PocketKNIFE

Today's feature is brought to you by the color black.

This is the Elite Tactical Guardsman, and when you see all three of those words together you know you're about to see a Very Serious Combat Knife. Or, perhaps, something that just takes itself a little too seriously.

The Guardsman answers a question that I think very few people have actually asked: Why don't folding knives ever have crossguards on them?

Actually, I think it doesn't quite ask "why" but rather skips right to answering "how."

It is written, for some damn reason, that a "fighting" knife should have a crossguard. So of course there have been oodles of attempts to incorporate a daggerlike crossguard into a folder in the past, some solutions being more awkward than others. This is a perennial contender, for instance. Or the likes of the CRKT M-16. Et. cetera. This sort of thing has been going on one way or another for a very long time.

What most of these have in common is that they're just as wide and doofy when they're closed as when they're open, either incorporating the crossguard into the heel of the blade so it's always sticking out, or building it into the handle in some way.

The Guardsman, however, takes a different approach. To maintain a sleek overall profile when it's closed, its crossguard folds flat against the handle.

But when you open it, the guard pivots out with the blade.

This idea is neither new, nor unique. The SOG Quake leaps to mind, and the internet is just rife with those goddamn "Russian NKVD" folders these days. This is the "Italian swing guard" design and has occasionally (and probably also originally) been found on various stilettos over the years. I don't know who actually invented it or when. If you want to know that sort of thing, ask a historian. I just take pictures of silly knives.

The Guardsman is like unto one of those but it takes its protein powder every morning so it's got a distinct added beefiness. Out of all those among this breed I think it's probably the least ridiculous and among the more functional. Not least of which because unlike the others it's got an Axis or crossbar lock, and you know how I do enjoy a good one of those. Plus it's made of D2 which is a steel I like, and it purports to have ball bearing pivots. All of those are plusses in my book.

Oh, and it also helps that it's only about $27.

Let's check off the rest of the list.

The Guardsman has modern and trendy a deep carry pocket clip.

To add to its fighting knife pretensions, the Guardsman has a rather militaristic, Ka-Bar like drop point profile blade with a partial flat grind and a black powdercoat or epoxy finish. There's even a fuller in it.

Although, curiously, only on one side.

It's pretty long, 8-9/16" overall when open and 4-3/4" closed. It's 1-5/8" across if you count the crossguard or about 15/16" if you don't. The blade is 3-7/8" long. Altogether it weighs in at 126.9 grams or 4.48 ounces, part of that weight doubtlessly contributed to by its full length steel liners. The blade is 0.120" thick across and the entire knife, not including the clip as usual, is 0.616" across its handles at the thickest point. Needless to say, it's made in China and marked as such on the blade. Beneath the crossguard, curiously. More on that in a sec.

All the pictures of this knife online seem to depict it with some kind of charcoal-on-black 3D machined Micarta scales or similar. But my example hasn't got those, and instead has scales that appear to be made out of some kind of injection molded something. Probably glass filled nylon. They are quite heavily textured, though. Maybe this is some kind of rolling change. Maybe mine's a counterfeit. Who knows.

It must be said that the Guardsman's pivoting action is quite satisfactory. I'm not going to claim revelatory or anything, although it's damn good for the price. It'll Axis flick readily, and in fact will fall open or shut easily via gravity if you hold its locking crossbar back. That's just as well, because while it does have a thumb stud for opening it's only got it on one side. The clip isn't reversible, either. At least it'll ride tip up in its one and only carry position.

The crossguard does indeed fold out automatically with the blade via a very simple mechanism. While it works, that part of it is on shakier mechanical ground.

I'm not 100% sold on the whole crossguard thing as it works here, truth be told. It doesn't lock into place and there's a fair bit of free play left in it when the knife is locked open, as illustrated above. You can push it forward pretty far which doesn't inspire much confidence in saving your fingers at first blush, although closer inspection reveals that there's a pretty generous ricasso at the base of the blade and the crossguard can't in fact be pushed past that point.

So you're ultimately saved from giving yourself the mother of all papercuts. But the overall feeling is... incomplete, if that makes sense? It feels more natural that the crossguard should lock solid when the knife is open like the blade itself does, but it doesn't. It could have, via the addition of maybe a little nub on the spine right at the forward end. But that'd sully the square, businesslike looks, I guess.

The guard can't be pushed backwards towards the wielder, though. So obviously it's more for, what, blocking incoming strikes or something? Against your sub 4" folding pocketknife? I'm not buying it. I'll freely admit that I've never had to drop and give anyone 20, soldier, nor have I spent much time on my elbows in the battlefield. But if I were going to make a habit of it, I have to say I'd probably pack something a bit less... foldy.

You could argue instead that the Guardsman is intended more as a self-defense knife, maybe. That's fair, and the crossguard probably would protect you from yourself pretty effectively if you got a little too enthusiastic rendering undo Caesar -- rocking horse action aside. But then, a humble Kershaw CQC-6K is still faster to draw.

The Guardsman will be more discreet to carry despite being longer, though, thanks to its deep carry clip.

A CQC won't broadcast to the world that you're Elite, either.

The Guardsman has one more thing going for it, at least on paper. It claims to have ball bearing pivots. Well, as you know I like to keep knife makers honest. So, does it?

Yep, it sure does.

Inside, the Guardsman has exactly the Axis/crossbar componentry you'd expect. Complete with two omega hair springs, the crossbar itself, and the familiar quarter-note slots for the same in the liners. Overall it's pretty easy to take apart, although do take care that the liners can be reinstalled backwards which will prevent you from mounting the clip, since its screws thread into a pair of holes present only on one of them.

I have to say, despite my complaints about it that crossguard is definitely engineered. You can break it down further into these components and it contains no less than four tiny plastic washers, a pair of threaded aluminum spacers, and these screws. One of them is the thumb stud and you can with care take it out and reverse it -- although you still can't reverse the clip if you do.

The halves are separated by this rather nice machined aluminum backspacer, which has threaded brass inserts in it. It has slots milled into it to provide enough flex to install the inserts, which is an unusual and certainly interesting way to do it.

Here are the mechanical gubbins. The crossbar has a unique design with what appear to be a pair of independent washers to hold the hooks on the springs, and they're swaged onto it or something. Search me how these were installed, since they're an interference fit and don't move, but the crossbar doesn't unscrew or otherwise come apart in any way I can figure out.

The bearings have ten balls each in plastic carriers. Neither the blade nor the liners are pocketed to accept the bearings, so upon reassembly you have to line everything up manually. Holding the crossbar back helps. It's kind of a fiddle but otherwise not too difficult.

Also for some reason the pivot screw has an anti-rotation flat on it, but the holes in the liners and scales have no corresponding flat spot and are just round. So you need two T8 Torx drivers to take it apart. As usual for a bearing knife, the Guardsman is pretty insensitive to pivot screw tension and because of that it can be locked down firmly to have no blade wiggle in any direction.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Look past the weird crossguard thing and the Elite Tactical Guardsman has all the fixings of an underrated gem of an inexpensive little knife -- or rather a big one. It's tough to argue with an Axis locking, bearing pivot, D2 folder for only $27. And it's also built pretty well on top of it. Okay, the guard is a little hinky but other than that nothing about it manages to come off as feeling very cheap.

I could surely come up with a lot more interesting to say about it if it were a piece of crap. But it isn't. Go fuckin' figure.

And you can own it without looking like a goomba, a skinhead, or a tankie. That's gotta count for something, right?

Forsooth, I hath made the journey down to yon local smithee, and picked up this.

I think no discussion of cutlery is complete without eventually, at some level, touching upon the Svörd Peasant series. To label this knife as a "classic" probably doesn't quite go far enough. The Peasant is a crocodile; a veritable relic, unchanged in its design since antiquity and yet still here today filling its particular niche. In a certain sense this is The Pocketknife, with the capital T and capital P being important.

The Peasant is a tang grip folding knife. It is brutally simple, and its design is a deliberate throwback to what is quite possibly -- no hyperbole -- one of the oldest known folding knife designs in the world.

The Peasant's included pamphlet specifies that it's based on a design observed in Bavaria and Bohemia around the 1600's. However, there are documented examples of folding knives with similar albeit not identical tang grip designs dating back as far as the time of the Roman empire. The Romans did indeed have folding pocketknives and some of them were quite complex, even including one notable example not too dissimilar from our modern Swiss Army knife, as displayed here. Simple friction folders were obviously where it all began and were exceedingly common for hundreds and hundreds of years. But by 300 AD or so it is purported that examples were appearing with a familiar extended tang design along the lines of what we have here.

The Peasant is intentionally made out of low tech materials using low tech equipment, mostly by hand, by B.W. Baker's Svörd knife company in New Zealand. It comes in multiple sizes and multiple handle materials, most visibly polypropylene in various colors and also wood. You can get kit versions, too, if you want to have the satisfaction of assembling yours yourself. This is the "Micro" variant, the smallest version on offer, and strap on those goggles and don your top hat -- I just had to get the brass version. I mean, of course I did. Come on.

Modern knives have a seemingly endless of supply tricks and mechanisms, and of course we've had a grand old time inspecting, dissecting, and discussing many of them in this very column.

The Peasant, however, doesn't. Its mechanism is purely that it has no mechanism. Only a single pivot point through a hole in the blade, and that's all. It's the absolute king of vintagecore. You might think your fountain pen and your pocketwatch and your waistcoat are anachronistic chic, but I'm telling you all that stuff is kindergarten playground time compared to how ancient this thing is.

The Peasant's extended tang serves both as its opener and what holds it open. You'll note the method is extremely reminiscent of how a classic straight razor works and the lineage between those and this is no doubt shared.

The knife is held together with just three screws, which are literally just commodity brass machine screws that are cut to length after screwing them through the handle and then peened on the ends. One acts as the fulcrum point for the pivot, one serves as the open position endstop, and another one holds the handle together at the tail end. And that's it. Job done, that's the whole system completely described.

The Peasant stays open by way of you gripping the tag against the spine of the handle. This method is exceedingly simple but also remarkably secure. As long as you're holding it firmly the knife won't close up on you. The tang ends with a little hole which comes with a small split ring in it, via which you could dangle it from your keys or tie on your own lanyard if you were so inclined.

The Peasant's blade is made of simple 15N20 steel which is not stainless, and takes on this dark patina for maximum medieval cred. You should probably keep it lightly oiled. It has a mildly drop pointed blade with a deep edge grind that's got no secondary bevel whatsoever. It's a convex grind a little under a quarter inch deep, and that helps the Peasant with cutting performance and allows it to perform well above its weight class provided the shortness of the blade is not an impediment to what you're doing.

What, you thought Fällkniven and Bark River developed the convex grind as the hot new ticket? New doesn't enter into it. All they did was nick it from history.

This Micro variant is quite diminutive, although the tang sticks out by necessity even when it's shut. That brings the overall closed length to 4-1/16" not including the split ring on the end which flaps around freely in any case. It's precisely 5" long when open, and its little blade is 1-7/8" long. There is no ricasso so the entire length is a usable edge. There's a V shaped choil of sorts at the base which is where the endstop screw slots into when the blade is closed.

The blade on mine is 0.057" thick at the spine, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn there is some variance from piece to piece. Across the handle scales the Micro Peasant is just 0.180" thick not including the heads of the screws. With them, it's still just about 0.265". You want to talk thin and light? Modern knives wish they could be as little as this. My brass variant is probably the heaviest model of the bunch, but even it is only 41.9 grams or 1.48 ounces, and that includes the keyring because I was too lazy to take it off.

Modern knives may have fancy composite backspacers, or anodized aluminum diabolo barrels, or maybe precision machined washers. These are decadent fripperies. Mere lace and frills. The Peasant, for its part, has no handle spacers whatsoever. That means the blade rubs against the insides of the brass handle plates. And so what if it does? You got a problem with that or something? It turns out, it still works just fine even so. And the brass is softer than the steel, so the handles are absolutely incapable of scratching the blade in any case. Rather, the reverse happens.

The entire bill of materials consists of just seven components, and that's if you count the split ring. The screws, as mentioned, are just ordinary brass machine screws. Like, from the hardware store. One of the handle plates is threaded and the other one isn't, and the screws are proof against backing out by having the ends peened into place. This is evidenced by the flat spots on the heads, for instance.

This means the Peasant is actually not quite so simple to take apart as it appears, because backing the screws out ultimately involves overcoming their smashed tips. As you can see, I broke one of the screws getting mine apart for this picture. But it wasn't a big deal; I had some suitable #6-32 machine screws just lying around on my workbench already. I believe the stock screws were actually originally fine thread #6-40, but it was the work of a few seconds to ream the threads out to 32 pitch with a tap. No harm done, and keep on keeping on.

Rather than hammer my new screws and annoy myself further in the future, I instead fabricated these brass jam nuts. In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, I turned them freehand on my bench grinder. The brass Peasant's handle plates also shine up very nicely with the application of a little Flitz. Although admittedly, probably not for long unless you clearcoated it or something.

I also found a trio of random brass washers in my odds and ends, which make the perfect tail spacer. This is completely unnecessary, but the beauty of it is you can customize your Peasant like this with just any old trifles and junk you have lying around and it works.

Here's a very modern knife next to it. This HUAAO Bugout clone may look simple by today's standards, but its elegance is peanuts compared to the Svörd. The HUAAO is all titanium, anodized aluminum, and stainless steel. Wonder materials. Black magic! The Peasant has, and needs, none of the above. You could hand one to your hypothetical time traveling medieval friend and he would experience no future shock; he'd tell you how it could be made, precisely what out of, and he'd probably even be able to make another one just like it.

Oh yes. And I would be remiss if I did not mention the pamphlet it comes with.

If I haven't played up the historicity of the Svörd Peasant enough, the pamphlet does it some more. Simplicity is the Peasant's selling point, and this as well as the knife's inherent cheapness are driven home all throughout. True to form, the documentation is just printed on regular old paper. Nothing glossy, no bond, not even in color. For your entertainment I've scanned both the front and reverse, which are available here and here, respectively.

The bloke with the wedge of cheese is a nice touch. He's very Phil Foglio.

For his part, B.W. Baker guarantees your Svörd for life. There are some included care tips as well, the highlight of which being the sharpening tips which boil down to basically, "Use a stone on it or something." There's no way you can't respect that.

For the the price of admission you also get this leather sheath. And it is genuinely leather, albeit split grain. I have no doubt that it's just as handmade as the knife is.

It's a bit of a squeeze but it'll conform to the shape of your knife over time. The tang is left sticking out along with its ring, if you leave it installed.

It's not much, but it'd absolutely complete the ensemble along with your canvas messenger bag, designer beard wax, hemp beanie, and vintage flannel shirt.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I think there's a place for a Svörd Peasant in every knife person's collection. It's not exactly cheap in this brass guise at about $32, but nor is it really unreasonably expensive for what you get. Especially considering its hand made nature, plus the sheath and all.

I have used the phrase probably one too many times referring to something as a warning from history. The Peasant is anything but. It's not a warning; it's a celebration. It's the closest thing you'll probably ever get your hands on absolute genesis without owning a museum. It's a chance to hold a fragment of the thing from which, ultimately, everything else in this hobby sprung forth.

Maybe its two handle slabs aren't quite technically identically shaped to each other. Maybe it's got grinder marks on it, and it shows up with an uneven patina, and its blade will rub scuffs into the insides of the handles as you use it. For any cheap mass produced knife we'd decry this sort of thing to no end. We'd label it crap, and to hell with it, and declare it Temu garbage of the worst kind.

But what makes the Peasant different is that all of that is the point. Therein lies the charm; that's what makes it special. It's flawed, but intentionally so. And thus every one of them is in some tiny way unique compared to all the others as well. I would not at all be surprised to find, for example, that the parts from this one wouldn't quite interchange with the parts of any others. And that's something you never see anymore.

Maybe the Svörd Peasant's real value is making you stop and look at every manufactured thing in a different way. Someone made this. Some one. A person. Not a factory, not a country, not a conglomerate, and if you choose to look at it hard enough, maybe not even a brand.

In more ways than one, then, it comes from a different time. And that's where the magic is.

So see you later, alligator. Never change.

Hey guys! I've just recently gotten into collecting pocket knives, and I wanna make sure I'm taking proper care of them. My last two purchases have been karambits, both with fairly steep recurved blades, whose edges I'd like to be able to maintain.

I know that normal sharpening stones aren't going to allow me enough contact with the blade to actually put an edge on it, so I've picked up a Smith's DRET sharpener and have been practicing on an old dull knife with a stiletto blade, just to try to get some basics down. I'm getting better with it, but I'm struggling to get an even, consistent edge. Even without any special optics, I can see with my own eyes that I've got wildly uneven angles.

Granted, I'm practicing with a very low-quality knife that was already in pretty rough shape. I've managed to get the edge from "literally unable to break the skin with 20 pounds of pressure and aggressive sawing motions on my forearm" to "can cut through paper with about half of the blade before bunching up", though it's come at a cost of scratching the absolute hell out of the rest of the blade (which is just me being sloppy).

I figure that once I'm able to get competent enough with sharpening a normal blade shape that I'll move on to testing with a donor karambit. I picked up a super cheap, mall-ninja-ass karambit on Amazon because the reviews were all poor and said that the knife arrived completely dull, so I figured this would be perfect to practice sharpening. Unfortunately, it arrived with a surprisingly sharp edge, so I'm gonna have to abuse this knife for a bit before I can even practice anything on it.

Just curious what sort of tools y'all recommend for dealing with recurved blades, or any techniques I could try to incorporate into my practicing. Thanks!

Here's another one of those knife-esqe, but not-a-knife objects.

This is the Artisan Cutlery Kinetic Tool, and it's a balisong trainer sporting a bottle opener instead of an edge, along the lines of the various BBarfly models and Squid Industries Mako. So it's perfect for safely practicing balisong flip tricks and similar, while still providing a modicum of functionality over a normal trainer knife.

The Kinetic tool measures uͧрⷬ aͣᴛⷮ aͣвⷡoͦuͧᴛⷮ 9-̄1/2"៉ loͦng whͪeͤn oͦрⷬeͤn, ₐₙd ₅₋₁/₂" 𝄴ₗₒₛₑd, w̠͇i͕̙̺t̫͕̼h͎̫̝ i̫͙͎t̪͚̻s͕͎ u͕͕̝n̝̻s̢͓̘h̠̻͍a͔̪̪r͍̙p̫͙̟e̺͓͜n͓̫̘e̡͇͔d̢͇̠,̪̟͜ n̝͎̘o̪̼̠n͔͓͚-̦͚͜b̺͙l͕͓a͚̺͜d̻͉̻e͇͙͓ b̡͇̦o̦̞t͚̞̞t̪͔̫l̦͉̞e͔͔͎ o̵̠͕͚͋̒̚p̴̼͉̞̽͐͠e̴̠̘̝͑͆̕n̴̫̦̔̾͆e̸̝̺̞̿̔r̸̪̦͌̓̀ t̴̡̝͉͐͌̔ḧ̵̟̝̻́͒̓i̴͇̞̿̾̀n̴̟͖̐̒͘g̸̻̺͛́̚͜y̸̡̦̦͆̚͝ ~c̵̡͓͍͊͊͊o̸͍̦̿̿m̸̡͓͉͛̚͝i̴͉͚̾̒n̸͔̼͊̿͘g̸̫͕̝̀͊~ ~o̸̠̻̻͛͒͠u̵͚͍̦̔͌̓ẗ̸̡̫̟́̓͌~ ~t̵̪̼̺́͛̓o̴͕͓͊̕͠~ ~á̸̘̪̝̿̽b̵̪̠̙͋͆o̵͚̠̘̐͑͝ú̴̘͎͒̕͜ț̵͍͎̓͆͛~

...

...

This is the Artisan Cutlery Kinetic Tool, and it's a world-legal "switchblade" because, as you can see, it's not actually a blade. Instead, it's got an unsharpened bottle opener that provides a modicum of functionality while not really being a knife. Therefore, despite its automatic opening action it ought to remain legal just about --

...?

Hang on just a damn minute.

There's some kind of Mandela effect shit going on, here. Is the Kinetic Tool a balisong knife or is it a switchblade?

Well, it's both. And it's neither.

You see, down at the tail end it has a mildly unusual but otherwise mechanically familiar balisong T latch. It hooks over the spacer pin on that end of the knife rather than the typical method of engaging with either of the handles, but otherwise works as you'd expect and you can flick it undone easily enough to find that the Kinetic Tool functions as a serviceable, if a bit heavy, unsharpened balisong trainer knife.

And on the other end is a conspicuous shiny button that, when pressed, sends the unsharpened "blade" rocketing out exactly as you'd expect from a side opening automatic.

This is, needless to say, mechanically bizarre. The question of "why," of course, is a stupid one. If we sat around here asking why all day we'd never get anything done.

But either way, you can't exactly call it a knife.

Artisan actually make a small range of these things in a few different variants, including one under their cheaper CJRB brand. Various handle and tool blade styles are available, but this is the original one with the rearward mounted bottle opener, slotted screwdriver tip nose, and the typical perfunctory but otherwise useless hex nut "wrench" cutouts in the middle. It comes in a few versions wherein the G-10 scales are swapped for different colors but this olive drab green one is as usual the superior choice.

So the Kinetic Tool's headline feature is that is does indeed function as both a balisong and an automatic, all in the same package. And it works. Although this involves some compromises and inherently engenders some weirdness.

I mean, beyond the obvious one in just how strange the idea is on its face.

For a start, as a knife with two opening mechanisms it thusly has two open states. And then it follows that it has two closed states as well, of course. If you compare the image above you'll see the handles are in a different position than in the headline photo at the beginning of this post, despite the tool self-evidently being open in both pictures. You'll wind up with the handles reversed relative to each other if you open it in balisong mode rather than in switchblade mode. You can latch it open or shut in either position.

Both mechanisms are also always in play, so to speak. So there's nothing stopping you from opening the tool as a switchblade, and then closing it as a balisong. Or the opposite of opening it as a balisong, and then pressing the switchblade button afterwards. And then...

...What happens is this.

Yes, the Kinetic Tool can switchblade itself closed if you already have it open. Only once, of course, until you manually reload it against its spring -- Artisan unfortunately haven't figured out how to violate the laws of thermodynamics. But in light of that, this may have something to do with why it isn't sharpened. By default, what it would whack you with in this case would be the "spine" of the blade anyway, but being able to snap the thing shut on your own fingers accidentally is still a bit disconcerting.

But this means you can combine either opening or closing method as you see fit. Another wrinkle caused by this is that when you open it normally in balisong mode, the blade is "backwards", so to speak, and presents you with the edge containing the bottle opener against the safe handle and not the straight spine. That's because it opens in the expected orientation from this position when you open it in switchblade mode, but since the pivot direction of either method is reversed from the other, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

The Kinetic Tool's latch also doesn't have any endstops.

In addition to adding another element of Fiddle Factor to the proceedings, it also means you can with some dexterity spin the latch around backwards and latch the tool together from the inside.

This has the amusing side effect of making the Kinetic Tool one of the few physical objects I can think of that's capable of softlocking itself.

Really. Watch this.

Did you catch it? Here's what you do: Open the Kinetic Tool in balisong mode, then flip the latch around to latch it from the inside. Then press the switchblade button to make it close itself.

Since you engaged the latch backwards it is not in the path of the blade's closing travel. But you can't undo the latch, because the tip of the blade is in the way, and the blade is already at the end of its travel. You can't use the latch to push the blade out of the way, and you can't use the blade to undo the latch. And you can't undo the latch through the blade. And so on, and so forth; it's a mechanical catch-22.

Thankfully this conundrum isn't permanent, since you can use a suitable poking object to pivot the blade out and reset the switchblade mechanism, and then undo the latch. But it'd be great for one of those, "I'll bet you a dollar you can't open this knife in 30 seconds" sorts of bar bets.

What all of this adds up to is that the Kinetic Tool is a fantastic deskside fidget toy despite -- or perhaps because of -- all of these oddities. It's just shame it isn't actually useful for much else.

Other than its thin handle scales, it's constructed entirely of steel of one kind or another. So for a balisong, it's actually kind of heavy: 158.8 grams or 5.6 ounces. A lot of compromises had to be made with the pivots, essentially shrinking them down to dollhouse size, to accommodate also stuffing the entire switchblade mechanism in between them. Thus the pivot feel is serviceable but not great, and then it also likes to hook your finger with the bottle opener notch while you're manipulating it which is obviously suboptimal. Relocating the bottle opener to the tip would have solved this at the expense of making it much harder to use to actually open bottles. Pick your battles, I guess.

It's not terribly useful as any other tool, either. The aforementioned bottle opener will probably be the most often used feature for most people. For instance, I don't think anyone in the history of mankind has actually undone a bolt in such a manner that resulted in meaningful work being done with one of those stupid stairstepped hex notch thingies. This despite their popularity in showing up on those dumb wallet cards and oodles of other gifts-for-dad sort of tripe, seemingly just so another bullet point could be put on the package. I guess you could use the screwdriver tip as advertised, although only on rather large slotted screws, and only those that are not down any kind of blind hole. Artisan claim the tip can be also used as a prybar, but do so at your own peril due to how thin the pivots are. I think putting any real amount of torsion on the mechanism would probably tear the tips right off of the handles. There's a slot in the blade, too, but I have no idea what that's for. You can fit a piece of 1" webbing through it, but towards what end I can't fathom.

Oh, and in deference to tradition it has the totally expected but largely useless ruler markings along the back edge. There are no numbers but the little tick marks are indeed fractional inches: Halves, quarters, and eighths.

The front shows Artisan's logo, and the reverse has the model number of the variant in question as well as Artisan's "patent pending." Nowhere is it mentioned where it's made; not on the article itself or in the blurb. If I had to guess, I'd say China or Taiwain. And nor is the blade steel specified on the tool itself, but Artisan's web page claims it is made of 8Cr13MoV which might actually be useful to know if it had, you know, an edge.

Inherent dangers aside, it'd probably be slightly more useful if it did. But then it'd surely be double illegal in most locales, so the fidget toy version is what we got.

Actually, they did once make a sharpened version -- sort of. Model 1823PO is a similar scheme to this, but it included the ability to insert a standard utility knife blade. (That seems kind of familiar, come to think of it.) It's now discontinued, though, and jury's out on whether or not that was due to hordes of owners complaining about shaving their knuckles off with it. Either way you can't buy it anymore and I've never been able to lay my hands on one.

Oh well.

Artisan call the flipping action "silky smooth," which is a bit optimistic. The Kinetic Tool's balisong pivots are, as mentioned, tiny. They do ride of brass washers but they're not especially refined, and leave a fair amount of slop in the mechanism as pictured here. They don't feel particularly robust.

You can see the washers plainly by looking at it down the edge:

It does spin freely enough but once again, just like the Mantis knife we looked at last week, it suffers from the problem of the "blade" being heavier than either of the handles individually which necessitates the flipping action to be a bit slow.

You can see the teeny tiny pivots and their attendant washers here. I did not bother to take the switchblade mechanism apart because I know how annoying it'll be to put back together. I know what we'd see in there anyway: A torsion spring, a hole for it in the heel of the blade, and a machined mushroom shaped lock button. I'd doubt there are too many other surprises.

One unusual point of note is that the Kinetic Tool's G-10 scales are screwed to the liners from the inside. I'm not sure why, though, because if the intent was to not have exposed screw heads there are still the four screws at the tail end that go through and hold the spacers on, which are visible right there and bold as brass on the scales at the tail end of the knife.

I guess one other oddity is that the two pivots for the balisong handles are actually constructed slightly differently, and use different screws from each other. That's because one of them also serves as the endstop for the blade's travel in switchblade mode, whereas the blade has to be able to pass through the other. So one pivot is a full length threaded barrel with a screw in each end, and the other is comprised of two escutcheons machined into the puck around the switchblade mechanism with a gap in between. None of the barrels or spacers have anti-rotation mechanisms on them so to fully undo everything you'll have to grab them with pliers or something.

Its forward kicker pins are permanently machined in place into that same puck around the switchblade mechanism. A raised boss around the button acts as one massive rear kicker pin, which is kind of clever.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Kinetic Tool certainly does one thing it sets out to do, which is to be a really strange Knifelike Object with two fully functional opening mechanisms all in the same package. Obviously I think the "tool" aspect of it is highly dubious and I think it'd have been better off as an actual knife.

Its design results in some mechanical oddities that are thus far exclusive to Artisan's/CJRB's range, so if you want something like that just so you can say you have it, it's in a field with no competitors other than itself and its siblings. If I were you I might try the cheaper CJRB version, since it's bound to be no more or less useful but has the same mechanism, is sure to retain all of the same quirks, but costs half as much.

And then, there probably aren't many fidget toys in the world with the possibility of leaving your onlookers wondering if they walked away in the same timeline they arrived in. Surely that thing you're playing with was a butterfly knife just a minute ago.

...Wasn't it?

Hey guys! This might be a bit of a longshot since I don't think this knife is too popular, so I don't expect a lot of people to have experience with it. I recently purchased a Reate Exo-K, and I absolutely love it. It's in no way a practical or useful knife, it's dangerous to the user and its own self, and it's illegal to carry in a lot of places. But it's fun, and that's what matters to me.

I often will idly flip the knife open and closed while working, and from the beginning there was always a little amount of rattle when deploying it. After having it for about a week or so, it feels like all the pivot points have gotten a bit looser, which I think is to be expected after breaking it in a little.

But now it's beginning to feel like there's more play going side-to-side with the arm, causing more rattle than before. While held in the normal reverse grip, it tightens right back up and there's virtually no play, so I'm not worried about it falling apart on me while I'm actually trying to cut something with it, but I'm worried that the arm may come apart somehow during deployment. Since a flipping motion is required to open this, I worry that I may end up launching a razor sharp blade in a random direction at considerable speed, which... isn't good.

For what it's worth, this is how much space I'm getting between the arm and the handle when in the open position. That much space exists while the lock is engaged. I'm not sure if this is typical for the Exo-K, or if this is an excessive gap.

Compared to the trainer, there's a significantly larger gap and louder rattle. But they're made from very different materials, so I won't know how much I can reliably compare the two.

Just curious to know if anyone else has had this happen with theirs and is normal, or if I should reach out to Reate for a warranty claim.

"Oh, look. Another stupid balisong. Why don't you get a new shtick, granddad?"

...

No.

This is the Mantis Mothra. In the category of knives named after Toho movie monsters, it is probably in a class all by itself.

The Mothra is a full sized aluminum handled balisong, measuring up at 9-3/4" long when locked open, and about 5-11/16" closed. It has a 4-1/2" long spear pointed blade which is, despite its appearances, only single edged. The manufacturer calls it a "drop point" which I suppose is technically correct in the same sense that a stromboli could be called a "sandwich."

The blade is made of 154CM and is very thick: About 7/32". That's pretty unusual for a balisong. Not including any protuberances like the latch head or the ears of the blade sticking out the sides, the Mothra is a girthy 1-1/8" across and about 1/2" thick in total. All of this adds up to a weight of 157.5 grams or 5.55 ounces. So, ephemerality is one attribute this knife definitely hasn't got.

(Project Farm Voice) The Mantis Mothra is made in Taiwan.

It also sports some very intense design.

The handles have this craggy, stonelike appearance on their edges that looks like it ought to be a wall texture in Quake or something. Then the blade has a deep fuller in it that's got several holes drilled through. Suffice to say the looks are certainly unique, possibly even divisive.

The Mothra's handles are clearly cast and not machined. If I am any judge, those blemishes down on the tail end are definitely air pockets from the casting process. The surfaces are bead blasted and anodized, so then one can only assume that all the spots on the edges and corners that've been rubbed through and the bare aluminum peeks through are intentional. Probably so that when the surface inevitably gets scratched or otherwise patinas, Mantis can say it's "supposed" to look that way.

On the bright side, showing up the way it does for an MSRP (but certainly not street price) of around $300 makes me feel a lot better about the finish on that $20 Exo knockoff I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. Although, on the matter of price -- hold that thought.

I've talked probably one too many times before about knives with "impossible" pivot screws, which present no mechanism of screwdriver engagement on their heads. This looks slick but isn't much of a trick, of course. There's always a flat spot on the shank of the screw or some other manner of anti-rotation feature, or failing that on a balisong specifically you can just flip it over to the side that's got the screw heads and undo them with the knife in it's latched position, because the tension against the shanks of the screws will hold them in place while you work. The other side always contains the screw heads.

So you see, just flip the Mothra over and...

...Oh.

Uh.

So it's impossible to take apart, then.

Strike that, reverse it.

If you haven't guessed, the Mothra's trick is that it's part of Mantis' "BladeXchange™" series. The pivot screws are not screws; they're buttons, which work in a manner identical to those found on a button lock folding knife. Except rather than lock and unlock the knife, they allow you to slide the blade out of the handles entirely via a channel milled into the heel of the blade that meets up with the pivot holes.

That's visible here. And these are the easiest disassembly photos I've ever taken for you guys.

So the Mothra's deal is that it's actually incredibly easy to take apart. But why would you ever want to? Well, other than the obvious cleaning and lubrication chores...

...Mantis also sell a variety of different blade styles as you would expect, which you can replace -- sorry "eXchange" -- with whatever you've already got. One knife into many, if that's a void that needs filling in your life. And in addition to various edge profiles they also offer a blunt trainer blade you can swap in. The one pictured there is the "Dexter" blade which has a Wharncliffe profile and loses the false edge on the back.

And the straight spine on it reveals just how ludicrously thick the blades for this thing are.

So here it is being a Dexter. Mantis seems to just name their variants based on whatever blade they come preinstalled with; insofar as I can tell, the handles are the same between their various models. So you can be like Katy Perry and change your mind; reinvent yourself (or at least your knife) as freely as you like and you'd probably have valid grounds for changing the name right along with. Swapping takes mere seconds, although the reasons for doing so are left as an exercise for the reader.

The release mechanism for the blade looks like this:

There's a fat part and a skinny part, and a spring behind it. When you push the button the fat part sinks into the opposite side of the handle until it's flush, and the channel in the blade is wide enough to clear the skinny part, so once you get it lined it up just slides apart.

Apropos of nothing, this also means that it is trivial to succumb to the temptation to assemble the Mothra backwards. Here it is as such. And if you do this, how it's pictured above is as closed as it can ever get. It's mildly amusing the first time. You probably won't do it twice.

Anyway, the astute among you have probably already figured out two glaring asterisks hovering just above and to the right of this entire getup.

First and foremost, balisong makers go to great lengths to improve the mechanical precision of their pivots to create finer, smoother, more solid, less rattly, and generally more pleasant mechanisms for their knives. I've waxed poetic at great length about this sort of thing many times. Bushings, precision washers made of fancy low coefficient of friction materials like sintered bronze, ball bearings, the works. Some of this stuff costs big bucks, and balisong nerds get very excited about it.

Well, I just showed you a photo of the Mothra taken apart and it sure didn't include any of those. That's because it hasn't got 'em. All the effort was apparently spent on the release mechanism and for the rest, well, we're just banging rocks together. Literally, in fact. The pivot surfaces are just the blade steel riding directly on the inner surfaces of the handles. The bead blasted and textured aluminum oxide anodized surfaces of the handles. You know, that stuff they make sandpaper out of? So you'd predict that it scuffs up the pivot area something fierce.

And you'd be right. Give that reader a cigar. No washers, no nothing. Not even a pair of perfunctory plastic ones.

The other part is, all of this needs to have a generous clearance so that you can actually slide the pieces apart without them getting all jammed up. So with no bearings or bushings in there either, this thing must rattle like a telegraph office.

Right again.

I will hasten to point out that the pivot play on this knife is so bad that if you look carefully, you can see that the only thing stopping it from getting even more off-axis is the fact that it's stopped by the inner face of one of the handles hitting the flat of the blade. Oof.

(I hue shifted that photo, by the way, because the gripper-stuff on those gloves I was wearing happens to be red and I just know the types of comments that would garner. The original, unaltered photo is here, you weirdos.)

You absolutely cannot tune this knife. Not in any way, shape, or form. There is no screw tension to adjust, no washers to swap, no bushings to shave. It is what it is, now and forever. And part of the problem is that the "pins," for lack of a better word, that make up the pivot and release mechanism don't even engage with the holes in the blade all the way through. The solid part only rises up a little less than halfway through the thickness of the blade so the top half is always left freely floating and able to wiggle around.

Mantis probably could have cured that by making the blade a little thinner. But they didn't. And lo, here we are.

So that leaves the question of the Mothra's balisong action hanging in air. Like a particular metaphor. One that I'm not going to make.

The answer is that it's distinctly weird. The enormous rattle and play in the blade notwithstanding -- that doesn't actually impact the moment-to-moment usage any. The Mothra's rebound action is also pretty okay, probably owing to its trendy but now common "zen" pin design which locates the rebound pins inside the handles rather than having them press fit through the blade. But other than that, since we're on the topic, there are no other fancy features. No spring latch, no weights, no interchangeable scales. Heck, no scales at all.

The Mothra's downfall is presented in two acts. Neither of them, surprisingly, are the weird handle texture. And rest assured that it is weird, but you can get used to that sort of thing easily enough. No, there's another uncanny feeling to its action that's tough to put you finger on until you really think about it. Eventually you'll realize that it's caused by the blade (64.6 grams) weighting significantly more than the handles (44.5 grams each) which is the opposite of most balisongs.

Beyond its pivot mechanism, a balisong knife's flipping feel is normally pretty much exclusively generated by its handles, which should weigh the same or more as the blade. Often they have thin blades that are carefully tuned to achieve this effect. Not so with the Mothra. As previously noted, its blade(s) are enormous, thick, and above all very heavy. So that leaves the point of balance not in the handles or even hanging around the pivot point but swinging around wildly somewhere out in space. And because of that, where it is also changes relative to where in its arc the blade happens to be at any given moment.

This causes the Mothra to feel a lot less like a competition balisong and a lot more like a medieval flail. Its spins are by necessity long and slow, and if you try to apply any kind of speed to any trick and break concentration even for a split second it will positively leap out of your hand and away, seemingly of its own accord. The action is epicyclic, with its center shifting around in an unintuitive manner; circles within circles. Again, this could have been remedied by a just using a thinner blade so it'd weigh less. Indeed, the monstrously fat blade is cool and all just in and of itself, but if Mantis wanted to do something like that'd it'd probably have been a better idea to put it on an ordinary folder or similar and not their flagship balisong. Just saying.

And here's the other thing. Have you spotted it?

The Mothra's clip is in the wrong place.

No, I don't mean on the wrong side of its handle because my objectively correct opinion is to prefer it to be rearward towards your pocket seam when clipped and I always complain about that, nerrr. No, it's on the fucking safe handle. The one you hold, and have to spin and roll over in your hand when you're manipulating the knife. That's not where it belongs. There's a reason it always goes on the bite handle, at least on other knives, and also why that's the side with the latch. But here it isn't, and there are no mounting holes on that handle so it can't be put there. So it's in the way. Always. And it's massively disconcerting.

The only cure for that is to just take it off.

Okay, yes, there's nothing stopping you from just popping the knife apart and flipping the blade over so the edge slots into the other handle instead. But now the latch is on what has become the safe handle, and that absolutely will come back to bite you (literally) if do that and then switch between this and a different knife.

I have no idea why this is. Do you hear me, Mantis? Fix it. Put the stupid holes on the other handle. There's plenty of room for them there; it'll be easy.

So yeah. It looks cool, it definitely has a gimmick, but it's all talk and nothing in the sack.

Look, here's the Mothra with a pair of other full sized balis. That's a Kershaw Moonsault on the left, and a Benchmade 42 on the right. The Mothra's about the width of a Moonsault (although it's thinner in profile), but about the same length as the Model 42. Monkey in the middle, there you go.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The entire Mantis BladeXchange series is one of those situations where there's a solution desperately in search of a problem. I mean, sure, you can theoretically use this to arrange your life so that your trainer balisong and your real balisong are the same knife. But so many compromises and sacrifices need to be made to get there that you have to ultimately ask yourself, is it worth it? A nice live balisong can be had for $200 (or a lot less), and trainer versions of various knives even from major manufacturers are basically free by comparison. I'm feeling like a two-knife solution is probably a better strategy overall.

That brings us back to that point I stuck a pin in earlier, actually. Riddle me this:

Where, precisely, is the value found in a balisong knife?

I mean, physically, not philosophically. Dollars and cents. What part of it makes it cost what it costs, $40 or $100 or $300 or whatever it is? Half of the world will say it is in the mechanicals: in the precision machine work, the design, the pivot mechanism, tuning the balance, and all of those tactile but ultimately conceptual things that take time and care to get right. That's why a flea market knife costs $20 and is crap, and why a Benchmade costs $300 and it isn't. Right?

The other half of the world will say it's obviously in the blade, dummy, with whatever fancy alloy steel it is plus all that heat treating and cryo quenching and sharpening and polish work. Which is clearly why, say, a live blade Flytanium FlyOne costs $500 but a Flytanium Zenith trainer is only $60. You dig?

Well, a whole Mothra costs you $180 real world dollars or so, but you can buy its blade loose for $35. And there ain't much precision machine work in the handles, which is all that's left over. Hell, they're even cast to reduce cost, and not very well at that. And as we saw there isn't a single washer, bushing, or bearing in the entire damn assemblage. Somehow here, one plus one comes out equaling five.

So where, exactly, is fancy bred? Is it in the heart, or in the head?

G'day.

This little beaut is the Cold Steel Bush Ranger.

Come to think of it, "little" is an... imprecise... way to describe it. Completely wrong, in fact.

"Bloody enormous" is more appropriate.

It's 8-3/8" long when open, for a start. That's including its 3-1/2" clip pointed blade, which is an impressive 0.156" thick and made of very fancy, very tough S35VN crucible steel. The Bush Ranger is 4-7/8" long when closed, and weighs every bit of 164.8 grams or 5.84 ounces. It's also a very sturdy 0.673 thick not including its clip, and 1.787" in breadth at its widest point which is at the peak of blade right at the knurled thumb-opening plate doohickey.

With its remarkable bulk and Bowie-esque shape, this might just be the only folding knife Paul Hogan would ever approve of. And all this for around $100? Crikey. (For what it's worth, Cold Steel tries to MSRP this at $224.99 at the time of writing. Nobody actually has it listed for that price, nor I suspect would anyone actually be willing to pay it. So there are meaningless numbers in the world, and then there's that one.)

Actually, speaking of said thumb-opener doohickey. Its design is shared with Cold Steel's "AK-47" model, and the tiny gap between this horizontal plate and the spine of the blade means this has the unique property of theoretically being capable of hooking your pocket hem for automatic opening, similar to the Emerson "Wave^tm^" mechanism. But, notably, without stepping on Emerson's trademark.

I say theoretically because, alas, it doesn't actually work very well. The added breadth sticking out of the sides tends to cause it to snag rather than cleanly come off of your pocket, which leaves you with a half opened knife still clinging to your pants. And then there's you, standing there looking stupid. The gap between the plate and the spine isn't very big, either, which you'd think would preclude it from working with thicker fabrics but I actually found the opposite to be so. You probably don't want your pants fabric to actually fit in there, because that tends to lead to even more severe snagging.

So as a pocket-hook-opener, the Bush Ranger is kind of, shall we say, pants. Oh well. You can still open it one handed via a thumb easily enough.

Unlike practically every other presumptive hook-opener (well, not every one, but you know what I mean) the Bush Ranger is a lockback mechanism.

Oh, sorry, that's Cold Steel's "Tri-Ad Lock." Sure, whatever you say, guys. Mechanically, it's really a regular lockback. It's just that Cold Steel must pathologically invent a trade name for everything, even if whatever it is has already been invented. They seem to think that their mechanism is the strongest out of all lockbacks and, if you squint a bit when you read the literature, they sort of insinuate that it might be the strongest locking mechanism, period. I'm not entirely sure I believe that. But the Bush Ranger at least does lock up solidly with a very loud clack, and no perceptible lash in any direction.

This is a half length lockback system, with the cutout where you press about midway down the spine of the knife. Just like everything else about this thing, the lock bar is very thick. The handle slabs are very thick, too, being made completely of sculpted G-10 without liners underneath. Cold Steel does not actually specify the color, but it is a sightly greeny earthy brown. So don't drop it into any dry brush or you'll never see it again.

This is a Mike Wallace design, and Cold Steel spend some words describing how comfort was one of the design goals, aiming for long term use without hand fatigue. Towards that end there is a generous finger notch and the fat handles are very rounded on the edges. The finger notch carries through across the face of the handles as well. Unusually, there is also an additional trough towards the tail of the knife where the heel of your thumb might naturally rest.

It's got a reversible clip that is comically dinky compared to the rest of the knife, too tightly sprung, too short, and honestly just not very good. It's there, but it presents yet another impediment to hook-opening this knife. The too-tight clip and very grippy handle texture conspire to bite your pocket hem like an outback crocodile.

The star of the show is really the Bush Ranger's blade. While its finish work isn't impressive, its robustness certainly is. There's no two ways around it, this is a serious chunk of steel. Cold Steel seem to think that heavy duty usage is the Bush Ranger's raison d'être and it's tough to argue with them on that point. Spearing sharks or fighting Mulga snakes or fending off drop bears or whatever it is you do -- The Bush Ranger is probably equipped to handle it. Well, outside of urban civilization, anyway. It's very likely to attract comment if you draw it to clean your fingernails while, say, standing in line at the post office.

Think of this as the diametric opposite of a Benchmade Bugout. Yes, both knives are made of very fancy steel sandwiched between linerless composite handles. But other than that they couldn't be any more different, and serve needs found as far apart from each other on the spectrum as I think anyone could possibly manage without trading either knife for a machete or possibly a battle axe.

If you've ever wondered what the hell all the fuss is about Cold Steel's Tri-Ad lock, here you go. All of the components are suitably beefy but there is no mechanical difference between this and a lockback.

The Bush Ranger's halves are separated by a backspacer made of some kind of composite. I think it is also G-10, and has a similar sort of structure and texture as the handle slabs. As you can see, the lock bar is sprung by a hefty leaf spring and this also serves as the closed position detent. A quintet (that's five) of shouldered threaded barrels accept screws that hold on the clip as well as secure the backspacer to the tail end of the knife. The lock bar pivots on a plain shouldered pin that sinks into both handle halves, and another one serves as the endstop for when you open the knife. Notably, these don't press out from the sides, so don't try that if you're taking yours apart.

Because apparently nothing about the Bush Ranger can possibly not be oversized, the pivot screw is enormous. Most knives can be disassembled with a T6 Torx driver, and the pivot screw might be a T8 or T10.

That's for paintywaist girly men. The Bush Ranger's pivot screw is a T15. You'd better hope you have one of those in your bit kit.

The pivot washers are PFTE and both the pivot screw and its hole have an anti-rotation flat on them. Accordingly, there is no screw head on the female side:

The thumb opener plate is held on with a single T6 Torx screw and is removable, e.g. for cleaning or to get it out of your way when sharpening.

All five of the threaded spacer barrels also have anti-rotation flats, so they must be placed in precisely the correct position to get the knife back together. It's not that hard, but for some reason they all face in different directions.

The Bush Ranger is cartoonishly huge.

I mean, just look at it. The CQC-6K up at the top there is not a small knife, but it's handily overshadowed by the Bush Ranger.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Don't buy this knife if you want a non-Emerson hook-opener on a budget. If you want one of those, and you want it to be huge and bushcrafty, consider a Kershaw CQC-11K instead.

But there is something to be said for the Bush Ranger's gargantuan slab of high end steel, if you have a use for such a thing -- especially for the price. Probably not if you have small hands, though. Or if you're planning on going to town today.

Fair go, mate, she's a whopper. No worries.

The Microtech Halo VI is stupid, and that's precisely why I love it.

Normally this is the part where I would say, "The Microtech Halo VI T/E is an unassuming aluminum bodied knife that..." and so on, and so forth, until I make you try to guess what its quirk is.

But that's wrong. Because it isn't unassuming in any way. Not even a little bit.

First of all, it's massive: 10-1/2" long open, 6-1/8" closed, with a 4-1/4" long tanto pointed blade that's got a devil-may-care rakishness to its point. It's not light either, at 141.6 grams or 5 ounces. And carrying it? Pfah! Who cares about such trivial details? It has no clip and no lanyard hole. Nothing. Suffice it to say, no one is going to discreetly tuck this into a shirt pocket.

You see, the Halo VI is a single action out-the-front automatic knife. Not -- and this is a very important distinction -- your typical dual action in-out mechanism. Those are for losers. Losers who are concerned with stuff like safety and practicality. Losers who didn't have to go completely bonkers designing a solution the very problem that they deliberately created for themselves, because they can and who the fuck is going to stop them?

I can only imagine what the design process for the Halo VI must have looked like, but I'll bet you it started with doing a massive line of coke right off of the boardroom table.

The Halo VI has this fat obvious fire button on it. It's big and chunky and has a fascinating sawtooth texture on it, and you really, really want to press it. The oblong dingus in the middle is a sliding safety, a button within a button, much like the safety on a Glock trigger. It's there because as a single action knife, the blade is always spring loaded, positively quivering with tension. Ready to launch out and ventilate your shorts, put a hole right through your dick, deliver you an express vasectomy.

A typical switchblade's dinky spring only pushes the blade for a tiny fraction of its travel and inertia does the rest. Not so with the Halo VI. Its blade is full-time under power, all the way throughout its range of travel, and its spring pushes hard. It absolutely will not be stopped by such puny inconveniences as any part of your personage being in its way. Everyone who's ever owned an in-out switchblade has at some time, most likely while giggling, fired it at a solid surface like the top of a desk and found that the end result is that no real damage was done to the presumptive target and you're now just a chump holding a flaccid, unlocked blade flapping loosely in its track.

That is not how the Halo VI works. You absolutely do not want it going off in your pocket. If the blade hits something during its travel it will do its level best to puncture it, and then once the unfortunate obstacle is removed it will instantly carry on the rest of its merry way, without fail.

Hence the safety.

So you light the thing off, and the blade rockets out the front and slams open with an thunderous cacophony, and locks there. It's glorious. Everyone in the room knows when you've triggered it. Even when they know what's coming, it makes people jump. Watching such an enormous length of steel spring into your hand with such viciousness would surely take the fight out of anybody. There's pumping a 12 gauge shotgun, and then there's this.

But, uh. Then what?

On a normal limp-wristed switchblade you could flick the switch the other way, and the blade will slither back into the handle aided by its wimpy little excuse for a spring. But the Halo VI is a single action auto, remember, so retracting it requires stuffing the blade back into the housing somehow, against the spring. And that seems... safe?

Ah.

So on the other end, the Halo VI has what can only be described as a goddamn AR-15 charging handle on it.

You pinch the two little spring loaded grabber tabs to unlock them, and yank this aluminum bar...

...all the way back, which pulls in the blade.

There's no getting around it. The verb you're looking for is "rack." This is a knife you reload.

Here's a complete demonstration of the action.

And the upshot of this is, aside from all the machine work and fine tolerances in the latches on the tailcap and its fitment against the handle body and so forth, the Halo VI's mechanism is actually caveman levels of simple. It consists of a big spring, a button, a little spring for the button, and a blade with two notches bitten into it. And that's it. Unlike a double action auto which requires a multilayered sandwich of sliding plates and extension springs and little latches and ramps and all. There is very little in there to go wrong.

All those people who are annoyed by the fact that every single double action auto in the world has an off-centered blade in it will thus be pleased to note that another side effect of the mechanical design is that the Halo VI's blade dispensing port is exactly in the middle.

And it's an attractive thing in its own weird way. It's flawlessly anodized and held together with Microtech's stylish but baffling triangular headed screws. Clearly much care went into the design of the ergonomic yet alien curvature of the handle and the diamond pattern on the trigger button. Never mind that you have to buy a special tool to take it apart, and the warranty will be voided if you do. Who has time to care about that?

It's massive. Gargantuan. Vulgar, even. I'm running out of words for it.

I told you a lie earlier. It actually comes with this Kydex holster thing. It's cool, though; the holster is also wildly impractical. It does offer just a soupçon of retention, and it also holds the knife proudly erect and high on your belt, clearly visible at all times so people can see what a cool guy you are. Probably from space.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I don't think there's any way to fully -- let alone succinctly -- sum up the completely bonkers nature of this knife. It is an entire gallon of moonshine, a four wheel burnout in a billowing cloud of tire smoke all the way down the street, Hendrix blaring on the stereo unironically, on fire, wearing shades.

You can't carry this knife anywhere because it'd be illegal. You can't hand it to anybody, lest they unavoidably find a way to injure themselves with it. You can't keep it around your desk, because you'll always be playing with it and never get any work done. Its design is so purposeful, and yet it can have no purpose. It's too weird to live, but too rare to die.

It's terrible. It's perfect.

A fixed blade today, and it's not even Friday. Luxury.

This is Böker's PSK, or "Personal Survival Knife." So think of it like a personal pan pizza but, you know, made of steel and different in every possible way.

This diminutive, now discontinued knife is a Tom Krein design and Böker seem to want you to think of it as a fixed blade version of their Krein designed Pocket Bowie. I think it's better described as a smaller version of the Böker Vox Rold, but that's just my take on it. And it would be a funny old world if we were all the same.

The original run of these are made of 12C27, but the later ones got downgraded to 440C. If you find one of these, the 12C27 version is the one you probably want; it's a tougher steel, which for a knife like this is exactly what the doctor ordered. 440C is fine and all, but I think the 12C one is better. Mine seems to be from pretty early on, since its serial number is 0315. I've never been able to nail down exactly when the changeover happened, but by at least serial 0780 they'd already switched steels. So if you've ever wondered why half of all online retailers listed this as one steel and the other half as the other, now you know.

The PSK is a little 6-5/16" long jobbie with a 2-3/4" long drop pointed blade. But it is ridiculously stout for its size, with a blade that's 0.185" thick at the spine or 4.71mm. Böker themselves call it 4.7, so you get a whole 0.01mm more than what you paid for, gratis. Shrinkflation ain't got nothing on this.

The other headline feature is that the handle is a massive 0.786" thick (near as makes no difference to 20mm) so this combined with the thick blade means despite its compact footprint the PSK is, to use the vernacular, not fucking around.

It weighs 159.4 grams in total or 5.62 ounces, so "ephemeral" is precisely the wrong word to describe it. This is not a bantam weight holdout knife destined to spend its entire life unused and quietly rusting under your shirt. Besides, if you tried to use it as a neck knife you'd probably wind up looking like Rubiel Mosquera by the end of the week.

The handle is made of two thick slabs of sculpted G-10 with red fiber/rubber spacers beneath. The PSK presents a pleasantly ergonomic grip that is a far cry from the flat, barely-there perfunctory handle scales or dinky cord wrapping of most compact fixed blade knives. This is especially important if you plan to actually seriously use your knife for an extended period for any serious task. That is, beyond opening packages, cleaning your fingernails, and showing off to your buddies at the camp site. In the tail, the rearmost handle pin is hollow and also serves as a lanyard hole in case you're one of those lanyard people.

The spine contains an interrupted section of very square and precise jimping which is really my only gripe with the PSK's design. Not from an ergonomic sense, but rather because the cuts are so square and closely spaced that they tend to accumulate crap in them, which is a minor league irritation to pick out afterwards.

The PSK has a full flat grind and a relatively shallow factory edge angle, which gives it surprising cutting performance for its size and the thickness of its blade. Thickness is what it's got, too, in abundance. Böker's blurb for this describes its design as "nearly indestructible" and I believe it.

And let's be honest, the 2-1/2" blade length is all most outdoors people actually need -- despite any mumbling they might do to the contrary about bears or mountain lions or whatever else. The reduced length mainly means it is much easier to carry without swinging around all over the place or knocking against everything all the damn fool time. If you need a fucking machete, carry a machete. Otherwise, don't.

To assist with this, it comes with an injection molded sheath patterned very much to look like Kydex, but it isn't. The pictured Tek-Lok clip comes with it in the box, too, which was a nice surprise. Usually if the manufacturer provides a hard sheath they just leave you to your own devices to figure out how to carry it or mount it to anything. But in this case that's probably because the Tek-Lok is basically mandatory. The PSK is very handle heavy -- the balance point is about 3/4 of an inch rearward of the front handle pin -- which is great for ergonomics but means that without a very solid attachment mechanism you'll wind up with your knife wanting to do a backflip off your belt. And that's only funny the first time.

The sheath does not have adjustable tension and its retention is achieved by a pair of round nubs molded into it that go just behind the knife's finger guard. The retention is positive, but only just. It doesn't take much of a tug to draw it which is a mixed blessing depending on how you prefer to carry your knife. If you're one of those cool guys who likes to go handle-down, you might want to revise that strategy with the PSK. Contemporary reviews mentioned the loosey-goosey sheath also, though I have to say that even shaking mine vigorously I can't get it to drop out of the sheath of its own accord. But if you hang it upside down and anything so much as brushes against it while you're pressing through the bush, it'll probably get pulled out and you'll wind up with bruised toes.

And for all you low-drag tactical operators out there, yes, the blade can audibly rattle in the sheath laterally. Give it a rest; You're not Solid Snake. If this really annoys you, you'll have to pry the sheath apart and line it with felt yourself, or something. Or just press your own sheath out of actual Kydex.

Böker is proud enough of their association with Tom Krein that they put his logo right here on the reverse of the blade. The steel descriptor is on that side as well, so if you wind up handling a used one of these remember to look for it there. Pay no attention to the "China" marking in the finger notch. This knife cost $45 when it was new. What do you want?

If you haven't gotten a handle on the PSK's proportions yet, this ought to shed some light on it. (I don't know if you noticed, but that was a "pune," or a play on words.) The PSK is shorter than the Usual Article, my CQC-6K that I carry nearly every day, both in overall length and length of the blade.

The Inevitable Conclusion

History is just littered with knife designs that tried hard to be folders with fixed blade performance. If you ask me, that sort of thing will always be a fool's errand. If you want fixed blade toughness with folder-like convenience, just go on and get yourself one of these instead.

Needless to say, I think the PSK is boss as hell, with only the minor letdown of its factory sheath. That's easy enough to rectify, though, for anyone with access to some foam and a blowdryer. Or failing that, there's room enough to drill your own hole for a tensioning screw on the stock sheath. Swings and roudabouts; nothing is ever perfect.

So I have no idea why Böker discontinued it other than the usual relentless march of capitalism. What a drag.

As in cheap, perfunctory, and thoughtless.

In a previous column I mentioned owning only two knives, or suitably knifelike objects, that I received without actually wanting them. This is the second one.

This presents the usual difficulty in showing off a generic knife, because typically I can just say that I have a Manufacturing Co. Model XYZ or whatever and there is at least some hope that A) people will know what the bleeding hell I'm talking about, and B) find an example of it out there in the world, even if it is just in the form of more reviews of now-discontinued knives.

With this, I have no such capability. I have no idea who makes this or what it was called. You can't ask for it by name even if you wanted to. And it's certainly old enough that I can no longer find incarnations of it being sold via any of the usual Chinese drop-ship bottom feeders. The closest I can find in these modern times is this "Elk Ridge" folder, and this "Sarge Knives" model, both of which are clearly the same idea but neither of which are an exact match.

So rejoice; this knife may be well and truly extinct.

It's all academic anyway. You don't want one of these. It's absolute flea market crap of the worst kind.

I ordered a couple of knives from somewhere back in the day and this arrived as a "free gift," unannounced and unsolicited, with my purchase. I think it was from BudK, but I could be wrong. Obviously its shtick is that it has two blades on it: One absolutely ghastly mostly serrated blade, and one "razor" blade that is of course astoundingly useless for its implied purpose.

The "razor" blade is just a regular cheap pocketknife blade, but with a square profile. It predates the current stupid Joker razor fad by a couple of decades, but this arrived precisely at the time when the Johnny Depp/Sweeny Todd movie was the height of fashion so back then every damn fool thing was pretending to be a straight razor for a while. Notably, the razor blade lacks any of the features actually required to work for shaving. It's hilariously dull, for a start, but it also doesn't have the deep hollow grind that a traditional straight razor has and indeed requires to achieve its microscopic edge. A real straight razor doesn't have much if any of a secondary bevel, and certainly not one as thick, pronounced, and obtuse as this one. The surface finish is also so abysmal that it would actually be actively detrimental to its performance. I think more work would be required to get this shaving fit than it would be to build a new razor from scratch, so forget it. And even if you did, nobody knows what kind of steel this is made out of and that's usually a strong indicator that it won't hold any kind of edge for very long.

But that's not what it's for. What it's for is to bamboozle uneducated buyers into effectively setting their money on fire.

The normal blade somehow manages to be even worse. It's exactly 3" long and about two thirds serrated, of course with the usual trashy chisel grind. It is poorly machined, has a terrible surface finish just like the other blade, and because it's got those dumb 1-2-1-2 serrations down most of its length it'd be a hassle to make sharp even if you wanted to.

This is a slip joint folder, meaning that neither blade locks open in any way. The mechanism is very crude and the action is extremely stiff. Opening the serrated blade with one hand is tough, but opening the razor blade with one hand is downright impossible. I suspect the pivot is riveted rather than utilizing any type of screw, but it's underneath the rubber overmould which doesn't come off, so I can't tell.

The entire knife is wonky. The assembly is off-kilter, and neither of the blades open straight. If you peer down its length you can see it's slightly corkscrewed. A simple brass sheet divides the two blades when they're closed, although...

...The mechanism is so twisted that if you try to open both at the same time they actually collide with each other.

There is no model, but the country of origin is obvious even if it didn't say so. If "Stainless" is the most compelling feature a manufacturer can tell you about their knife you are probably looking at a problem. The medallion on the handle also just says "Stainless." It looks like it ought to be a brand, but it isn't. This is surely a case of monkey see, monkey do. Real knives put a shiny emblem there, so we'll put a shiny there, too. Never mind what it says.

The Inevitable Conclusion

It's clear why these were being given away, since obviously its vendor was having trouble selling them for actual money. So why, then, do I even keep this piece of shit around?

As a warning from history. You see, this is an inglorious time capsule, describing the way all cheap knives used to be back in the bad old days. It still serves as a concise illustration of most of the design and construction details you'll find on a shoddily constructed knife. Absolutely everything about it is wrong. Every single aspect is a warning sign, and to see it -- or better still, to hold it -- is to immediately and intuitively understand what all those signs are. The awful surface polish, the pock marks and rust spots fresh from the factory, the halfassed edge grind, the lack of serviceable hardware, the shoddy etching, totally nameless, and with the grinning implication from its anonymous origin that it's more than it actually is. Oh yes, it's all there.

You've heard of the ur-example. This is an un-example. Precisely not what to buy, under any circumstances, for any purpose. No matter how desperate you are. You'd be better off sharpening a rock.

So in retrospect, I'm glad I got this one for free.

UTILI-SONG evolved into...

...ROCKHOPPER! ~(Screeaw!)~

Printables link: here.

"But you already designed a balisong," you say. Yes, I did. And it is further said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result.

So I did the same thing again, and I got a different result.

Iteration after iteration, tune after tune, ultimately literally every single component of the original Harrier Utili-Song wound up being changed or in some cases, just outright thrown away and designed anew. This carried on to the extent that I eventually realized we were deep into in a Ship of Theseus situation, and at that point it ought to get a new name. Thus, the Rockhopper was born. So here's another black and white knife coming at you from the deep blue sea.

It is not an optical illusion, but the handles are subtly tapered which was an important aspect I realized was originally missing. There are also ergonomic finger rest cutouts, which also provide a tactile indication of which side of the handle you're holding.

At is core are the headless "Impossible" screws I used on the Adélie design. I liked these so much that I said at the time I would backport the design to my other knives, and here we are.

The next logical step is, of course, to give the Rockhopper bushing pivots to ensure a guaranteed kick-ass action.

And isn't it just. (Slow mo version here. Warning: That file is 28 megabytes. Sorry, instance admins.)

The Rockhopper also has a deep carry pocket clip. I can't think of any production balisong that does. Maybe there's one out there but I'm drawing a blank. Give me an "acktshully" in the comments if I'm wrong.

Oh, yeah.

I also added a Morpho style spring loaded squeeze-to-release latch. The latch head is a new lower profile design, and positively locks in place in both the open and closed configurations unless the handles are squeezed.

I could sit there and do that all day.

The spring latch was what gave me the most trouble. Getting that tuned to work reliably was a major chore, and ultimately revealed that you can't print that component in ordinary PLA if you expect it to work, at least beyond demonstration purposes. Cold creep will eventually do you in if you try, and by "eventually" I actually mean "within a couple of hours of leaving it latched." Which is a real drag.

But if you print the liners in ABS instead there's enough creep resistance in the material to make it possible. ABS will also take a minor set after a while, but its permanent deflection is more limited and at least so far in my testing a pair of ABS liners has kept the spring latch perfectly functional from the start right up until the time of writing.

The entire knife has been slimmed down, especially the blade holder, because it turned out the added thickness was actually unnecessary for function and durability. The thinner design feels much nicer in the hand.

And when I said I did a lot of tuning, believe me when I say I was not fucking around.

Practically every mechanical aspect is parameterized and configurable, which was necessary to dial in everything to be just so.

That's because, and I knew this already, designing a balisong knife is actually unexpectedly difficult and complicated. It doesn't seem like it should be at first blush. I mean, pre-industrial Filipino fishermen carved working examples out of whalebone and bamboo or whatever the fuck, right? How hard can it be?

The answer is, very. Making a bali- that spins and goes "clack" is not actually terribly difficult. But doing so in a manner that doesn't suck, works reliably every time, and most importantly can be cranked out on a consumer level 3D printer turned out to be quite involved.

Everything is a factor. Everything. The spacing between the cutouts for the Zen pins, and their diameters. Length of the handles. Angle of taper. Length of the latch, to compensate for angle of taper. Clearances between the bushings, the screws, and the blade. Height of the pivot bosses. Interface between the tang and the pins. Everything works in concert with everything else.

If you've ever wondered why Chinese flea market balisongs are such crap, this is exactly why. All of that stuff has to be right, and it has to be consistent, and that's not easy.

I designed the Rockhopper to be an intermediate sized knife. It's 4-15/16" long closed, not including the protrusion to the rear from the clip. Open and latched it's 7-5/8" long, including the length of a typical Stanley style utility knife blade. It's 11.5mm thick or 0.45" in total, again without the clip. And printed with 100% infill in a combination of PLA and ABS, it weighs 36.1 grams or 1.27 ounces.

In length that puts it in between, for sake of example, a Benchmade Model 32 and 51. It's about the same overall length when open as a 32, actually, owing to the longer handles but shorter blade assembly.

I also did a trainer version of the blade, presented here in eye-searing green for safety. This is for practice, or can be used by any prospective waddlers who happen to live someplace with insufficient Freedom^tm^ where live blade balisongs may be illegal.

And I did a better job of it than that damn carrot. At least I can say that for myself.

The Rockhopper is pretty much exactly as complicated on the inside as a Morpho, as well. A full build requires 27 individual components, all of which you get the fun an excitement of assembling to get to the finished product. Once again, I'm not going to detail the assembly process -- which is rather involved -- for the sake of brevity. That's all detailed on my Printables post.

Want one? Of course you do. Get the files here.

Nyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh, what's up, Doc?

This, er, "knife" is nearly unique in that it's one of only two in my collection that I received without actually wanting it. Now there's a fuckin' sterling endorsement. No, wait. The opposite of that. Indictment. Yeah, that was the word I was looking for.

These things are all over the internet, as anyone who is even peripherally interested in either knives or cheap Chinese import crap is undoubtedly aware. And if you draw a Venn diagram of those two things I am as you know standing directly in the center with geometric precision. There's no official brand or model designation for this, of course, but they're thick on the ground under all kinds of word-salad search-robot product titles. I have even occasionally seen punters with the chutzpah to hawk them claiming to be a "Squiddy" product, which they most certainly aren't.

It is fairly easy to wind up with one of these things for free. I suspect the reason being that China cranked out a metric buttload of units, but the "carrot" fad flashed in the pan even faster than Pogs, light up shoelace pucks, fidget spinners, or jelly bands. All the TikTok clips and Shein banners and whatever other social media nonsense have surely categorically failed to generate sufficient hype to make anyone rich selling this dreck, so now whoever-it-is is stuck trying to figure out what the hell to do with a warehouse full of cheaply injection molded plastic bali-carrots.

So, I ordered two other knives I actually did want, and this showed up in the box along with them. Completely unsolicited.

Gee, thanks.

Anyway, this is after a fashion some kind of balisong, so I think I'm obligated to look at it. It exists somewhere on the graph in between a blunt trainer knife and a fidget toy. There are toddler sized versions of these I've seen as well, but not this one. It is every bit of 7" long, closed, which puts it in the same sort of size category as a full sized traditional balisong. But it has no edge, and the "blade," such as it is, is not only plastic and completely rounded over including the point, but also appears to be hollow inside. It should therefore be thoroughly impossible for even the most uncoordinated of wielders to injure themselves or anybody with this, and even if you managed to stab anything hard enough with it to entertain the possibility of dealing damage it would probably just break instead.

Here's the scoop; There's no way around it. It is, even by the metrics of low-end trainer knives, crap. Just absolutely atrocious.

The Bali-Carrot is of course made via a simple injection molding process. It's thus a channel "milled" design, but milled is precisely the wrong word for it. The construction is extremely simple, consisting only of both handles which are single unitary pieces, the blade, and two screws. There are no bushings or washers or anything. And forget about a pocket clip or a latch.

These are pretty clearly just assembled from parts taken straight out of the mold. Nobody spent any time or money on finishing work, and even the injection job is a poor one. Mine has a distinctly recycled-park-bench air about it, particularly in the tail ends of the handles.

It's assembled by way of two commodity machine screws just chunked into the plastic. The holes for them obviously weren't even threaded to begin with; this is just a sheer friction fit obtained by force. I know whoever is assembling these just uses whatever cheap screws are lying around, too, because I've seen many pictures of these online from many shady purveyors, but the screw heads are often visibly different between them.

Mine are round headed screws, but I imagine one of these could show up with anything in there. At least I got a matched pair.

To positively ensure fitment, I imagine, the openings in the handles are significantly wider than the "blade" is thick. Possibly the original intent was meant to include some washers in there which have since been omitted to cut costs, but I can't say. The upshot is that there are huge gaps left between the handles and blade, which results in an enormous amount of play.

I mean, just look at it.

And if you try to mitigate this by cranking the screws down, the tips of the handles bend inwards alarmingly. This is a lost cause, and I've already stopped caring.

All of the above notwithstanding, the Bali-Carrot almost does fulfill its function as a usable flipping toy or trainer. It has the disadvantage of being incredibly light -- just 46.3 grams in total or 1.63 ounces -- due to being just plastic. But I'm not really one to talk on that front, if we're honest. And it does pivot freely, at least, albeit by way of having huge gaps and tolerances everywhere.

But.

The design is nonsensical. One thing every balisong knife in the world definitely does have is either a pair of kicker pins or a tang pin, or "Zen" pins in the handles. That is to say, by hook or by crook they all have some way to prevent blade overtravel so once the handle(s) are swung around to the open position they stop at the 180 degree mark or near to it.

Except this one. There's a mystery hole there, which looks as if maybe at some point in history someone intended a pin to go in there. But there is no matching interface on the handles even if so, and where it winds up is too close to being in between the pivots for it to ever have been useful anyway.

So the end result of all that is this.

Heh. Nyeh heh heh. Bwaha ha... ha. It's garbage.

Yes, this commits the one cardinal sin, the unforgivable apostasy of a balisong, the singular true heresy: The blade can travel past the open position. It's only stopped by ultimately hitting the back edge of the opposite handle on either side, but it makes the whole thing feel distinctly weird and in my opinion, balisong fixated knife snob that I am, wholly unsuitable for actual practice use. At least if you're ultimately planning to use it to build skills and then graduate to a real balisong knife.

I want to make it clear here that I'm already not going into it with high expectations. Certainly not for a piece of Chinese drop shipped junk that's probably worth less than the packaging it arrives in. But this particular design shortcoming makes the Bali-Carrot feel uncannily wrong on the rebounds if you try to employ anything beyond a simple roll of the wrist and gravity to open it. Rather than rebounding normally the entire length of the handles clack against each other, dead flat, and it's like hitting a very small wet sack of potatoes. This could have been solved in about 2 seconds for no additional cost, too, by just molding some endstop humps in the handles, and then a little protrusion on the heel of the blade. All the parts could still be one piece.

But that's not how it is. When all we get is the above, I guess it's silly to expect to be able to ask for anything more.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If this hasn't been driven into the ground already, it's no surprise that whoever is pushing these now has to resort to giving them away. And even if you get it for free it's still kind of a bad deal.

There is, perhaps, some merit to the fidget toy aspect of it if you don't mind the comically awful fit and finish, and you don't mind the berk you'll look if anyone actually sees you waving a plastic umbellifer around. So the carrot hype remains completely nonsensical to me. Is this what the cool kids are actually into, now? I hope not. If so, maybe this is a sign of being old, and of not getting it -- whatever it is.

But on reflection, I think I'm good. I don't need to get it after all.

A few posts ago, when we discussed the TheOne "BM87" balisong, I did not let on that I ordered something else at the same time. There are, well, two of them.

This is the TheOne "BM51," V6. As you would expect, it is a direct clone of the Benchmade Morpho Model 51. Almost. You see, there are some changes. One of which is immediately visible -- I'll address that in just a moment. The other isn't.

The Model 51 is Benchmade's now very discontinued larger version of the Model 32 "Mini Morpho." I don't own a Model 51, but I do own a Model 32 and I have vouchsafed to you previously that it is my favorite knife in the whole wide world. The Model 51 is much the same but longer. If that's what you want, that's what it is. Although if you fancy a Model 51 now you're going to have a tough time of it. The used market is your only option, and you'll be paying continually skyrocketing collector's prices for the privilege.

But you can have one of these today for around $110. Which, granted, isn't exactly chump change, but for what you get it gives the real Model 51 (and 32) a run for its money.

The (the the the) TheOne BM51 is a very high quality piece of kit.

The one thing that's noticeable from a mile away is the redesigned solid titanium scales, as opposed to the originals' carbon fiber ones. I think they're really swank, even if they do make the knife weigh a bit more. One thing people complained about (although not me!) regarding the Model 32 and 51 was the light weight, which in some people's eyes was a little too lightweight. If that's you, then rest assured that the BM51 weighs a more solid 128.6 grams or 4.54 ounces. And again, I don't have the direct Benchmade equivalent to compare to, but contemporary sources put the Model 51 at 3.3 ounces or 93.5 grams. So the difference would indeed be noticeable, I think.

The scales are rebated with channels down their length, and have five round holes each rather than the original's slotted design. The liners are solid titanium as well, just like the original, and they are anodized in a brilliant blue. And also like the original they are jeweled, although the pattern is coarser and less of it shows through. The effect is really striking, though. Side by side with my Model 32, which has the same finish, the depth of the color is quite comparable.

The pivot screws are T8 on the male side, and the female ones are smooth headed "impossible" screws that carry over from the original. The trick to getting knives like these apart, by the way, is to undo the pivot screws with the handles latched together.

It has the dimensions down to a tee as well. It's 5-7/16" long closed, and 9-3/16" when latched open, with a 4-1/8" spear pointed blade, as measured from the forward tips of the handles. The blade is precisely 0.100" thick, and the spine is very pleasantly rounded. It's made of D2, allegedly, with an as-machined satin finish. I can't verify the actual composition of the steel, but given that even inexpensive knives are coming from China with D2 now, I don't have any reason to disbelieve it. Normally when you buy a clone knife the first thing to go out the window is whatever fancy blade steel the original may have used, but in this case the Benchmades were also regular old D2. So the only possible potential bugbear is differences in the heat treating, which I have a strong suspicion are negligible to nonexistent. And unlike the BM87 I wrote about previously, the BM51 is genuinely very sharp right out of the box. If you want to start using it for stuff right away it won't need much if any of a working over.

The BM51 has a Zen pin kickerless rebound design, which I like a lot. But the other feature it has is the fake Benchmade logo pictured here, and that's the one thing about it that really pisses in my corn flakes.

I don't mind buying a knockoff knife knowing that's what it is. The BM51 is a fine knife in an objective mechanical sense, and I really think it should be able to stand on its own as such even if the design elements are all borrowed. That's basically what, say, Ganzo does and it's worked well for them so far. But if there's even a chance anyone out there in the world may get their hands on this and possibly believe it's the real deal, even for a second, that's a bit more objectionable. I have to dock points for this not going the route of the BM87 from before, which at least had the decency to show up without any stolen trademarks on it.

For what it's worth, my example arrived in a plain white box without any markings on it. So at least it's unlikely to fool anybody if it happens to show up on a store shelf somewhere.

Of course, it does have a pocket clip, and it's no surprise that it's exactly the same design as the Model 32 and 51's. The clip is also titanium -- apparently nothing on this knife isn't except the blade and screws -- and is understated without any engraving, anodizing, or any other embellishment of any kind. The ease of draw it provides is supreme, probably owing to the fact that, seemingly unusually for a knife of this caliber these days, it's actually sprung a little loosely from the factory. You could take it off and give it a bit of a bend if you need a more positive grab. And it is also once again unquestionably on the wrong damn side of the knife by default, which seems to be a pathological fascination shared by every balisong maker in the world. At least it is, with some effort, reversible. More on that later.

This could just about stand in for a review of the Benchmade 51 while we're at it, because superficially every single other feature of this knife is the same. It has the same jimped single piece handle spacers, as well as the same kind of button headed latch that is also spring loaded.

(This is in slow-mo, by the way.)

Just give it a squeeze and the latch pops out neatly. It is in my very best Bruce Cambell that I say: Groovy. Zen pins, titanium everywhere, spring latches... All of these are things I like to see in a balisong.

I also like to see nice phosphor bronze pivot washers. I mean, by preference I'd like to see ball bearings, but I'll take what I can get.

However...

The BM51 has one more surprise up its sleeve, in that it actually has bushing pivots. The original Benchmade actually doesn't -- This is the same design as the one used on the aforementioned TheOne BM87, but in this case it's a mechanical improvement over the original design rather than a cheapening.

While we're at it, though, let's have it in bits. The BM51 breaks down into an identical list of components as its inspiration, with the exception of the added pivot bushings.

The bushings are extremely precise, and they're where the BM51's excellent pivot action comes from. They're just longer than the blade heel is thick, so free movement is assured regardless of the pivot screw tension.

It must be said that there is always a small but noticeable amount of vertical play in the pivots, though, because there's always that clearance left over by the bushings that can never, ever be removed no matter how hard you try. Well, short of machining the bushings shorter, I suppose, which would probably be unwise and would also defeat the purpose. If you really want to give it a go, my example did come with a complete extra set of pivot hardware in the box including all four washers, both bushings, and two pairs of pivot screws.

But still, the score the BM51 gets from the old Wiggle Test is actually pretty good, especially taking into consideration that this is not a ball bearing knife and it has long handles, which magnify the visibility of any runout by the time you're looking at the ends. I think the amount of pivot play is on par with my genuine Model 32. That's a glowing endorsement if I've ever made one.

Here you can see the latch spring mechanism faithfully reproduced. The hook on the heel of the latch engages with that tiny pin, there, and the prong on the handle liner flexes out and puts it under tension. The latch also detents in the closed position, and the cam profile on its heel prevents it from being able to swing far enough to hit the blade. This system is really quite clever and obviates the need for a separate spring. The world knows there are enough parts in here already, what with nine screws, four washers, the two bushings, three pins, the threaded Zen pins, four each of scales and liners, the latch... and then the blade.

Oh, and needless to say when I put it all back together I moved the clip over to the right fucking side of the knife. I did that last, so in all of these other photos it's still wrong. You'll just have to put up with that, I suppose.

Incessant comparison with the Benchmade Model 32 and 51 are inevitable, considering that this is aiming to be a cheaper version of the same knife. It's significantly longer than the Model 32, although that doesn't tell us anything because so is the 51. That's the entire point.

This as well as its original are "traditional" full sized knives, whereas the Model 32 is compact and unusually short for this category. Mine is up top in those photos.

For the money, the Benchmade's finish work is obviously superior. The blade polishes on these two knives aren't even on the same planet as each other. The clone is a fine knife, but the Benchmade is visibly finer. That, and the Benchmade will actually come with a warranty. And it was made in America, if that matters to you.

In operation, though, there is no other word for this TheOne incarnation other than fantastic. Everything you want a balisong to do in terms of spin, balance, and rebound it does perfectly. It does have a noticeably increased heft in the hand owing to the titanium rather than carbon fiber scales. Its spins are slower than the Benchmade's, more deliberate and ponderous. It is still lighter than quite a few other brand name knives of similar length, though. It's like half the weight of a Kershaw Lucha or Moonsault, for instance. And to be fair, the lickety-splitness of the Benchmade Morpho duo is down to both of them actually being much lighter than is typical for a balisong. They're not benchmarks; they're outliers.

Ironically, this is noticeably quieter on rebound than my Benchmade. The extra mass in those titanium scales probably has everything to do with that, absorbing the vibrations rather than broadcasting them. Neither knife is exactly loud, but the BM51 is even less so.

The Inevitable Conclusion

TheOne knocked this one out of the park, if you ask me. I always wanted a Model 51 and I've yet to find one A) readily for sale, and B) at a price I'm willing to pay just, ultimately, for the hell of it. So this scratches the same itch while falling within a much more attainable price bracket, and also carrying no collector's value whatsoever so you won't feel too bad actually using it for stuff. It's a very visually striking knife, too. The bare titanium scales give it a certain gravitas, a sense that it is the real deal even though in one critical way it very much isn't.

The fit, finish, and materials on offer here are all damn good -- exemplary, even -- and it raises the question of why in the hell the Chinese can pull of something like this so well but so few of the bespoke designs they come up with are ever worth a damn.

No, I'm not going to turn this into another globalization rant. We could be here for hours discussing why innovation is so unrewarded in China whereas copying off others is so lucrative. But that's the gist of it, really. Make of it what you will.

But I like the TheOne BM51. Well, except for the fake logo on it. And the name, which makes it sound like you have a stutter.

On a post a while back I made a comment about nobody making an Axis or crossbar locking knife with a CQC style pocket hook opener on it.

This is what's known as "making a call-back." It establishes a sense of continuity with the reader, which makes them feel good about remembering something you said earlier and gives them a sense of belonging or membership in the community surrounding the brand you're building. See what I did there?

Yes, okay, I'm beating around the bush. You all read the title and saw the headline picture. You know what time it is.

Noot noot, mothercluckers. This is the Adélie, and it's exactly what I said it was. If you've been wondering why my output has been so slow lately and what the hell I've been working on instead, now you know.

And it's fully 3D printable. Well, except the blade, of course. You can grab the Printable here.

The Adélie employs the same design philosophy as my previous two knives, in that it is a printable design that can be produced as-is, requires no supports, and does not rely on any external hardware. Except, again, the blade.

And if you don't mind my saying so, I think it's also pretty rad.

Our reference example is provided in this boss black-and-white penguin color scheme. Boss, that is, except for the fact that photographing a snow white object on my usual white background void while keeping it acceptably visible actually turned out to be literally impossible. Sometimes I'm just really fuckin' smart, aren't I?

So today you get blue. And you also get to see why I never use any of the various colored background swatches my photography box came with, because they're terrible. I'm not even going to try to edit the backgrounds out of these photos. So much for consistency in building that brand.

At its core, the Adélie has a truly functional Axis lock/crossbar lock mechanism. Of course it requires no external springs; the necessary spring action is provided by a pair of flexible prongs built right into the model.

I also incorporated a lot of tricks and mechanical improvements over my previous models, all of which I learned the hard way, and which I will now be obligated to eventually backport to those designs now that I've finished this one. Eventually. Give me a minute, okay?

Let's start with the screws. The biggest weakness of my last two models was easily the printed screws, which had the unfortunate but unavoidable capability of being able to cleave themselves in two via the sheer mechanical advantage afforded by their threads. It turns out that Archimedes guy was on to something after all. The upshot is, and some of you probably found out, if you put any torque whatsoever on the old screw design after they reached the point of bottoming out, the heads would just ream right off.

The solution to this turned out to be to make screws that just... don't have heads. I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner.

"That clearly would not work," you say. Well, yes, that is unless every single part that the screw goes through is meticulously designed with a single uninterrupted helical thread all the way through the entire assembly.

Let's talk other features.

The Adélie has a fully reversible, deep carry pocket clip.

It also has the aforementioned Emerson/CQC style pocket hook on it for snappy automatic deployment when you draw it, by way of snagging just so on the hem of your pants as it clears the fabric.

You know what? It occurs to me that for all the times I've yammered about the damn Emerson Wave^tm^ CQC pocket hook opening action, I've never displayed how it actually works.

That's how it works. Fast, clean, elegant. But this isn't the Wave^tm^, because even though Emerson's patent on that expired in 2017, its shape and name are still trademarked. So this is the Penguin Opener.

If you feel like it, you can also use the penguin's beak to open the knife manually with your thumb. I was actually going to put a thumb stud through him, but I determined throughout my testing of various designs that it actually wasn't necessary.

And of course Benchmade's Axis lock patent expired in 2016, so along with every other knifemaker in the world I stole that, too. Surely, though, a plastic 3D printed knockoff of the same cannot be opened with the "Axis flick."

Wrong.

The Adélie has a bushing pivot system. That's design improvement #3. The net result of that is that you can cleanly flick it both open and closed, although owing to the blade carrier's very light weight it takes a bit more finesse than with a commercial knife that's made of... you know, metal and stuff.

The CQC-6K comparison is a bit more on the nose today than usual. The Adélie is 6-5/16" long when open, including the protrusion of the clip at the rear. The blade carrier protrudes 2-1/2" from the forward end of the handles, but the exposed portion of the edge is 1-1/8" long. Of course, it takes standard Stanley style utility knife blades which are available in a variety of styles and guises...

...Including these zooty ceramic ones, which with one installed renders the Adélie completely nonmetallic. Make of that what you will.

Fully assembled and with a regular metal blade in it, the reference example weighs just 27.9 grams or 0.98 ounces. Ultralight backpackers, eat your hearts out. Of course, as a non-commercial product you print yourself, the weight will be influenced by what infill percentage you make it and what material or material(s) you print it out of. Maybe some of you have rhodium-infused PLA filament or something to make the blade carrier heavy. I dunno.

It's a bit longer than the Gerber EAB pictured at the bottom, by necessity. The EAB is made of metal, and it does not require any length to be spent on having a tail screw since the body is a unitary machined piece of steel.

I'm including a disassembly pic with the complete bill of materials just because I got it for free, so to speak. Usually I have to disassemble the knife in question to get this photo, but in this case the Adélie comes disassembled to begin with, all in bits already right off of your print bed. Assembly is, of course, required. I'm not going to go into that here -- this screed is going to be quite long enough already -- but it is all detailed on my Printables post.

It's not serious engineering, this, but some design work did go into the Adélie.

On my previous knives, my screw design was deliberately designed to be operable with a penny, rather than real tools, just to be cheeky. That's not really an option here. With the same single narrow diameter down their entire length, the screws I designed don't quite have the surface area on the head to accept the curvature of a penny's edge. So I had to cast around for some other suitably ridiculous yet readily available tool to match up with.

Ultimately I settled on this, which is one of those promotional giveaway screwdrivers. This one is from the Sloan Valve Company in Franklin Park, Illinois and I've had it since at least the 1980's.

I have oodles of these damn things, and so does anyone else who's been around for a couple of decades. They are precisely the sort of goofy thing that's not quite a real enough tool to actually be useful for much of anything else. I suppose you could also use a normal purpose-built quality screwdriver to assemble your Adélie if you felt like it, but... come on.

I will also leave you with some of the prototype builds I produced while messing around with various tweaks to the mechanism and overall profile.

Now all the internet lost media historians can remain forever wistful over what could have been, rather than what we ultimately got. (For instance, I'm particularly partial to the one with the angled tail and offset rear screw, but it didn't play nice with the pocket clip design so that profile wound up in the bin pretty early on.)

Conclusion: If you want to get your hands on your own one of these, you can download the model files from here.

A mention in the comments of that EDC knife recommendation thread from a few days ago reminded me that, yes, of course I have one of these in my collection. And if you think I've written a volume so far about knives, we haven't even gotten into the multi-tools yet. Oh boy, hang on to your tailfeathers.

There is a spectrum for these types of things. At the one end you have knives that might have an extra function or two tacked on -- a glass breaker or bottle opener are the perfunctory and perennial favorites to make a knife "multifunctional" so you can put an extra bullet point on its box. Then at the other are tools that might only just so happen to contain a knife blade. (Or all the way off the far end, multi-tools that manage not to include a knife at all, like the Leatherman PS.) Squarely in the middle of this gradient lies the traditional Swiss Army Knife.

The Select Fire is firmly on the near end of that particular spectrum. It's clearly built around a dedicated pocket knife mechanism at its core. Knife first, tool second. This is opposed to stuff like classic Leatherman tools that are a knife second, tool first.

But in addition to the obligatory cutout on the back of the handle that acts as a bottle opener, it also has a fold-out tail...

...That accepts standard 1/4" hex drive screwdriver tips.

I can get behind this sort of thing. Lots of knives and multi-tools have some manner of screwdriver capability built in, but the way this is done I think is the superior strategy. This is unlike the Swiss Army approach where you get a middling and, frankly, low quality screwdriver point or two that can't be readily replaced or almost as bad, the Leatherman approach that uses proprietary (and expensive) flattened bits. Instead, with the Select Fire you can chunk any old commodity tip in there to either replace a worn out one or adapt your knife to whatever types of more specialized fastener head you might encounter regularly.

You get four screwdriver tips included out of the box: A #1 and a #2 Phillips, a 1/4" slotted, and a 3/16" slotted. On either side of the knife are two bit carriers that flip out from the sides and are spring loaded so they always snap back to be more or less flush with the handle scales.

The bits are just held in with friction which sounds like a recipe for disaster, but you'll note that with the holder in its home position the cutouts in the handles aren't actually long enough to make it possible for a normal length bit to slide out far enough to fall out. The holder has to be swung out to extract the bits, intentionally or otherwise.

I had to prop this one open by way of example (with the plastic cover from the end of a mini HDMI cable, if you're wondering).

And then, of course, you can also just use the bit socket with no bit in it to drive 1/4" hex head screws. You'll find lots of fasteners with combination hex-and-whatever heads are this size, for precisely that reason.

So the possibilities here immediately present themselves. With the included drivers you could probably completely disassemble any typical desktop PC, for instance. Or if you're a knife nerd like us you could swap out two of the bits for a T6 and a T8. Then you could use your knife to take apart your knives. Yo dawg, etc.

The screwdriver bit arm, or whatever you want to call it, detents in either a 90 degree...

...or 180 degree position.

It does so by way of a spring loaded crossbar in the tail of the knife that slots into a trio of notches in the heel of the screwdriver arm. That's visible here:

It detents into the closed position as well, of course, but does not fully lock in any position. So if you're really reefing on something, you'll want to be sure of your Direction of Application of Grunt so it doesn't fold up on you. If it does it should do no harm, but it'll still be annoying. Also, you can't fold the screwdriver arm up with a bit installed in it -- it won't clear the bottle opener.

The nice thing about the pivoting arm design on, this as opposed to the usual perfunctory short fixed socket often found on these types of devices, is of course the length. The extra reach is handy, plus there's the ability to lock the handle at 90 degrees for extra torque when required. You could in the right circumstances even use this to fish down in a blind hole for a screw. At least, provided the hole were big enough to allow for the diameter of the socket. It's about the same size as the tip of a dedicated exchangeable bit screwdriver, though, so that idea's not too far fetched.

According to the terms of various international treaties, all multi-function tools must by law have a set of largely useless ruler markings etched into them somewhere. In this case it's on the front and back surfaces of the screwdriver arm. There are fractional inches on one side and millimeters on the other. It's just about good for estimating the length of a screw, and not much else.

The actual knife part is a competent but ordinary liner locker with a 3-5/16" long drop point blade made of 8Cr13MoV. The blade is 0.114" thick at the spine, matte bead blasted, and has a hollow grind. A subtle belly is present towards the forward end, which you will notice if you look at it carefully. Fully open, the Select Fire is 7-1/2" long, and closed it's about 4-1/4". It's a chunky boy, too, probably mostly owing to having to pack in both the screwdriver arm and the pair of bit carriers in the handles. Mine weighs 147.1 grams or 5.19 ounces. Yours won't -- I'll get to why in a little while. The widest point appears to be just forward of the bit holder socket when it's folded: 1.438" or about 1-7/16". It's also quite thick, 0.655" or about 5/8" not including the clip, and 0.775" with it or 3/4".

Said clip is a pretty typical traditional design and is not deep carry. It is reversible, though, and dual thumb studs are present to ensure that the Select Fire is sufficiently ambidextrous. But the only option for clipped carry is tip down, which always fucks me up whenever I carry this knife because practically everything else I own is a tip up knife instead.

The clip is nicely engraved with the Kershaw logo. It's the real deal, not printed or painted.

The Select Fire is a true liner locking knife, not a frame locker, so you get the full sandwich of left and right liners and a matching scale on either side. The scales are injection molded and I'm pretty sure they're glass filled Nylon. Kershaw doesn't specify what they're made of but that's what they feel like to me.

They do, however, specify that this knife is a Grant & Gavin Hawk design. The G&G Hawk moniker is marked on the blade like so. Apropos of nothing, we have indeed looked at another Hawk design knife previously, and suffice it to say I think this one is a damn sight more useful in the real world. I also notice that the Hawk duo make a custom utility knife as well. Apparently now I have a rival in the world of bird-adjacent box cutter design.

And I'll tell you what, at an MSRP of $50 and a street price of about $35, the Select Fire is a damn sight cheaper than getting your hands on any of the in-house Hawk knives.

For your money you do get a knife made of what is without question a budget steel. 8Cr13MoV is identical in composition to AUS-8 stainless, and is an alloy probably pretty well suited to the use case this knife is likely to endure, i.e. careless use by tradesmen, Joe Six Pack, and other oiks who are not knife collectors. It's a decently tough steel in that it will resist the blade snapping better than many other contemporaneous options, and it is extremely corrosion resistant which is a plus for any owner who will believe "stainless steel" should mean "totally rustproof under all circumstances," even though you and I know it doesn't. Edge retention is 8Cr's weak point, but you can't have both edge retention and toughness at the same time without spending a lot more money on your steel. So, the marketing department will call it "easy to sharpen" instead.

As a budget folder and a liner locking one at that, I do have to point out that the blade in mine doesn't sit quite centered. That's not unusual for this sort of knife, since liner and frame lock mechanisms inherently have a force pushing the blade to one side at all times when they're closed. It's all gravy, though -- even with this, the blade does not actually contact either liner during operation.

The Select Fire is a plain folder and not spring assisted, which is a trifle strange because the bastard is already loaded to the gills with springs anyway. One more probably wouldn't have broken the bank. The pivot action is pretty nice, though, and as is typical for Kershaw knives it locks up positively and solidly with minimal wiggle in the blade in either direction once deployed.

So, about springs.

At first I didn't intend to take the Select Fire apart for this column. I figured there probably wasn't anything in there to see that anyone would care about, so the original plan was to just look at it from the outside, rack up the usual shitload of stacked focus macro photos, maybe make a joke about not being able to use something to take itself apart, and then on to the next thing.

But I did take the Select Fire apart, and I'm glad I did. Because if you're the same kind of idiot I am, there are a couple of design surprises inside you might find interesting. If you aren't, well, you can go away or scroll to the bottom for the wrap-up. The construction details of the Select Fire are likely to appeal to Select People. (You see what I did, there.)

The reason I took it apart is something the eagle eyed among you might have already noticed, which is that the blade pivot uses Nylon washers but the screwdriver arm pivot has phosphor bronze ones. So that's odd, and I wanted to take a closer look.

On the way, I found this. The Select Fire has a complete separate superstructure underneath the scales. At first blush that's not unusual for a liner locking knife. Obviously it has to have liners under the scales, I mean, duh. It's right there in the name. But the Select Fire has a secondary set of screws holding it all together underneath the scales, totally independent of them, and thus could function without the scales mounted at all if you wanted to. You wouldn't want to, but you could. Normally a knife like this has all the screws pass through the scales and the liners all in one go, directly into whatever it uses for spacers.

So with that there are an absurd number of screws in this knife. 19 in total, if you count the ones for the clip. And it is separated by the endstop pin and one diabolo shaped spacer, down there in the tail.

What I didn't expect was to find that the detent bar for the screwdriver is loaded with a tiny Axis style Omega spring. It's just so twee and lovable. I adore it totally. There's one on each side.

To accommodate this, there is a complicated pocket molded into the back side of each scale. I suspect this is why there are no mounting holes for the clip on this end to allow tip up carry; They'd conflict with the spring. So for that reason, I'll excuse it... just this once.

The two spare bit holders swivel on pins that are sandwiched between the scale and the liner. They're sprung with one torsion spring each, which when the knife is fully assembled rests in a slot in the back face of the scale. However, anyone who takes one of these apart will quickly discover that this spring will pop out of place pretty much as soon as the scale screws are removed. How it goes back in is not immediately apparent if you don't understand how the mechanism works.

Upon reassembly, you'll want to slip something in between the spring and scale like a small screwdriver to hold the end of the spring in place and keep it from incessantly flicking itself back out into precisely the position you don't want it to be in. Pinch the scales together and hold them that way until you get the two rearmost screws in.

The Select Fire is about the same overall length as my usual CQC-6K we use for comparison purposes around here. It's broader in the beam, though, possibly with some breadth intentionally added to accommodate the spare bit holders. At over 3" in blade length it is unfortunately too large to carry in some locales. You know which ones fixate pathologically on that particular limit for whatever reason. For prospective owners who are unfortunate enough to live in such hellholes, consider instead the Kershaw Shuffle DIY, which is much the same idea but has a 2-1/2"-ish blade instead. But it also loses the extra length on its screwdriver bit socket.

With such a smorgasbord of moving parts, the Select Fire is probably also a strong contender for the title of King of the Fidget Knives. It's like a toddler's busybox but for strange adults. Not only can you mess with the blade pivot, but both bit holders swing in and out and spring back into position with a satisfying click, and you can diddle with the screwdriver arm as well. Or whirl it around like a helicopter with it in the 90 degree position.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This may not be the knife most people think they want, but it's probably actually the knife most people should have.

We tend to fixate on the knife aspect solely, and fixate on it in a particular way. Well, of course we would, right? This is a knife community, and this is a column about a knife. But overall we tend to hyperfocus on things like the alloy of the steel, the aesthetics of the scales, the cleverness of the mechanism, and the snappiness of the draw. And we make up silly scenarios and use cases to justify all these as if we're likely to need to pull the thing on zombies in a hurry. Or if on a daily basis most of us need to use a pocket knife to split logs. Or maybe use the damn thing as a piton.

But, well, we don't. Come on, be honest.

By and large most of us stupid monkeys don't live our life on the veldt anymore. We live it in a manufactured world. There aren't trees to chop down or tigers to fight off with our knives -- but there are frequently encountered screws. Lots and lots of screws, all over everything, holding our modern jungle together.

What most modern people use the knife part of their knives for, even though they will never ever admit it unless pressed very hard -- possibly in a vise -- is not actually really critical work. It's opening boxes and mail. It's cutting tape and rope. And cleaning fingernails, and coring apples, and chopping the tag of the back of your shirt. And the other perennial favorite, of course, is incorrectly using the tip of the blade as an impromptu screwdriver (and promptly snapping it off). Well, you're already holding the tailor made solution to that in your hands right here.

And all that's just those people who even carry a knife on a daily basis at all, which I am sure is a slim minority in our current century. All of the above is why so many even out of those of us who do have cruised along just fine with nothing more than a regular Swiss Army Knife, which in objective terms is, actually, terrible at the knife part of being a knife.

The Kershaw Select Fire isn't. It is a very decent, very competent knife. It is a knife first, just as I outlined many paragraphs ago. But it also includes a very serviceable screwdriver. One that is actually better at its job than most multi-function tools that are also worse knives in the bargain. There are "better" and fancier knives in the would -- and more expensive ones, sure. But will they do this for you?

Just yesterday while I was doing the photography for this column a thunderstorm blew through and I paused what I was doing to go stand at the back door and watch. It was then that I noticed the downspout by the back door was overflowing. So after the storm passed, I climbed up there to have a look. The downspout elbow was clogged with washed away stray nesting material and shingle grit and maple tree whirlybirds who knows what else, and it was clogged up far enough down that I couldn't reach all of it.

I mean, of course it was.

But I still had the Select Fire in my pocket, so I used it to take the screws out of that chunk of downspout -- a task at which it excelled -- right then and there. Unavoidably, I got muck all over myself in the process. And my knife. So what if I did? This knife has no collector's value to scuff. And I got the thing unclogged and put back together with no other hassle at all.

It is stories just like these, told a million times a day, that make up our collective civilized world. Nobody is actually slaying zombies with their damn knife. Nobody is fighting terrorists with it, either. Very few are in the woods actually doing any "survival." Nobody's skinning game they've just killed with their teeth, or whatever the fuck else the manufacturer of that expensive knife is hoping you're fantasizing about with enough lack of clarity to finish typing in your credit card number.

But there are things to mend. Everywhere, all the time. Just now my Select Fire saved me from a damp and grumbling trudge across the grass to the garage to get a screwdriver. And next? Who knows. But I'll have it and because of that I'll be ready.

For most of us, a knife like this is probably a better daily companion than the several-hundred-dollar, designer steel, carbon fiber scale, titanium liner, individually serial numbered, custom anodized clip, drawer queen of a bauble you just saw on the front page of your favorite knife web site, whatever it was. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it because it'll never not be true: The knife you will use is a better knife than the one you won't, no matter what either one costs.

Postscript

Oooh, a bonus feature.

I mentioned that my Select Fire weighs more than yours will. Okay, not by much. But still. That's because I made a slight modification.

As stated, the screwdriver bits can't actually fall out while the knife is knocking around in your pocket, because the cutout they rest in isn't long enough for them to fully slide out of their holders. But sometimes mine do still come loose, and then I find them still captive but all higgledy-piggledy in there. This annoys me, even if only just for the principle of the thing.

So given that I am already, shall we say, invested in Zack Freedman's Gridfininity system for unrelated purposes, I tend to have a ready supply of 2mm x 6mm neodymium button magnets lying around. 1/4" is 6.35mm. I think you can already see that these are the perfect size to interface with a typical quarter inch screwdriver bit. So I glued one magnet into the bottom of each screwdriver bit slot, and now they stay neatly in place no matter how hard I shake, tap, or tumble the knife around.

Nirvana: Achieved.

I assure you this is not a pen review.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure it's really a knife column, either. You see, this is the Guard Father Spike OTF. And you'd have to be very charitable to call it a "knife." That's because it hasn't got an edge.

It's completely round in cross section and from a couple of feet away looks like it might be the world's most bodacious tire gauge. But peering down the barrel of it you can see that what it does...

...Is this.

It's billed as an automatic ice pick. The potential applications for such an object are, naturally, left as an exercise for the reader's imagination.

At its core is a slightly over quarter inch thick (0.257"), 3-7/16" long stainless steel spike. The whole thing is just about 5-7/8" long retracted, 9-1/4" fully extended, and it rings in at 63.3 grams or 2.23 ounces. And the end of course terminates in a vicious point.

The fire button lives in the track where the pocket clip goes, and you can rotate the clip...

...To cover over the button and act as a rudimentary safety.

You'll probably feel a little more comfortable for that, and also knowing that the button takes a committed mashing to set the thing off. This is a good thing because the Guard Father is a single action out-the-front mechanism, which means it's just raring to go under powerful spring tension at all times. Cry havoc and the dogs of war are slipped in a hurry; when you press the button the spike fires out with extreme alacrity. And it locks in the forward position ready to serve as, just for sake of example, the world's manliest leather awl.

But! There is no mechanism for retraction like your standard issue Greaser switchblade. The only means of putting it away again is to hold the button down and manually push that pointy pokey tip back into the barrel. I highly advise not using your fingers for this, not only for the fact that doing so is functionally impossible but also a highly fraught undertaking. Instead, it's best done by pressing the point against a sturdy object but preferably one that's slightly softer than the steel is so you don't mar the point any more than it already comes from the factory.

Presumably because of this aspect, the point actually isn't quite needle sharp but arrives with a small but perceptible flat spot on the very end.

The mechanically initiated among you may have already guessed that if you have to shove the point back in by pressing it against something but still have it lock, it'd be impossible to get it completely enshrouded by the barrel without using a pusher small enough to fit inside. And since that's not how it works, you'd be exactly right. A small amount of the point is always left sticking out.

How much? Precisely 0.064", or 1.64 mm, which translates to, "exactly enough to be mildly dangerous at all times, and sufficient to draw blood if you press your fingertip against it too hard." So unless you need a drop for your next diabetic test strip, maybe don't do that.

The Guard Father Spike is not much bigger than a beefy pen or marker and it even has a clip, so the temptation to carry it in your shirt pocket immediately presents itself. The trouble with that is, with the point peeking out like that all the time it's not only immediately obvious what it is, but it'll also be at risk of raking across your shirt fabric -- or you -- at all times. Tip down carry is not an option but again, knowing all of the above, maybe that wouldn't be a great idea anyway.

Someone truly dedicated could at least probably fix the stick-out issue by reprofiling the point so it sits flush when retracted, and then devise some sort of inverse cone shaped dingus to use as a pusher tool to safely stow the spike away. Possibly with the aid of a 3D printer or something. I'm sure I can think of somebody who could do that if I thought about it long enough.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I haven't consulted a lawyer on this or anything, but I also have to wonder if this will be technically legal to carry in locales that think they've banned automatic knives but haven't worded their laws quite cleverly enough to also encompass this.

The product blurb calls the possibilities for this device "endless," but I submit to you that is only so if you have a vivid imagination and infinite patience for making up new descriptions for "stabbing things." This may fill an invaluable niche if you are, say, Fox Mulder or Agent 47. For the rest of us, though, probably not.

But it sure looks mean as hell, and I'll bet you none of your friends have anything in their collections quite like this.

I don't know what it says about me or this knife that I keep meaning to post it here, but somehow forget that I have it. It's happened like six times already. Which is odd, because I bought it specifically for this feature.

So, here you go.

This isn't a Reate Exo M, but it looks like one. And the genuine article costs damn near $300 and I'll be stuffed if I'm paying that for a fiddle toy I can't leave my house with, since gravity knives are illegal to carry where I live.

And yes, it does indeed open with Nothing But Gravity, as the description is always ready to remind you. All those guys with the shaved heads and the really esoteric interest in flags with eagles on 'em got really excited when they saw that, I'll bet. Yeah, it's because chucklefucks like them why these things are illegal.

This is a knockoff of the Exo M, and I got it from the usual scumbags for about twenty bucks. It looks the business from arm's length, and it works pretty well too. The blemishes in the anodizing notwithstanding; they're really tough to spot in person but the ascetic lighting in my photo box makes them really visible. That part's kind of a drag.

It works by way of this captive pivoting mechanism, which allows one half of the handle to swing out a couple of degrees.

This clears the way for a pair of lugs on the blade carrier to slide down the track milled in the inner part.

The blade is then free to drop to the end of its travel via gravity, just like we all paid our ticket prices to see. Yeah, baby.

When the handles are brought together the lugs are held in place and the knife is locked in the open position.

If this all feels familiar to you, in a vague and dreamlike way, you're not wrong. It's the same mechanism all those fucking Carrot Knives use. Yes, this is what they ripped off. Well, joke's on them -- our rip-off is actually made of metal. So there.

The real deal is made of "ELMAX" steel. This one purports to be made of D2, and sports a lone marking on the blade to this effect. It does not bear any other markings or insignia. As usual the steel descriptor may or may not even be bogus, but it's not too tough to believe. D2 isn't that expensive these days.

A deep carry pocket clip is provided which works okay, but is a little too tight for my liking. It is not reversible, but that might be immaterial since the knife is pretty ambidextrous otherwise.

It does, however, have a sliding lock switch on the side opposite the clip that'll prevent the hinge from opening, fully locking the knife either open or closed:

It's right in place for a right handed user to operate with a thumb, but a lefty could probably work it with the index finger without too much trouble. Without it, it is theoretically possible for this to get wormed open in your pocket and since the only carry position is tip down, you might otherwise find an inconvenient extra hole in your shorts.

As the "compact" version of the Exo, this would be a comfortable EDC-able size if it weren't for the fact that a League of Nations goon squad would probably track you down and haul you up in front of Sir Geoffrey Lawrence if you actually tried to carry it anyplace. It's 4-1/2" closed, and 7-5/8" open, with a 3-1/8" straight-back blade that has a small false edge on the spine. The body is all aluminum and actually feels quite nice in the hand despite its squared-off looks, with some very positive crosshatching in the thumb area on the rear and positive jimping for your index finger on the front. The scale inlays are textured Micarta to give you something to push against when you're working the action. It's not too heavy, either: 92.6 grams or 3.27 ounces, probably due to mostly being made of aluminum.

The color, by the way, is not a camera trick or optical illusion. The aluminum parts are anodized in a rather pleasing gunmetal gray-blue. It'd be even more attractive without all those tiny blemishes in it, but which then again I suppose is why it was only $20.

The Inevitable Conclusion

A fidget spinner is probably less likely to get you arrested than having this about your person, but it's awfully difficult to use one one of those to open your mail. (Exceptions, of course, do exist.)

The problem with recommending these kinds of things is that there's no brand or model designation you can tell anyone to ask for. You might not know what you'll get, and you'll have to know what you're looking at. And if you know, you'll know. You know?

My partner asked me for a recommendation for a EDC because I own and care for my kitchen knives. But I know nothing about pocket knives, so I'm hoping you all can recommend something lest they walk out with a 8 inch chef's knive peeking from their pocket.

I had a look here, but I just got lost in all those choices.

It doesn't need to be super durable as I should be able to sharpen it for them, but it should be easy to handle. The purported usage is self defense, but I think it will mostly be used to do chore related tasks.

Any solid choices there?

EDIT: after the replies pushing back on using this type of tool for self defense, I've had a talk with my partner and went through the arguments here. They didn't take much convincing that it was a bad idea. Thank you all for pointing it out!

Well, guys. I said I was gonna.

I do'ed it.

The Cold Steel AD-15 is a big fuck-off shiny knife that looks like it could skin a crocodile. It is available in a variety of guises, and I of course was contractually obligated to get the green one which looks like a crocodile, too.

The "AD" is referring to this knife's designer, Andrew Demko. I am fairly certain, but not 100% positive, that the "AD-15" moniker is also a not-so-subtle reference to the AR-15. But I can't prove it. And every time I mention the AR-15 on lemmy this weird high-pitched screech starts up, so we'll say no more about it and move on.

The AD-15 is up my alley -- of course -- because it has a weird locking mechanism. It's Andrew Demko's "Scorpion Lock."

It's not entirely dissimilar to a lockback mechanism, but it's exposed and and works by way of dropping a fat pin in the knife's backspacer into a big notch on the heel of the blade. It's visible above, and locks home like so:

It's certainly novel. Cold Steel, meanwhile, have this to say about the AD-15:

The AD-15 might be the most comfortable, user friendly, sub 4 inch tactical folder we've ever made! Modeled after Andrew Demko's patented original, it offers ambidextrous operation and opens and closes with one hand.

Uh. So, about that.

Let me start with the size, because I'm not entirely sure why anyone would call this knife "sub" anything. It's fuckin' massive. 8-1/2" long overall open, 5-1/8" closed, with a 3-5/8" drop pointed blade that's a frankly ridiculous 0.145" thick and made of S35VN steel. But that's only part of the story. It's a full and complete 1-1/2" in breadth when it's closed which I believe makes it the widest-when-closed folding knife I own or have ever owned. Or possibly ever will own.

It has a zooty aluminum backspacer/lock, of course, but it also has full steel liners and the entire knife weighs 182.2 grams or 6.43 ounces. It is a very, very beefy 0.652" thick not even including the clip.

So suffice to say it's big. Discreet urban EDC carry: Completely off the table.

I'm not sure where "comfortable" and "user friendly" come into it, either. This is possibly the most difficult to open folding knife I've ever encountered.

That's not because it's tricky, mind you. The locking mechanism is deceptively simple and, dare I even suggest it, kind of elegant. But it necessitates the lock pin pressing against the heel of the blade with an absurd amount of spring force, all the time. Both the pin and the blade are polished smooth, but they still drag against each other throughout the entire opening process. And not only that, but you have to overcome the full sum total of the spring's tension whenever you try to open the knife as the cammed ramp on the back of the blade pushes the pin and thus the backspacer bar thingamabob up and away.

Here's the spring:

The net result is that an incredible shove against the thumb studs is required to even get the blade to begin to budge from its closed position, let alone fully rotate it out and open. Yes, you "can" open it with one hand -- if you have hands like an orangutan, which luckily I do. If you don't, well, tough. Most people will probably be forced to open it with two hands.

And closing it with one hand is right out. For anybody.

An ordinary lockback knife has either a hump on the spine or a cutout in the handles to provide you a spot to press, levering the other end of the lock bar out of its home and unlocking the blade. This doesn't. There's a knurled part of the backspacer/lock bar, but that spot absolutely is not for pressing. You're welcome to try, but good luck with that. You have to hold the textured G-10 scales with one hand and manually grab the lock bar with your other hand to lift it up. It's got grip ridges machined into it for this purpose.

You can almost kinda-sorta wedge the tips of your fingers in the gap between the scales and lock bar and try to finagle it out of its slot, but this is very fiddly and mildly painful, and both looks and feels ridiculous. So no, this knife essentially can't be closed with one hand.

The AD-15's clip is fairly traditional, and is drilled to match the lanyard hole on the tail end. It's not deep carry, but that's probably academic anyway. It is reversible. As it is, the clip is fairly nice if a bit tight, but drawing this knife from your pocket is also made much more difficult than it might appear at first glance because the scales are so damn grippy.

Normally that's a good thing, right? When you're wrestling alligators in the mud in the bayou, or whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with this knife, you don't want it squirting out of your hand. But the grabby scale texture also rakes against your pocket hems and makes this knife singularly difficult to draw without giving yourself an atomic wedgie in the process. It just will not let the hell go from your trousers.

We've methodically debunked pretty much every claim in Cold Steel's blurb by now. So... What's it actually good for?

Not self defense, that's for damn sure. If you plan to be accosted by ruffians, you'd better make an appointment with them first so you can spend the requisite half hour getting your knife out and opening it in advance. You could probably split coconuts with it if you wanted to, though. Or maybe cut down a tree. It is monstrously stout and I have no doubt the lock is fantastically strong. The S35VN steel is a very tough alloy and, combined with the absurd blade thickness, should be able to withstand careless use easily.

Overall I like the shape of the AD-15 and once it's actually open it feels great and very confidence inspiring in the hand. The blade is machined well and is a very neutral utilitarian shape that presents a wide belly for cutting tasks as well as a stout and close to centered point for stabbing. To assist in either of the above, your grip on the lock bar serves to clamp the blade even more firmly into the locked position so you can be pretty sure it's not ever going to fold up on you.

It has the aforementioned grippy scales, plus extremely chunky jimping on the back of the blade as well as the tail. You're probably not dropping it.

The blade is just about mirror polished and looks quite nice, too. Well, it will until you actually start using it for abusive outdoor tasks, anyway. It picks up fingerprints like a sonofabitch and I suspect scuffs and scratches will also be highly visible. That may eventually harsh your vibe.

Surprisingly for such a chunky and humongous knife, the AD-15 is actually only held together with two screws that are very easy to remove. It has one pivot screw in the front and another one just like it holding it together at the tail, around which the lock bar pivots. The two screws are also identical -- totally interchangeable.

Inside is the aforementioned spring, and the hollow pin that serves as its endstop is also the lanyard hole. The design is simple, and just tarnished slightly by how godawful difficult it is to use.

The size comparison speaks for itself, really. It's a big boy, no doubt about it.

The Inevitable Conclusion

While fiddling with this knife I tried to think of various ways in which it could be improved in the action department. I did try my hand at polishing the ramp on the back of the blade and it improved matters slightly, enough to make the thing at least possible to use, but still not pleasant. I thought about other hypothetical mechanical changes like a lighter spring, or adding a hump to the backspacer, or relocating the pivot point, and ultimately I decided the hell with it: The best way to improve this knife would be to keep it shaped just like it is, but make it a fixed blade.

And really, that's what the AD-15 is. It's a fixed blade masquerading as a folder. It'd be better if it dropped the act.

That kind of thing has been tried many times before and honestly it never quite seems to work. You can tilt the scale one way or the other, and make no mistake that the AD-15 tilts it pretty damn far, but making a fixed blade fold or a folder as strong a fixed blade always seems to require making sacrifices that wind up defeating the purpose.

And that's a crying shame, because I really want to like the AD-15. In some senses, I do. It's just too bad it's impossible to bloody use.

Maybe I'll just make a Kydex sheath for it and call it a day.

Sigh.

I already made the René Magritte joke previously, so I can't very well use it again. So, I've been staring at the blinking cursor for the better part of five minutes now trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to write a hook to put in front of this friggin' thing.

This is, very emphatically, not a Benchmade Model 87. Yes, yes, I know what it looks like. But it's fake, mon. No question about it.

It is, in fact, made by prolific balisong cloners TheOne. On this I am a bit of two minds, as usual, because on the one hand it's a total Chinese ripoff of Benchmade's design and on a certain fundamental level that's not cool. But on the other hand, the manufacturer casts no illusions whatsoever over what it is. It is marketed directly and up front as a clone -- not, meaningfully, a counterfeit. You'll notice it doesn't sport the Benchmade logo on it at all. It arrived in a plain white box without any stolen trademarks on it.

The thing is, see, that it exists for the express purpose of acting as a consolation prize for all those people who will never in a thousand years actually have the opportunity to own a genuine Model 87. I include myself in that group. I'll leave this here for an illustration why; even when the damn thing was available it was $550, and Benchmade produced a grand total of about seventeen of them before discontinuing it. Now they won't sell you one for any price no matter how much you want one. So if they're worried about losing a sale, maybe they could actually manufacture some damn product for a change.

Oh, but then the first run buyers will all howl that their resale value is being diluted by increasing the supply. Cry me a fucking river.

Sharp eyed readers will note a couple of minor differences between this and the Benchmade original, notwithstanding the missing markings. The Model 87 has a Torx headed screw in latch head pin, whereas this has a plain press fit one. And the genuine article's blade is CPM S30V, and this is D2. And the Benchmade has ball bearing pivots while this has bushings and phosphor bronze washers.

All of the rest of it, though, is spot on. I'll cut to the chase right here and say that the build quality and bill of materials here is actually astonishingly good.

The balisong knife market is, of course, famously insane. But now we're standing on both sides of the bell curve simultaneously, and I get the feeling history is starting to repeat itself in ridiculous ways.

In the beginning we start with the various big name knife manufacturers like Benchmade and then BRS and Flytanium and Squid Industries and whoever else, who produce high quality knives that get popular, and then they get expensive. So the clone manufacturers have risen up to compete with them -- typically by ripping off and reproducing their designs, of course -- but now the clone manufacturers are getting super popular, too. This is turning into big business, and enthusiasts are flocking to these knockoff knives which are improving by leaps and bounds. Now, we've got knockoff manufacturers that have a reputation for quality, with a real name for themselves and actual dedicated fans. So their prices are starting to creep up, too. There are clone knives that cost upwards of $300 nowadays.

This isn't one of them, though. This knife costs around $100. For what you get, considering the price of enthusiast balisongs in general, that's still an outstanding deal. But it's still not exactly what I'd call cheap. So what's next? Will another cheaper clone maker step up and clone the clones? When those hit the big time, will the clones of the clones get cloned? It might just be turtles all the way down.

What you get for your hundred bucks is a 1:1 scale model of the Benchmade Model 87. The same dimensions, all around. So it's a big knife, very chunky overall with a wide squared off aesthetic. It's 5-7/8" long closed, fully 9-15/16" long open, with a 4-1/4" blade that's got a trendy reverse tanto point. The blade is 0.121" thick with a nicely rounded spine. And while it has a machined finish left on both its flat and its bevel, it's very fine and reminiscent of that on a Spyderco knife. It's not unattractive at all. The grind is also completely flat, which I did not at all expect.

The hardware all faithfully reproduces the decorative machined glaive style screw heads of the Benchmade. Yes, the handles are genuine titanium and are unitary channel-milled slabs exactly like the original. That leaves the entire knife weighing in at a not insubstantial, but deceptively light 156.8 grams or 5.53 ounces.

The latch is this non-protruding style that drops out the bottom. It is indeed spring loaded, and pops out the bottom when you give the handles a moderate squeeze.

From a usage standpoint there isn't a single fly in the ointment. The genuine article is probably better, no doubt, largely owing to its ball bearing pivots. But TheOne's knives are designed for use and in this "BM87" it shows. Doing flip tricks are precisely what these are for. The machined handles feel excellent in the hand. The knife pivots freely precisely as you would expect, the rebound action is great, and the spring latch is immensely satisfying. The latch will spring out from either the latched shut or latched open positions, and the torsion spring hidden inside keeps it standing out and well away from both the handles and blade so you can't strike either one with it while you're manipulating the knife.

In addition to a baggie containing a complete replacement set of pivot hardware, mine came with a card in the box proclaiming it was pre-tuned at the factory.

This threadlocker on the pivot screws is as it was delivered. I broke it loose when I took the knife apart for my disassembly photos. It seems like someone went ham more on one screw than the other, but the action was fine when I received it and it wasn't difficult to take apart at all.

The wiggle test reveals what we already knew, of course. While it won't match the uncanny squareness of a bearing knife, it's still pretty good for a bushing pivot model that has such long handles. The presence of the bushings means you can fully tighten the pivot screws and the handles will not lock solid. Here, as pictured, is with the screws as tight as they'll reasonably get.

This is of course a "live blade" model and it comes with an edge already on it, although my example is not actually very sharp from the factory. This may be by design, or it may just be where the penny was pinched. The edge grind is dead true, though. If you plan to use this for real cutting tasks and not just showing off you will probably want to give it a sharpening once over but the good news is that this won't be difficult at all. It is sharp enough to draw blood if you really fuck up and do so with gusto, but it's such that you at least have a chance of not breaking the skin if you make a minor mistake and graze yourself on the bite side without too much force.

Here are the guts. As a channel milled knife, the bill of materials is not very long but it's still impressive. The handles are as stated solid titanium through-and-through. The washers are indeed phosphor bronze, and each pivot has a precision bushing going through its respective hole in the blade.

I can't fault the machining work in the handles. I'm staggered; I just can't shut up about it. You get that much solid titanium for the price? This is not how Chinese knockoff knives are meant to be.

What you get in each pivot is this stack. Two bronze washers, the bushing, and a Chicago screw. The assembly goes together like this:

The latch reproduces Benchmade's novel design and uses a torsion spring for its mechanism.

Despite how it looks, it's actually very easy to take apart and put back together. There is a hole in the shank of the latch, and an index notch in the handle beneath the screw head. You can just drop the spring in place and it'll work -- you don't have to mess around with keeping it under tension or anything before you can cap the screw off.

The latch components.

Obviously I haven't got a genuine Benchmade Model 87 to compare to. But with this thing being such a full size knife, I think the nearest equivalent I have to act as a stand-in is the Kershaw Lucha.

The BM87 is thicker than the Lucha, at 0.433". There is no clip to subtract from the measurement, because it hasn't got one. It is tapered, and very wide at the flared end: 1.491". It's noticeably wider than the Lucha as well, all the way down its length.

The Inevitable Conclusion

As a clone knife, this TheOne is always going to have a bit of a stink following it around. All the forum oldheads will turn their noses up at it and it'll never actually be worth anything or appreciate in value like a Benchmade would. But that's not the point.

I fell down the rabbit hole of researching clone balisongs as much as I dared before I bought it and I'm still mystified at the following these things have. People get into clone knives -- big time. Now I can see why.

Even just as an objet d'art this is fantastic, but it also has the benefit of being designed to be used. If one day you send it windmilling off onto the pavement you're bound to be a lot less broken up about it, for instance, than if you'd just piledrivered your Model 87 in the same way. And if you totally bin it, you can just buy another one. That's not a luxury you'll have with a limited run collector's item.

I've always maintained that a knife is best when it's able to be used. An object with no function is just a bauble.

If you've been eyeing one of these but you're sitting on the fence because you're afraid it might be crap, here's your verdict: It isn't. Be shocked, or be appalled, or be disgusted. But there it is.

Dissection of the Kershaw/Emerson CQC series, the continuation thereof.

This is part four out of however many of these. Obviously, I like the idea of the "Wave Shaped Feature(r)" opening gimmick, which is why I've got so many knives that have it. And so far, all of the knives of this ilk we've looked at have ostensibly been fighters of some description or another. But what if, like most of us, you don't have a case for using your Wave opener for spearing Daesh insurgents or whoever the hell? What if you have slightly more civilian outdoorsy aims in mind?

This is the Kershaw/Emerson CQC-11K in D2, model 6031D2. Kershaw explicitly bill this as a hunting knife, and its highly upswept tip has a definite dressy-gutty-skinny vibe. It's much less for stabbing and much more for slicing.

And if you're thinking, "Hey, wait a minute. This knife looks exactly like the Emerson Rendezvous," well, you're definitely not wrong. In fact, in their blurb Kershaw goes on to explicitly mention that it's based on the Rendezvous. But there's a critical inescapable difference here, namely that the Rendezvous is $267 and the CQC-11K isn't. Sure, Kershaw claims the 11K is "discontinued" but apparently they manufactured about a million of these and they're still thick on the ground. You can easily score one right now at the time of writing for only $35.

What you lose out on in exchange for the $232 price difference is that the Rendezvous is made of 154CM steel and the CQC-11K is made of cheaper D2. And... uh, that's it. There is no second thing.

The Kershaw version even has the Emerson Knife Designs logo right there on it, just like all the other CQC's.

The remainder of the design elements are singing the same old familiar tune.

We will now recite the hymn of the Emerson CQC knife. It has, yea and verily, the Emerson Wave Shaped Feature(r) pocket-grabbing hook, which snaps the knife open automatically when you draw it. It is assembled, doth and truly, entirely with slotted and Phillips screws. Bear witness, for it has a knurled disk rather than studs for manual thumb opening. The textured G-10 scale, indubitably, is only on one side leaving a smooth steel surface on the other for an easy draw.

There's one other difference, though:

Instead of the injection molded backspacer, the handle halves are instead spaced with threaded diabolo barrels. This doesn't impact functionality any, though. It's just how it is.

Oh, and because thou shalt use this for hunting and not tactical purposes, it is not black. It is brown. Brown makes it outdoorsy, don't you see?

The CQC-11K is also very, very stout. It's much more broad than the other knives in the series we've inspected so far. It's not fat -- it's just big boned.

It's a full 1-3/4" across when closed, and the blade is 1-1/8" tall at the horn at the top of the spine. The entire knife is about 8-1/2" long and the blade is 3-9/16" long from the forwardmost point of the handle to the tip. (Kershaw calls it "3.5.") The blade is 0.120" thick at the spine and the entire thing sports a satin tumbled finish. The bevel is hollow ground as well. Minus the pocket clip it is 0.418" thick not including the heads on the pivot screws, or 0.499" with them. It is 163.1 grams in overall weight or 5.76 ounces -- Neither svelte nor light.

Inside we see few surprises. The construction is very similar to the aforementioned CQC-4K, with the pivot riding on nylon washers. The one major detail is those diabolo spacers:

These are screwed into with stubby little short screws, rather than the hella long ones that pass all the way through the scale and backspacer on the other CQC knives.

Because of this the spacers stay securely attached to one side of the liner or the other, depending on which side you start taking the knife apart from.

The comparison with the CQC-6K says it all, really. If you want a big meaty knife, this one's for you.

It looks like someone took the 6K and stretched it out vertically to make the 11K.

Handling the 11K works about as you'd expect, but there is the notable quirk of the position of the pocket clip, which is pretty far down on the knife and leaves a lot of it sticking up out of your pocket. For the purposes of ease of access that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially out in the woods, but this is about the furthest from a discreet carry you can get without just strutting around in public holding the thing in your teeth.

As before, the clip can be swapped to the other side but it will be much grabbier on your pocket there because it'll interface with the textured G-10 scale rather than the smooth 410 stainless back side of the knife. For what it's worth, Emerson themselves do make a couple of left handed variants of their knives (for big bucks, of course) where the smooth and textured sides are swapped. But Kershaw doesn't make a left handed version of this one.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Since its damage type is slashing rather than piercing, this ought to work better on Unes and Venus Weeds and -- wait, what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah. The CQC-11K. It does what it says on the tin -- It's a CQC knife, but remixed for utility cutting tasks that align neatly with sportsmen's needs. Gutting fish. Dressing game. That sort of thing. In those contexts, I'm not entirely certain the presence of the Wave(r) opening feature is likely to be a make-or-break purchasing decision unless you employ the Jimbo and Ned "he's coming right for us!" hunting strategy. Or, if you absolutely must have something about your person to attach an (r) to at all times. Still and all, it's always nice to have and it transforms what would otherwise be an ordinary frame locking folder into a knife that's a bit special.

The major headline here is that if you were for whatever reason eyeballing something along the lines of the Emerson Rendezvous, it's a no-brainer decision to buy this instead. Lately I've been bringing up the point of undercutting the exorbitant prices of various big brand knife models by exploring their clones, but this is a weird one -- it's a case where a manufacturer has pretty much gone and cloned themselves, undercutting their own product with... their own product. That's pretty strange, and makes this knife well worth a look.

In addition to being a 1 for 1 substitute for the Rendezvous, the CQC-11K is probably a good stand-in for any of Emerson's other upswept tip knives that may have been on your shopping list like the Commander, Skinner, or Horseman.

I don't know about you, but I like saving a dime. That means I can spend that dime on more knives later.

Not to be all clickbaity or anything, but I honestly don't know what to call this knife because it has no name or model descriptor that I can find anywhere. So we have no choice but to fall back on the venerable old chestnut of, You Won't Believe "This" Crazy Thing.

The manufacturer (if they even are the actual manufacturer) describes it as: "HUAAO Manual Folding Knife D2 Blade T6 Aluminum Handle Edc Self Defense Hunting Knives Camping Survival Multifunction Knife Portable Folding Flipper Knife."

So, yeah. It's one of those. I've also seen it billed as an "Atropos Knife Trapper" sporadically, which is something it categorically isn't. We've looked at the Trapper before, so we know what it looks like. I.e.: not this, funky though it may be. They sure do have a similar aesthetic vibe to each other, though.

We have, of course, also inspected another "HUAAO" knife recently. Based on that, and given that every single other thing on their web site appears to be a counterfeit of some other brand's knife, I have to conclude that this is a knockoff of something, too. But I'll be damned if I know what. (And yes, they run the domain knifesfactory-dot-com. Not "knives." Much classy. Wow. Very legit.)

Anyway, what you get is this rectangular aluminum clad object that looks like it might be a minimalist-punk Scandinavian cigarette lighter or something. It has no markings and presents no visible latch, button, catch, or even a fingernail nick, nor any other controls. I'll bet you won't guess how it opens. Go on, give it a try.

If you get a grip on the grey part and give it a considerable nudge to overcome the friction, it will swing away.

And then...

Oh.

No, no, no, no, nope. That's not how knives work. That's not how any of this is supposed to work.

We've seen our fair share of knives with two pivots, and one with three, and even a couple that have transverse pivots that go the wrong way. But with one limited exception all the pivots on all the knives are at least on the same axis.

But not on this one. It's a combination of all of the above. Perpendicular is in, baby. Two dimensional knives are so last season.

Once you fiddle the whole thing into position what you wind up with is a roughly 7-1/2" long knife with a 3-1/4" long blade with a very straight spine on it. The blade is fully flat ground, and is 0.173" thick at the spine.

It is alleged to be made of D2 steel which may or may not be bullshit, and is unverifiable at the lengths I'm willing to go to find out. It does, however, have a rather nice tumbled stonewash finish on it.

It's about 4-3/8" long closed, and 1-5/16" across including its little finger guard stub. The whole thing weighs 119.3 grams or 4.21 ounces, the vast majority of which is the blade and its surrounding tray. The handle really doesn't weigh much at all.

For once, HUAAO actually put their own name on this knife and haven't ripped off another maker's mark, nor left it brandless. There still isn't any model designation anywhere on it, though, and the only other marking is a lonely "D2" on the opposite side of the blade.

It actually doesn't feel too bad in the hand despite being so square. The matte finish on the handle is pretty nice and all the edges are chamfered at 45 degree angles. The lockup is actually surprisingly solid, but then you'd expect it to be given how much all the parts rub against each other when you slot them home. The visible parts of the machinework are excellent, but mine is already showing noticeable rub marks where the surfaces slide across each other.

You may think you've heard of a friction folder before, but friction isn't enough to describe this thing's action. Deploying it is an incredible faff, and thoroughly impossible to do with one hand. (This may actually be of some perverse benefit if you live in a locale where one-handed opening knives are illegal.)

There are no protuberances whatsoever except for that very tiny and perfunctory nub at the heel of the blade that's probably meant to serve as a finger guard. Otherwise there is no clip, and in fact no provision for carrying at all. Not even a lanyard hole or someplace to put a keyring. Eschew all material and functional aspirations -- When we say minimalist, we're not fucking around. It didn't even come with a sheath.

The knife is ruler straight and actually rather thin in cross section, only 0.380" thick across the handle. It's held together with only two pieces of hardware: A large screw in the tail that comprises one pivot (T8 Torx) and what appears to be a cross pin through the heel of the blade that comprises the other. I tried briefly to get either to budge and quickly gave up. The tail screw in particular is either torqued to hell and back or glued. Or possibly both, since my example came pre-stripped from the factory. No user serviceable parts inside.

Despite this, it's not overly large and if you applied sufficient hipster dedication you could carry this knife in a pocket easily. Too bad it's probably a bit too long to go in the Zippo pocket in your skinny jeans.

What's more questionable is how it would stand up to the rigors of actual daily use. Would the pivots wear to the point of becoming irrevocably flaccid? Would it be a bad thing even if they did?

As far as I can tell there is no real detent in the mechanism. The only thing keeping it from flopping open is sheer friction, which probably won't last forever because the steel blade is much harder than the aluminum handle. The design is such that the blade is held captive and none of the edge is exposed until its little tray is swung out fully, but you still wouldn't want it clacking around loose in your pocket if it came down to it.

I also wonder how well it would stand up to twisting force, and just how much it would take to permanently spread that aluminum handle. The heel of the blade can act directly against it using its own pivot as a fulcrum.

Also, if you don't put it away very carefully the tip of the blade tends to hit the inner edge of the handle which will A) probably slowly round it off, and B) permanently mar the chic, understated finish and allow a tiny sliver of bare aluminum to show through. Which will annoy you forever.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This is another one of those knives that's long on style but short on practicality. There are a lot of things that could potentially be done to improve the design, and anyone suitably motivated could probably play woulda-coulda-shoulda with the details all day. But me, I'd leave it as it is. My wish list for this knife actually only has two entries on it: I wish I knew what to call it, and I wish I knew where the hell the design was ripped off from.

We are all quite well acquainted by now, I hope, with the Kershaw/Emerson CQC-6K. You are even if you don't know it, because it's the comparison knife I include alongside whatever it is I'm whiffling on about this week. Although it's not quite my single most favorite knife in the world, it's definitely a solid contender. Top five, for sure. Mine is the knife I carry the most, it's been with me to the most places, and it's done the most things. When I'm not feeling any specific breed of perversity that prompts me to carry of the others in my ridiculous and perpetually widening collection, it's my default choice. I know it'll perform and that I can trust it. There's no reason not to.

But what if you're Sergei Rachmaninoff and the 6K just isn't big enough to do it for you?

Enter this. It's the Kershaw/Emerson CQC-4KXL. Or model 6055D2 to its friends. The last part of the first part along with the last part of the second part tell you most of what you need to know. This is a big knife, and it's made of D2.

The CQC-4KXL is every bit of 8-7/8" long open, 5" closed, and it sports a 3-7/8" long drop pointed D2 blade. The blade is quite stout at 0.133" thick and the bevel is hollow ground. Similar to the CQC-6K, the blade has a long grained machined surface on the flat but the bevel has a satin tumbled finish. The whole shebang comes in at a hefty 176.7 grams or 6.23 ounces.

As a Kershaw/Emerson collaboration, this knife has quite a few distinctive design elements and a clear set of DNA that draws a through line connecting it to the CQC-6K and then the rest of Emerson's CQC series.

The Emerson half of it includes a predilection to assembling the knife with slotted and Phillips head hardware rather than Allen or Torx, a knurled disk on the spine in place of the more usual pair of thumb studs, and the "Wave Shaped Feature," which just like all the other CQC knives is this one's major defining trait.

Draw this knife from your pocket at the right angle and with just a modicum of skill, and the hook on the back of the blade will catch the seam on your pocket and snap the knife open for you. It's not a switchblade and it's not even spring assisted. It doesn't need to be -- After just a couple of practice runs you'll be a veritable magician and this thing'll just leap into your hand deployed and ready to rock. This makes the 4KXL and its CQC siblings excellent self defense knives if you're into that kind of thing. Plus, it's hard for the law to find any way to frown on it because mechanically and at its core, it's just an ordinary pocket knife.

To assist in this, there's a G-10 scale only on one side of the knife. The other side is smooth bead blasted steel with all rounded over edges, so it'll draw cleanly and without snagging or, perhaps more important for everyday use, without destroying the hem on your pockets. The clip can be swapped to the other side but the scale can't. So it rather defeats the purpose to do that, but at least left handed users won't be left completely out of luck.

The Kershaw side of its lineage means that the CQC-4KXL has a normal grind and isn't a goddamn chisel edge, and also that it'll only set you back about $35. That's significantly more palatable than the knives sold under Emerson's own label. The "China" inscription tucked away down on the heel there may have something to do with that.

Everything in the CQC series is a liner lock or in the case of this one a frame locking folder. It'd rock face if Kershaw finally got around to designing an Axis -- er, sorry, "DuraLock" -- knife with the Emerson Wave on it. But so far, no dice. If they do, I'll probably buy ten. (Are you listening, guys?)

Thus the pivot action on this (and all the other CQC knives I own or have handled) is the fly in the ointment and it's definitely where the penny was saved. The CQC-6K actually rides on phosphor bronze washers, but this one doesn't. The 4KXL has plain nylon ones instead. The action's not bad, per se, but it is a little draggy. The lock on these knives is always very stiff and thus very positive, but it also induces a lot of friction you have to overcome opening and closing it. There's a plain steel detent ball on the inner face of the lock which rides across a surface on the blade heel that's not polished, so friction it creates is evident and makes opening it far from silent.

That's opening it manually, though. Why anyone would do that on a regular basis is beyond me, because the whole point of this knife is that it'll go from 0 to 100% in an instant by itself when you draw it. When you do it the intended way, snapping it open off the hook, you don't feel the pivot and nothing about it matters.

You also get a monumental clack from the blade hitting its endstop and the lock dropping home. You can hear it and feel it. That's probably on purpose, though, because you want positive feedback that you drew the knife correctly and it locked open before you try sticking anything with it. Even so, that makes the CQC-4KXL and by extension the rest of its family less pleasant to use as fiddle toys than some other options. These are knives designed to work, not for playing with.

The CQC-4KXL comes apart just like you'd expect. Just like the other Kershaw CQC knives, in point of fact. I've never been super sold on the Phillips and slotted hardware on an ideological level. I get why this was done; presumably so Operators in the field could take these apart with just readily available tools or what's on their Swiss Army knives, or whatever. But modern knives are put together with Torx screws for a reason... It's to prevent accidents and having it all end in tears. Phillips is easy to strip and slotted heads are the most likely fastener on Earth to result in your driver slipping out and gouging something. Still, the fact remains that I've never actually had any difficulty actually disassembling any of these knives, and the 4KXL is no exception. So I guess I can't complain.

As we've become accustomed to seeing on most Kershaw knives, the pivot screw has an anti-rotation flat on it. The head on that side is just a rounded button head with no driver slot in it.

The lockup is very traditional, and it is my plausible but unproven theory that these are hand-tuned at the factory for lock engagement, based on the evidence of the grinder mark that's been left on it. My CQC-6K was the same way.

Otherwise, the fit and finish is up to Kershaw's typically impeccable standard. I've never gotten a dud Kershaw, ever, not even one of their cheap models. The lockup is solid, blade wiggle is negligible, and everything about it fits together very well. I can tell you from experience that Kershaw CQC knives will stand up to heavy and long term use without complaint and I see no reason why this one should be any different.

The CQC-6K (right) is already a pretty big knife. But the CQC-4KXL (left) just towers over it.

Open it's the same story. The 6K is already a competent fighter, but 4KXL has even more combat oriented design elements. The point on the blade is much less upswept, and it is near as makes no difference perfectly aligned with the centerline of the knife. There is a horn on the forward end of the handle the makes an even more pronounced finger guard as well. All this adds up to a knife that ought to be very effective at delivering a ne'er-do-well a rather inconvenient poke if necessary.

(No the finish on my CQC-6K is not from the factory. One day I'll get around to writing about that and showing it off up close, preferably after I grind out that damn nick in the edge.)

The Inevitable Conclusion

I maintain that the Kershaw/Emerson knives as a whole remain one of the best options available for a budget friendly folding knife. There's no need to gamble on an unknown brand or a knockoff when these are so cheap, high quality, and readily available. And I turned my back for one second and the next time I looked it turned out suddenly there's a whole galaxy of CQC's, now: Little ones, medium ones, big ones. The works.

In this case if you want a big knife that's got a trick deployment mechanism that's not a gimmick, not stupid, and actually works then the CQC-4KXL is a fantastic value for the money.

And I know we don't talk about using knives for self-defense in front of the normals these days. We just allude to it, a nod's as good as a wink, say no more say no more. That's because if any dingbat in the capital finds time in his busy schedule to find out about it in between snorting blow off of the backs of interns and embezzling highway funds to finance his swimming pool and cabana, he'll surely try to take them all away from us. But if you are in a position to need such a thing for any combination of reasons, I think the CQC-4KXL is going to be not only a good choice for its price, but hands down one of the best choices in the world.

Room service just sent this up. To cut the limes.

It's a Ganzo D727M, and if you saw it and smelled a rat you were right. That's because Ganzo is as usual, oh, let's call it offering "alternative" buying options to knives from other manufacturers. In this case it's the near spitting image of the Ontario Knife Company's RAT.

In a previous writing, we looked at the Ganzo G729 and I ended it with a long bout of introspection on the price of a knife, and its true worth. Undercutting your own countrymen, I decided, can be worth it when the asking price is already too damn high. The case the D727M presents is less clear cut, though. The RAT it apes is not an unattainable dream to the working man -- it only runs about $50. But the D727M, by contrast, is only $21 at the time of writing.

In the Ganzo tradition, there are also some changes.

Ganzo has seen fit to equip it with their "G-Lock" Axis style lock, as opposed to the liner lock the RAT comes with. Which if you ask me is a lot nicer than the original.

And rather than the AUS-8 that much of the RAT series comes in, the D727M's flat ground, satin stonewashed blade is made of D2 tool steel.

And it's a big knife. Near as makes no difference to 8-1/4" long open, 4-5/8" closed, and its drop pointed blade is 3-1/2" long and a stout 0.133" thick. The knife is 0.506" thick across its G-10 scales, not including the clip. It's 1.345" across in breadth at its widest point when closed, and at 115.8 grams (4.08 ounces) all of that makes it a big knife for big hands, and big jobs.

The clip is a traditional design with Ganzo's now familiar three screw mount, reversible, but with tip-up positions only. It's not deep carry, and it's nothing special. It's sprung with a nice balance of grip force and release, though, providing a nice draw. The whole knife's construction is very familiar, really. G-10 scales on top of steel liners which, if you peer in the gap, have big holes cut in them to make them lighter. Shiny Torx hardware. Stairstep daibolo spacers. A spine that's as square and straight as a priest's collar.

But at $21, is it any good? And even then, is $21 worth what it is and all that it entails?

In that foul year of our lord, 1972, Richard Nixon went to China. Only he, we are told, could have done it. Nixon opened the gates in the Great Wall and it turned out that the CCP liked their little taste of capitalism. They liked it a lot. Most of all, they must have liked the smell of money. Spurred by Western investment, goods started to leave China for the rest of the world. First a trickle, then a torrent, now a flood. The Party can call themselves "Communist" all they want but they run the whole damn country as one giant export business now, for profit -- the world's factory. And we gave it to them.

Oh, how we decry the Sinoist takeover of the manufactured goods sector these days. Why don't we make anything here anymore? I hate to break it to you, but it's not some yellow Communist plot. It's because we've been ratfucked by our own; the fatback grosseros on our shores carved it all up and hired China to make it cheaper so they could sell it back to us with a higher margin. "Profits this quarter," is the refrain. "Fuck the future and the consequences." We gave China the plans for our products and told them to make it all for us. So they did.

And in the bargain, the Chinese knockoff was born.

Apple, a company as American as, well, Apple pie. They hired China to make the iPhone for them. Gave them the equipment, the bill of materials, and all the plans and blueprints. So Foxconn, and China, know how to make an iPhone. Now, knockoff iPhones are being cranked out by the containerload. And knockoff everything else, too. It's the same story. We put up the lightning rod and threw the switch; nobody should be surprised about winding up with the monster.

So far the American knife industry has nearly, but not completely, escaped the siren call of cheap overseas labor. There are been a few casualties: Schrade, now owned by Taylor Cutlery which is Chinese. Gerber, completely made in China now. But by and large, the American knifemakers have remained resolutely American... Mostly. Almost. Some cheaper models are outsourced to China or Taiwan. Hell, the Ontario RAT is one of them. It's made in Taiwan. So just like the iPhone, even its original is technically Chinese. So is almost everything from Cold Steel, and a few Kershaw models including my beloved CQC-6K.

So we've seen that if you give them the plans, the Chinese can make it for you and they can make it well. It's when they give it a go on their own that things tend to unwind.

We're very familiar with the Chinese knockoff here in the knife hobby. It's a well worn joke. It's always the same story: Make it fast, make it cheap. Make it now, sell it now, never mind about tomorrow. Cheat. Corners are there to be cut. Rattly and nasty. Horrible and strange. The purview only of provincial rednecks and desperate teenagers who don't know any better. Fear and loathing in the glass case at the flea market. And up until just about the day before yesterday there was nothing of value to find there. These are the same factories and drop-shippers grinning while selling you a "12 million lumen" flashlight that runs off of two AA's, or $12 "Rolexes" made out of plastic and lead paint.

But suddenly they're getting better.

In 2019, Tim Leatherman, the founder of the Leatherman Tool and Knife Company, said this: "There’s a lot of knockoffs coming from China. The price is about one-tenth of ours, but the quality is about one-twentieth. Nevertheless, the day is going to come when the price is 50 percent of ours but the quality is 80 percent."

That day is now. I'm holding the proof in my hand, and it says Ganzo on it.

The fit and finish of the D727M are phenomenal. Mechanically, there isn't a single thing about it not to recommend. Flick the thumb studs and it leaps open like a frog from a dynamite pond. Hold back the lock and give it a swing and it'll snap shut like a mouse -- or rather rat -- trap. The lockup has all the precision of a Swiss watch. The blade doesn't wiggle in the slightest. Not the merest scuff nor rough machine mark nor shortcutted, unfinished surface is visible anywhere on it. The blade grind is even, precise, fully true, and sharp out of the box.

And it's only $21.

What terrible progress the Chinese could make overnight if only they could figure out how to apply all this know-how, all this skill, this mastery of mass production to an original design. We're at slack water now. Once the baggage of the copy is cast off and we're presented with a bespoke product not shoddily run off for a low-effort buck but made to the same standards and for the same price, the tide will finally have turned. And we will be fucked.

Past that point there will be no stopping it. There probably already isn't. As much as we are addicted to buying whatever it is, China is addicted to its manufacture. China is a rich country now because it owns US debt. We're locked together in this grim waltz now, neither ever able to stop because the moment we do the entire teetering edifice would collapse on the spot.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The relentless march of globalization has taught us just how small the world actually turns out to be. But now, should it be normal for something as mundane as the purchase of a pocket knife have ethical considerations stapled to it?

It's easy to say China this, China that, as if it were a single monolithic entity. China is ripping us off and siphoning our jobs. China is selling us back our own American dream, 99 cents at a time. China is repression personified, and China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. Well, the Chinese government is. And fuck the Chinese government with a cheese grater on a pole. But the Chinese government is no more the Chinese people than the American government is you and me. Chinese jobs are manned by Chinese people -- Running the machine shops that are making this knife, for instance. Chinese people who are, hopefully, becoming part of China's finally burgeoning middle class. And if so, good for them.

The fact of the matter is, the D727M is a fine knife. Everything Ganzo makes is, as far as I can tell. Once either is in your hand, there's nothing between an Ontario RAT and this Ganzo. Pick the one you like. The rest is goddamn politics.

Your regularly scheduled program of exasperatingly verbose portable cutlery dissertations will now resume. I've been busy lately. (Knives taken on that expedition: My Cold Steel Finn Wolf, the Dinkum D2 Encumberance, a Leatherman Surge.)

This is the Kershaw Launch 9, model 7250OLSW. It is green. Like the avocado on your toast.

It's also a side opening automatic.

It's part of Kershaw's dizzying array of "launch" knives, which in a very un-Kershaw-like way manage not to have any memorable names. They're just numbered. Launch 4, Launch 9, Launch 11, and so forth. After a while it starts to make your head spin, and you'll wonder if we're talking about knives or if we're supposed to be flying fighter planes.

All of Kershaw's Launch knives share one set of attributes, in that they're all competently American built side opening automatics with aluminum handles. Before it was discontinued, number 9 here MSRP'ed for $175 and was eventually available for around $100. So as usual for brand name automatics, this as well as its brethren are rather pricey toys destined to either be bought and rarely carried by enthusiasts with deep pockets, or put on your precinct's expense account.

But the Launch 9 in particular has one additional attribute with which to recommend it. I'll start by doing this:

It's tiny. 5" long overall, 3-3/16" closed, with a drop pointed, CPM154 blade that is precisely 2" long measured from the point to the base of the cutting edge. Or if you're being even more charitable, 1-7/8" from the forwardmost end of the handle.

And what that means is that this is a California legal switchblade.

No, would have never previously guessed in a million years that such a thing were a possibility, either.

The Launch 9 is, then, a little EDC switchblade that's actually designed to be used. What a novel concept! It's got a nice deep carry pocket clip with a smooth draw and a pleasant feel, reversible, plus a lanyard loop in the tail. The blade has Kershaw's "working finish" stonewashed surface, which is etched slightly and tumbled in such a way to produce a finish that's supposed to hide scratches and wear. It doesn't weigh much, either: only 42.5 grams or 1.5 ounces. That's thanks to the all aluminum handle construction, which is 0.439" thick and is enough to inspire some confidence in the hand.

The Launch 9 has a drop pointed blade that overall has one of those "all belly" sort of geometries. It has a flat grind, as well you'd hope for a knife that costs so much. There's a fuller machined into it just below the spine for some reason. Aesthetics, most likely, since I can't foresee the blade having enough length or surface area to get stuck into anything or anybody, even if you did wind up using for self defense.

Deployment is very easy and trouble free. The Launch 9 is ridiculously spring loaded and snicks open with authority every time you press the button. There's no safety to get in the way and the button sits noticeably proud of the handle surface. Pressing it doesn't take an undue amount of effort and it's always trouble free, thanks to the mechanism letting go well before the face of the button is flush with the surface of the handle.

There's no finger notch or guard, but the spine of the blade is jimped nicely for grip.

I think the green color is very nice, too. You can (could, at least) get it in black, as well. But I prefer a green knife.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I really do like the Launch 9. In a world where automatics are inevitably marketed as if they're to be used exclusively on Taliban insurgents or Tony Montana, this one is instead designed for normal sane people, who could actually use it for more peaceful, utilitarian tasks. It's the little switchblade that could, one you can have on you on the street, and possibly without a calling on the carpet by the HR department, either.