots and the long flipper heel doubles as a better-than-nothing forward guard. But the Wharncliffe profile means its stabbing performance will be utter bollocks, and that's going to limit you a lot. Your best bet is hoping a potential assailant wets his pants in terror at the sound of that 10mm thick slab of steel slamming into place and simply runs away. Which, to be fair, he might.

I'll also point out that the position of the endstop pin and its attendant notch at the base of the flipper cause the blade to stop well short of how far it could actually be folded into the handle if it were designed a little better. Like, to the tune of probably over half an inch, which'd make the TS004M-SL much easier to carry. Just moving the flipper forward a couple of millimeters would probably have done it.

The Edge

Guess what.

I got one of those stupid portable digital microscopes.

Calling it a "microscope" is really a bit of a stretch. It's more of a webcam that's just capable of focusing on things stupidly close to the objective. But it lets me get all Wayne's World up in the face of tiddly little details like this, with considerably less hassle than my old gimcrack setup -- which involved balancing a linen magnifier on top of the subject, and then balancing my phone camera on top of that. (Yes, I am taking these photos these days with my phone's camera. Sue me.)

Anyway, here's what the S-Tec's edge grid looks like. It's actually not too shabby.

For comparison, here's the factory edge on a nice knife, in this case the Böker 06EX228. This was machined by Ze Germans, who can generally be trusted to do a pretty good job of it:

The S-Tec's grind is visibly not as fine, but honestly it's beyond not bad and actually way better than what I usually see on a novelty Chinese knife. Don't be fooled by the breadth of the grind implying a shallower edge angle, though -- the S-Tec's grind just is wider owing to the blade being so damn thick.

The factory edge angle on this is pretty steep, which is most likely down to the much aforementioned absurd thickness of the blade and the factory probably really preferring not to run the risk of gouging any part of the blade surface during the sharpening process, ruining the piece and eating into the profit margins so much it might cause the elderly chain-smoking Chinese men surely running the equipment to possibly have to cut back on their nicotine intake.

So the TS004M-SL just about manages to have what we might label "working sharpness" out of the box. It has none of the unevenness or sawtoothy crudeness that we usually see, but it also struggles to cleanly cut a Post-It in two without putting a lot more care into it than I really think is realistic.

Quality metric #2 is trueness or how similar in angle to each other both sides of the edge grind are. This is usually where cheap knives fail, and the S-Tec certainly does exactly as expected. I oriented this one vertically because your brain is better at spotting the the difference left-to-right rather than top-to-bottom. It's plainly visible.

If you can't spot it, a good shortcut for this is to just peer down the edge from the tip of the blade, which is what I've done here. Thus using the Ocular Geometric Approximation Methodology, one side of the edge is 29 degrees whereas the other is just under 38, leading to a combined edge angle of 67 (!) degrees which... Well, let's phrase as, it probably ought to hold what sharpness it has got pretty well even given the totally unexciting steel, and leave it at that.

(I keep my "good" and showpiece knives at a 30 degree combined edge angle, that is 15 degrees per side, and my utilitarian knockaround ones at 40.)

Other than my Ruxin Edge Pro clone which is infinitely variable (within reason) I don't even have a guided sharpener that goes as high as 40 degrees per side. I think it would take some careful experimentation to figure out just how shallow you could go on this thing before you hit the spine, but I don't think a combined 40 -- 20 per side -- is technically out of the question. It's up to you if you want to spend the time to remove the colossal amount of material you'd have to in order to get there, though.

Feelies

The TS004M-SL comes in a rather pedestrian, but very shiny, cardboard box. As you would expect the box is just as enormous as the knife is, to the point that it doesn't cleanly fit into my photo box and I couldn't be bothered to crop the background out of the picture nor fiddle with it enough to get the reflections off of it. Here you go.

Despite having a perfectly cromulent pocket clip on it, the manufacturer couldn't help themselves but give you yet another lousy nylon belt pouch to go with this thing. But it's not just any lousy belt pouch. It is quite possibly the widest crappy nylon belt pouch...

In the world.

How wide is it? Well, here it is with three rolls of US quarters comfortably parked in it.

You get nothing else in the box but a little satchel of silica gel. No other freebies, no replacement hardware, no dinky crappy screwdriver, no leaflet covered in poorly translated chest-beating about this or the manufacturer's other products, not even a perfunctory business card begging you for five star reviews.

Oh well.

The Inevitable Conclusion

To some degree nothing I've written above matters. The TS004M-SL is the superlative. It has one aspect, and it's got big hairy bucketloads of it.

And at the end of the day, it's actually put together pretty damn well considering the price. It absolutely could have been worse. And it isn't.

The TS004M-SL is just fucking cool, and on some days that's a pretty good substitute for performance and practicality. It is absolutely The Business. Yes, it will fuck up anything you manage to get underneath of it. It took a shockingly small amount of effort to sink it into the wood in the headline photo I used up at the top of this column. Just feeling that kind of power in your hand speaks to some part of everyone.

And, I mean, come on.

Don't tell me you didn't see this and then immediately stick the model number into your search bar. I know you did.

Opposing and complimentary, like the yin and yang; dichotomous, a contrast between light and dark.

That doesn't remind you of anything topical, does it?

This is the Craighill Sidewinder, and it's got it all in twos. Two handle halves, obviously, in two different finishes. It even has two designers, Kai Williams and Chen Chen, who describe it as "an enigmatic kinetic sculpture moonlighting as a knife."

If that rather rather avant garde description didn't clue you in, Craighill is not really a knife company. Instead they are purveyors of "tactile objects designed for your enjoyment," according to the blurb on their web site. This is an artsy-fartsy way of saying that they make -- or at least sell -- various Sharper Image-eque gadgets and baubles with a definite slant towards the shiny with a gifts-for-dad sort of vibe, provided both you and your dad are in the 1%. This includes various puzzley things, a deck of playing cards whose product description is doing some real heavy lifting, and perhaps the absolute zenith: The $150 corkscrew. You can see how it is.

Anyway, the Sidewinder. It's not quite the only knife they sell but it's certainly the most interesting. And its mechanism is, yes, weird.

The handle is comprised of four steel plates forming two halves each, sine-wave shaped and with one stonewashed and the other black PVD coated. It has two pairs of pivots, and when you swing the blade open the handle halves swap places with each other.

If you compare the open and closed pictures you can spot the difference. It's hard to explain in writing. Here, watch this:

The action really is sublime. It's an art exhibition in motion.

The Sidewinder is compact, but being made entirely of steel it's extremely heavy for its size. 160.3 grams or 5.65 ounces, despite being only 4" long when closed. It's got a 2-5/8" long blade made of 12C27N, which is certainly a very capable if admittedly not very fancy steel.

But that, too, is nicely stonewashed. It has a drop pointed blade that, in keeping with its entire symmetry jam, has the point precisely centered along its width.

It's a liner locker although if you ask me, having a lock at all is probably unnecessary since this is one of those mechanisms where your grip on the handle inherently clamps the blade into position. The detent ball that keeps it from flopping open in your pocket is on the liner, though, so removing it isn't really advisable.

And sloshing around loose in your pocket it will be, because the Sidewinder does not have a clip nor does it have a lanyard hole or any other carrying provision. It doesn't even some with a perfunctory cheap ballistic nylon belt pouch. No, if you're going to carry this you have to suffer for your art and be prepared for commitment.

There isn't a thumb stud, either. This is a flipper opener.

To assist with this it has ball bearing pivots -- ceramic ones, no less -- the carriers for which you can see in the handle gaps.

With a bit of finesse it does indeed flick open very easily. You have to remember to hold it only by the black part, though, because the silver part will swing forward along with the blade and if you're holding onto that it'll stop short. This means you probably have less of a grip on it than you'd like and I certainly wouldn't want to try to bust this out in a hurry under duress. It's a fine line between an elegant draw to the adoration of all onlookers versus sinking the thing juddering half an inch into the floorboards.

I think the Sidewinder's mechanism is extremely clever, so obviously I took it apart for you.

There's actually not as much in there as you'd think, but there are no less than eight ceramic ball bearing assemblies owing to the thing technically having four pivot points.

The hardware consists of said pile o' bearings, eight screws, and a quartet of threaded barrels with anti-rotation flats in them. Theoretically you should be able to remove either screw from either end to get the pivots out, but I found that one side of mine was permanently threadlockered and the other side wasn't, effectively converting these into normal male/female screws.

On the tail end is a little curved plate like the barrel link of an 1911, with two holes in it that actuates the pair of pivots opposite the main one when you swivel it open. The curve is in it for a reason, and it's shaped just so that it never actually protrudes from the handle at any time or in any position throughout the action's travel.

The mechanism is actually extremely simple, and its elegance comes down to just how precisely the machined halves of the handles slot together in both the open and closed positions. I've outlined it for you thusly:

Because both the open and closed states wind up with the halves interlocking so thoroughly, there is no need for endstop pins and the blade absolutely cannot overtravel, nor strike the toggle on the end even though it looks like it ought to be able to. The lockup is very solid and there's no lash in the blade in any direction when in the open position.

It's also worth mentioning that while it appears the scales could all be duplicates of each other, they're not. Each and every one is slightly different from the others, with one of the silver ones having the cutout for the liner lock in it which is a separate leaf that's screwed into place, while only one pair have the D shaped anti-rotation holes in them while the other two just have round holes.

At the end of the day it doesn't really make any difference which way you insert which screw, although half of them are silver and half of them are black, and you probably won't want to mix them up.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Sidewinder is a tad on the expensive side but there's no denying it's extremely well built and it's got style out the ying-yang. There isn't a single whiff of mall ninja about it. It's pleasingly refined, elegant, grown up. Very gentlemanly. The machine work is impeccable, with every edge smoothly chamfered and every surface fully finished, even the inside faces where you'll never see or touch.

Maybe it's small, and maybe it's not made out of the latest trendy supersteel, but when you're holding it you don't care. It's not your partner's clothes or makeup or perfume that matter. The beauty is in the dance.

I’m a big fan of Spyderco; I own about two dozen of them. I absolutely love the Para 3 and Delica, but I also like buying oddball knives on occasion.

This one’s been on my wishlist for a while. I’m not usually a fan of pinned knives that you can’t take apart, as I like a bit of tinkering. But since I want to keep this original anyway, I’m making an exception. It’s well built like all their Seki City knives; nicely machined with no sharp edges besides the one that should be.

The Harpy has been in their lineup since the late 90’s, and it’s held in high regard by many. It’s a nautical inspired knife, with the serrations and blade shape being handy to cut rope. Of course these days Spyderco makes a separate line of actual nautical knives, but that wasn’t a thing in the late 90’s.

It’s a perfect fifth pocket knife; carries nice and comfortable. It also has excellent ergonomics despite not being very large. One thing I like: it feels like a very warm, friendly knife. The handle takes on your body heat if you carry it on your person. Holding it feels like a warm handshake.

This knife is also slightly infamous; it’s one of the knives that fictional cannibal-slash-serial killer Hannibal Lecter uses. It’s specifically mentioned by name in the book Hannibal, and shown in the movie. The movie has a plain edge knife though, but the book specifies a serrated Harpy.

With this knife it's tough for me to do that thing I do where I bury the lede in order to keep suspense for the first couple of paragraphs in order hook the reader before I reveal whatever its quirk is.

This is the WE Knife Double Helix, and it's easy to see what its deal is right away because it wears its underpants on the outside.

At its core the Double Helix is, more or less, an Axis lock style crossbar locking folder. However, rather than the typical pair of hair-thin "Omega" springs hidden inside the handles...

...Instead there's this trebble-clef external spring that runs almost the entire length of the knife. There are two, actually, with an identical but mirrored one on the other side. That's certainly a novel way to do it, and for this it was awarded "Most Innovative New Knife 2018" by Knife News. I'm sure WE will be trumpeting that at anyone who'll listen -- and anyone who won't -- until the sun burns out.

In my prior ramblings, I'm certain I've told you many times how the Axis lock is my favorite mechanism out of all the various non-balisong folders. You're probably sick of hearing it, along with the note that Benchmade's patent on it expired in 2018, enabling many other knifemakers to have a crack at the idea.

Part of why I like the Axis lock is its inherent capability, when properly designed and implemented anyway, to do the "Axis flick." That is, you can hold the crossbar back and just flick the knife open without any other manual intervention. The jury's out on whether or not this is actually an originally intended function of the mechanism.

Well, for its part the Double Helix doesn't leave much ambiguity about how its designers intended it to be opened. As you can see it is completely lacking in any kind of thumb stud, disk, hole, hook, or any other apparatus to aid you in getting it open with your thumb. And to further compound matters, unlike normal Axis lock folders its lock also resolutely holds the blade shut. You absolutely cannot open it without pulling the crossbar back.

The Double Helix is a fancy knife with ball bearing pivots, so with all of the above taken together we can only conclude that it's meant to be Axis-flicked open with a snap of the wrist. The only other way to do it is to use two hands, and what kind of self respecting individual is going to do that?

The flies in the ointment with the action are twofold, though. First is that the Double Helix is not one iota longer than it needs to be, which means that the tip of its 3-1/4" drop pointed blade passes extremely closely to the tail end of the knife. It's therefore not only possible but downright likely that some of the meat from the heel of your hand will at some point get squished into the gap between the handle halves and then the point will graze you as it goes by.

Second is that, visually striking though they may be, those two external springs are actually rather stout and it takes quite a bit of force to disengage the lock.

There is a pocket clip, which stands on long standoffs to ensure it clears the spring and is also for no particular reason not reversible. As usual there's no mechanical impetus as to why it couldn't be; there just aren't any holes for it on the other side even though both handle halves are total mirror images of each other. Apparently because WE decided they just couldn't be bothered. It's just as well, probably, because screws holding the end of the spring down have cylindrical heads that sit proud of the face of the spring by several millimeters and are incredibly snaggy. They wind up between the clip and your pants fabric, making the Double Helix nearly impossible to draw in a hurry without either tearing your pants fabric off or giving yourself an atomic wedgie. Both the clip and its standoffs are easily removable, although there is no lanyard hole either so if you do that you'll just have to leave the thing bouncing around your laptop bag like some kind of heathen, or something.

There is some thickness to the springs, and also to the handles -- arguably probably more than there needs to be just to get the mechanism to work -- which makes the Double Helix pretty chonkers. This is completely notwithstanding the fact that its groovy pivot screw with the machined-in "WE" logo is flush fitting.

It's 0.648" thick just across the handle slabs not including any of the other greebles; including the thickness of the two crossbar lock heads it's a whopping 0.770" and including the clip it's an even more ridiculous 0.807". And of course being made of zooty premium materials like titanium and aluminum, it's not as hefty as you'd expect: 99.8 grams or 3.52 ounces. Closed it's precisely 4-1/2" long, and open it's 7-13/16".

The blade is S35VN, surely mostly in order to maintain credibility among its intended purchasing demographic, and is 0.133" thick. It's fullered, and has a nicely rounded spine that's easily the least snaggy part of the entire knife. Reviewers who are more qualified than me have spent many words on its hollow grind and its excellent general purpose cutting ability, but I won't because this is a collector's knife and to the first couple of decimal places nobody is going to cut anything demanding with it anyway.

According to the stipulations of a very particular gypsy curse, I am incapable of giving an overview of any knife with a weird mechanism without taking it apart to see how it works. Although in the case of the Double Helix, pretty much everything interesting is visible from the outside.

I took it apart anyway.

Being firmly in the enthusiast knife category, the Double Helix was not at all difficult to take apart. It's all T8 and T6 Torx screws, as you'd expect. And also as an enthusiast knife, it breaks apart into a ridiculous number of individual parts, apparently to vainly attempt to justify its price tag.

This is most of the hardware. Each handle slab is actually two pieces, which is completely unnecessary from both a production and mechanical standpoint, but that's how it is anyway. I only took one of them apart for my disassembly photo, so the lineup above is short three additional screws. The trim collar around the male side of the pivot screw is also a separate piece, and it has two end stop pins. And also three washers per side of the pivot, for some reason. That all adds up to no less than 35 individual pieces of hardware required to assemble this, not including the blade itself, both pieces of both handle halves, the clip, and the springs.

Because the crossbar has to pass through holes in the ends of the springs externally, it is somewhat unusually a multi-piece design. It's right in the middle of the photo above, and it consists of a flanged center barrel while the nubbins on the outside that you interact with can be unscrewed. This is necessary because the usual method of installing an Axis crossbar through an offset pair of channels hidden under the handle scales obviously would not work in this case.

Note also the alarmingly tiny little spacer washers that go between the handle slabs and the springs, which are bound to disappear forever if you drop one on the carpet. So watch it.

Here you can see WE's weirdo crossbar lock track, including the dog-leg that locks it in place in the closed position. The general consensus online seems to be that this is supposed to be for "safe" pocket carry, as opposed to a weird design oversight, which I find highly dubious given that A) nobody in all of recorded history has ever had a problem with an Axis knife falling open in their pocket, and B) nobody is going to pocket carry this more than once anyway, see also the situation with the clip, above.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This is one of those things built purely for knife collectors, and normal people probably need not apply. Knife mechanisms are sort of like the quantum multiverse theory -- for any given possible way to do it, it is not only likely but downright inevitable that someone will eventually try.

I like the Double Helix's core conceit. It's just all the details surrounding its execution that I take exception to.

In my opinion it would not take much of a redesign to allow the Double Helix to retain its groovy external spring, but also make it significantly less irritating to carry and use. Just not locking the blade shut would put us well on our way, in addition to sinking the spring into the handle a bit and giving all the mounting screws countersunk heads.

WE, if you need to take me on board as a design consultant to straighten all this out I'll happily do so, and you'll find my rates to be very reasonable.