PocketKNIFE

That's right, here's another entry from my seemingly never ending collection of Balisong Shaped Objects. (I think this is what the cool kids today are calling "building the brand.")

The eagle eyed among you have already spotted what this actually is.

Yes, it's a bali-comb.

This marks a milestone in my knife(ish) collecting career, since it's the very last item I ever ordered from the BudK catalog, probably going on for a decade ago. Despite this, they still mail me full color glossy catalogs every so often, which certainly costs them more in printing and postage than they made from selling me this.

(I don't deal with BudK anymore. You shouldn't, either. That's because they're shitheads.)

This not-knife perfectly encapsulates pretty much the entire BudK purchasing experience, because it serves no purpose other than to look good in the glamor shots and then turns out to actually be useless for its advertised purpose. That's because, if you hadn't spotted it already, this does an absolutely abysmal job of being a comb. It's actually only superficially comb shaped. The teeth are all squared off, and have no taper. So all you wind up doing with it is kind of ineffectually scraping your scalp with the corners and edges which is a uniquely unpleasant experience.

It's as if someone described the shape to someone who had never seen a comb before over a very bad telephone line, and just stamped the result and put it in a box. It works half-okay as a balisong trainer, though. I mean, in a world that's a vacuum in which other balisong trainers don't already exist.

I didn't take this apart to photograph because some of the screw heads turned up slightly misshapen from the factory. That, and I can't be bothered. But I will point out this, which is the puzzling decision to have a different number of spacer washers on each side of the pivots. I'm not sure why this is, because it doesn't serve to center the comb "blade" in the handles any better. In fact, it makes it sit noticeably off to one side.

The bali-comb otherwise has the full compliment of traditional flea market junk design features. For instance, these holidays in the sprayed on black finish, and the classic style of ugly press-fit kicker pins.

You know how we dig up ancient tools and objects nowadays, and attempt to divine the motives and methods of the cultures that created them? Well, I have to imagine in some far-flung date, future archaeologists are going to unearth stuff like this -- probably from the crumbled foundations of my house -- and wonder just what the fuck 21st century man was thinking.

The Inevitable Conclusion

As it happens, I was in Jake's Country Trading Post the other week, which is a combination lawn statuary shop and roadside tourist trap in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As is apparently mandatory in these types of establishments, in a glass display case there they had a selection of overpriced shitty knives. And lo, what did I see in there but this exact same item -- only minus the BudK "branding." I asked the clerk there if anyone had ever bought one of the stupid things and he said that to his recollection no one ever has.

That ought to tell you all you need to know.

(I did, however, buy a different... item... that you may see here at some point in the future. It was unavoidable; you know how it is.)

Yo!

Here's a pen made by a knife maker. I collect knives, I collect pens. I collect balisongs. This is a balisong pen. "Inevitable," I think, is the word that best describes how we got here.

There's also a bit of a problem with it that you may have already noticed. That's not dirt or dust all over it in the pictures above. It's glue. I've had to glue this pen back together several times, and that's because it's designed to break itself if you have the audacity to actually use it as advertised. So I've given up, and now my BaliYo just sits unused on my pen display shelf gently accumulating a fine layer of dust.

If all you wanted to know was whether or not you should spend $14 on one of these without me prattling on about it for another thousand words, you can stop reading right here. No, you shouldn't. Go buy a Parker Jotter instead.

Anyhow.

Even after you take into account its core concept, the BaliYo is really weird. It is, as advertised, a balisong pen. It's got two pivots in the middle and you can flip and spin it around like a balisong knife. On the business end is a pedestrian ballpoint pen tip, which does indeed write but doesn't otherwise offer anything special. It's simple a twist-to-retract mechanism.

You may have noticed that the BaliYo does not include a latch. The handles can't be locked either open or closed. How you're meant to write with it is while it's in the closed position, and the pen point sticks out past the little weighted dealies on the ends of the handles like so. This works, but gives it a really weird writing feel. It's quite a wide load in this configuration, so depending on how you hold a pen you may also find yourself knocking the weights against the paper.

It also looks an awful lot like Dark Helmet's tie, doesn't it? Now that I said it you won't be able to unsee it.

A pair of springy pocket clips are provided -- double the number the nerd in the next cubicle has got -- and when it's riding in your shirt pocket rather a lot of it is left sticking out, so others will be able to see that your schwartz is twice as big as theirs. Since you can't lock the pen closed the dual clips are required to keep it from flopping around in your pocket while you're carrying it.

The whole thing is made of plastic, other than the clips and weights, and the metal collar where the point unscrews. The weights are there to provide enough inertia to actually allow you to flip it satisfactorily, but the big issue here is that the entire thing appears to be made out of basic ABS plastic which isn't very impact resistant, and there's nothing stopping the weights from clacking together.

So rather quickly, you'll find that the thin plastic surrounding them breaks. You can see what we're up against in the picture above.

I can think of quite a few ways Spyderco could have prevented this, all paths that they elected not to take. A pair of self-adhesive rubber bumpers on the outsides of the weighted ends, perhaps. Or a short tang with a basic kicker pin on the heel of the pen part, preventing the handle ends from contacting each other. Or just don't make the friggin' thing out of cheese. I'm pretty sure Spyderco of all people could get their hands on some glass filed nylon or something.

You can, of course, take the BaliYo apart and at this point I think I am contractually obligated to do so.

There's not much unexpected inside except for this pair of plastic bushings that the pivots ride on. They're the only precision component in here, and similar to the Smallfly 2 we looked at the other day, they are sized precisely such that you can completely torque down the pivot screws without A) breaking anything, or B) locking the pivots solid.

The ink cartridge in the BaliYo is proprietary, but replaceable. I think it's unlikely you'd run it out of ink before simply breaking the pen, though. I certainly didn't. Mine still writes even though I bought it close to a decade ago.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Maybe the newer models of this are less fragile, but mine certainly broke quite quickly. So without confirmation of that I'm not exactly in a big rush to buy another one. There's not much use for a fidget toy that you can't fidget with. And otherwise this thing isn't a very good pen, either.

This is neither a review or I guess really one of my usual Weird Knife screeds, but inspired by the post from the other day by @CharlesMangione... Here is a much worse implementation of a similar idea. These are a little strange but not necessarily that unusual because I still see them knocking around on the tables at flea markets all the time.

Everybody and their grandmother had one of these stupid things in the '90's and I'm no exception. They were marketed hard at the survivalist crowd which I guess was a lucrative market during the Clinton years, what with the popularity of the whole Michigan Militia thing, and so on and so forth.

Anyway, I've frequently seen these billed as "the knife that's its own sheath!"

But, like, isn't how every folding knife is? Duh?

Anyhow, the mechanism is a "pantographic" design, and these things work via a simple cantilever arrangement that retracts the blade into the handle. You lift this latch...

...And then you can kind of squirt the blade out the front like so.

(Note that this is basically impossible to do quickly, or one handed.)

Nicer ones of these have a track that the blade runs along so it doesn't knock against the crossguard on the way out. This isn't one of those, so in addition to being its own sheath this is also the miracle knife that dulls itself every time you use it.

Other highlights include this sawback cut into the spine of the blade, also presumably for "survival" purposes, which was the style at the time. But it's not actually sharp, so you ain't sawing jack shit with it even if you tried. I suppose you could use it as a fish scaler if you really wanted to, at the risk of getting stinky fish guts all over your knife.

Despite the prominent "stainless" marking on the blade, you'll note that mine has accumulated its fair share of rust stains over the years just from sitting around. So that's probably bogus, as was the notion that knives like these were ever issued to paratroopers, because they weren't. Strangely, the patent number engraved on there is not bogus, and actually cross-references to the patent for the original design. Why anyone is still bothering to stamp it on there decades later is beyond me, though, because the patent is pre-WW2 and is long since expired. (Except possibly to attempt to trick rubes into believing that this is a genuine period military issue item, which is extra rich because these were never military issue items to begin with.)

I'll bet you a shiny Lincoln penny you'll never figure out what this is if you don't already know. I'll give you a minute to think about it.

...

...

It is, indeed, not a knife. But it is a knife accessory.

Do you just find that getting out your pocketknife and opening it is just too much hassle? Well, CRKT apparently has you covered right down to the ground with this: the "Merlin."

It is a holster for most* folding pocketknives, which affixes to your belt and holds your knife in a semi-open position, ready for rapid deployment so you can be a ~~First Response Tactical Operator~~ look like an absolute fully rigged ocean going bell end.

No, really. CRKT calls it a "professional folding knife deployment sheath." With a straight face. I can't make this up.

Behold:

If I am understanding the rationale correctly here, I think this is supposed to be a cheeky legal dodge to knife laws that either prevent you from carrying a fixed blade knife or prevent you from carrying some manner of automatic opening knife like a switchblade. And further, for locations where the law has become wise to those types of guys who get clever and carry their Spydercos already open in a little Kydex sheath, like was all the rage in the early 2000's.

This is of course operating under the rather massively flawed premise that carrying a dinky pocketknife for the purposes of first resort self defense is actually a good idea.

Anyway.

How this works is you stick your knife point first into the tapered pocket in this thing, which has a sliding billy-goat beard sort of apparatus that, when you pull it, is supposed to hold your knife with just enough friction that it's easy to yank out but won't just fall out on its own. Theoretically.

To assist in this, a pair of flexible wedges on these ears are provided, one of which you're supposed to stuff into the handle of your knife. There's one on either side, so you can use the Merlin as either a righty of a lefty.

There's a rather bodacious belt clip on the back, and the whole ensemble can pivot about 20 degrees in either direction to, I presume, assist in busting it out. The pivot is lightly spring loaded. You can undo the screw in the middle and relocate the entire assembly relative to the clip, in one of 8 positions (per the marketing brochure) in case you like to live really dangerously and, say, dangle your knife upside down out of this thing.

Yes, yes, yes. I have spent all these words without getting around to the two points you've already figured out, which I can hear you screaming at your computer screen right now.

Point the first: If this is supposed to be a legal end-run around laws that prohibit you from carrying a knife in anything but the closed position, the knife you've stuffed into this thing also isn't in the closed position, is it? Q.E.D. My state is actually one of those states, and our law specifically includes the verbiage, "Ordinary folding pocket knife with a blade no longer than 3 inches, carried in the closed position."

Point the second: This is actually a really stupid, bulky, and flagrantly unsafe way to carry a knife. It self-evidently leaves a portion of the cutting edge exposed -- potentially a significant portion depending on how audacious of a folder you cram in here -- and neatly circumvents whatever hold-closed mechanism any knife might have such as a detent or button lock while offering nothing to replace it. You also wind up with your half-open knife riding really high on your belt so it pokes you in the ribs. Ready to get worked loose and either bite you, clatter onto the floor, or disappear into the gap between your seat and center console. And when that happens, by design it will be at least partially open. And then, if you think you're going to actually need to pull your knife in a hurry -- perhaps in some kind of hypothetical fantasy street brawl scenario -- you're going to have it on the outside of your shirt just as bold as brass ready to be yoinked by any passerby. (Or to be hassled by the cops once every nine feet.)

* Disclaimer: "Most knives" does not include...

...Knives with only one handle scale, or...

...Knives that pivot the wrong way, or...

...Knives with not enough pivots, or...

...Knives with too many pivots.

And not to beat too much on a dead horse, if your plan B is to have to magic a dinky folding knife out of your ass and get to stabbin', maybe you need to reevaluate what plan A was.

I can't see much of a practical use for the Merlin, which is precisely why there is one in my collection. You know how we do around here.

Happy Front Flipper Friday to all who celebrate! Today is also a NKD* for me with the recent arrival of the Civivi Appalachian Drifter II.

The lineage of the Appalachian Drifter family is intersting as there have been a number of variations. A slip-joint version in S35VN, a liner locking version in S35VN, various damascus versions, and this, the Nitro-V version. All, as far as I know, are now discontinued by Civivi and most places are offering remaining stock with pretty good discounts.

This has an odd-ball pocket clip: it's curved and has a triangular mount that is not compatible with any other Civivi knife that I've seen. (I'm not a We/Civivi/Sencut expert though so don't hold me to that.)

This might be only the second folding knife I own with a clip-point blade, which seems odd, as I like the blade shape. The original slip-joint has a traditional pocket knife feel/look to it and the Drifter II continues that albeit with more modern materials.

In-hand this feels, for me, pretty good. My hand fits well inside the curve of the scales and I don't get an hotspot with the clip. The deployment, on my copy, has been a little hit-or-miss. Maybe that's user error or maybe there's some weirdness going on but sometimes it flips out beautifully and sometimes it stops half-way. It might just need a disassembly and cleaning though. The jimping on the flipper is not rough and doesn't tear up your thumb. In theory you should also be able to deploy it by way of flipping with the fuller but I can't do that with mine. That's probably all user error though.

The micarta is not overly smooth, which is my preference. I know some complain about the Civivi micarta but I would rather have more traction than less and have never had any issues.

This rides close to the "gentleman carry" category for me and while I would not put it through hard use there's nothing to indicate it couldn't handle it. The hollow-ground blade is thin and elegant while the Nitro-V steel gives plenty of toughness.

For the deeply discounted price I paid, I think it's a great purchase. A nod to a classic looking folder with a modern twist.

(* I actually got this last Friday but as I was heading out of town to go camping in the cold, I didn't have time to even really look at the knife. )

It looks tiny, and at 35g it is, but a 3.5" handle is enough for even my meaty hands, and most of the time a 2.5" blade is plenty. In fact, it is about the same length as a CRKT Pilar that weighs more than the Woodswalker and the sheath (55g) together.

It's not what you would call "heavy duty", that weight has to come from somewhere. You're not going to chop down trees or open paint cans with it, but it is great to have a paring knife for a picnic/cookout and other light tasks. It's easier to clean and sharpen than a folder, and you don't have to explain how a liner lock works to your friends.

The sheath is it's real party trick, fits perfectly in the back pocket of jeans or inside pocket of a jacket, with just enough handle sticking out to pull. They also make a kydex neck sheath, but this isn't c/neckknives.

Like cameras, the knife you have with you is more useful than the one you left at home, and this little guy is in my pocket more days than not.

Heh heh. Huh huh.

"Pecker."

Here's something normal...ish for a change. This is one of those ultra-minimalist folding knives, the kinds that the beanie hat wearing through hiker crowd seems to like a lot (a demographic which I may occasionally represent myself). Except this one doesn't suck.

It's also really cheap. You can get one of these for just $16. Before I bought this I'd never even heard of Tekut, so I wasn't super sure about what kind of quality I'd be getting. But the design was just goofy enough to get me to give it a shot and I have to say I rather like what you get for the price. Tekut is apparently a brand of "Nextorch Industries," Guangdong, China. However, this stands in stark contrast to the usual flea market dreck you're used to me prattling on about. It just goes to show, it's possible to make a decent knife for cheap.

Tekut explicitly market this as an EDC knife. It has a semi-deep carry pocket clip on it (non-reversible) and it's a reasonably svelte 42.3 grams (1.5 ounces). There is no fancypants titanium or any other wonder materials here; the entire thing is made of steel. So it could be made lighter, I guess, but also a lot more expensive if you tried. Instead, Tekut has made it lightweight by the simple expedient of ensuring as little as possible of it actually needs to be there.

The 7Cr17MoV blade is exactly 2-1/2" long as measured from the forward end of the handle. The usable edge length is about the same, with a teeny tiny ricasso right at the base. I dunno what the handle and other components are made out of, but they have a "black titanium nitride" finish. The blade has a nice drop point profile, very pointy, and I am just a teeny bit astounded to report to you that it does not have a chisel grind. These types of things often do, which is just nasty 'orrible, but this has a traditional double sided grind.

There's a lot of noise in the marketing bumf about this knife's "7-lock Locking Mechanism," which offers Simple And Safe Operation. The packaging mentions it no less than twice. Well, it's actually just a regular pushbutton lock with a plunger mechanism. I'm not sure where the 7 comes from.

What's slick about this knife, though, is the sheer elegance in simplifying the mechanism. The spring action for the lock is provided by this long wire spring which goes through a slot in the base of the plunger...

...And extends through to the other side where it serves to protect the blade from coming into contact with things while it's closed. Therefore the Pecker does not need any more than one handle scale, which can afford to be barely there in the first place, nor any spacers or liners, or any of their associated hardware.

As usual for these damn button lock folders, the manufacturer absolutely cannot help themselves from making the button lock the blade closed in addition to locking it open. This kind of thing usually just pisses in my campfire, since it's a universal truth that you can't friggin' open a knife like that one handed. The Pecker doesn't even include a thumb stud, so you can forget that option as well.

It took just the merest touch of a T8 torx driver on the pivot screw, though, to get my example to swing freely enough that you can flick it open with the button held down, and it'll even swing just with gravity -- without introducing any noticeable additional wiggle into the blade. So I'm a little bit less pissed off about it.

But still. If you're a knife designer, just... don't do that.

Here it is alongside the usual scale comparison objects. Get out your shot glass. The one on the right... I'm not going to say it. You already know if you know.

The ergonomics on this knife are a trifle strange mostly down to the barely-there handle. This isn't a fighting knife. I wouldn't treat it as a survival knife, either. It's not super uncomfortable and surprisingly there are no rough edges or sawtooth machining marks left on it anywhere. The handle is just really slim, in both dimensions, so your grip on it is always a bit dainty. But all the edges are just ever so slightly chamfered and thus it doesn't feel unpleasant in the hand.

I'm going to throw this at you, too. This is obviously a super budget knife, made in China, with not a whiff of premium aspirations. But the edge geometry is dead true, and spot on even. So this is what you could be getting with all your flea market mall ninja shit; your M-Techs, your Furys, your Tac Forces, Smith and Wessons and all the rest of them. But you're not. They're holding out on you. Doesn't that just burn your biscuits?

This little bastard was actually remarkably difficult to take apart. The spring was the main thing. It's in there good, and if you manage to pop it out it's quite tricky to get back into its little notch where it passes from one side of the handle to the other. The other end of it is quite firmly press-fit into its hole, and I chickened out there and left it a lone. So as you might have guessed, it is generally inadvisable to disassemble your Pecker without professional assistance.

Just dismounting the blade is less tricky, and as you can see it rides on two nylon washers which were liberally greased from the factory. (I am absolutely not going to make a Pecker-lubrication joke here. I'm not! If you were waiting for it, you'll just have to go away disappointed.)

The bill of materials on this knife is pretty damn short. There's the handle, the blade, the lock plunger, the spring, one spacer, the front plate, and the pocket clip. That's it. The entire thing is held together with only three screws. Just three! If it weren't for the pocket clip, it could have been two.

It didn't come in a box; it showed up in a blister pack on this hang card. I managed to slip the knife back in for display purposes here, but now that you all have seen it I can throw the packaging away.

The front and rear tell you pretty much all you need to know. For an inexpensive knife, I like it. Keeps the cost down, and I won't have yet another knife box I'll feel the pathological need to preserve for the collector's value.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I actually really like this little knife, in case you couldn't tell. For what it costs it has no business being as good as it is. It's fairly well built, reasonably competently designed, looks slick, and it's just got the right touch of weirdness that you all know is on brand for me. And it didn't take a whole heck of a lot of fiddling with to get it working smoothly -- at least in my case.

If you want a little knife to clip to your pack or toss in your glove box or even carry around with you every day I think you could spend a lot more and still wind up with a lot worse than the Tekut Pecker.

Heh. Pecker...

Ah.

I see you've played knifey-spoony before.

And yes, I do have the matching fork:

"But," I hear you ask, "where is the matching balisong knife?"

Don't be stupid.

Anyway, this is some more straight-from-China nonsense. These don't have a brand name, and there are oodles of others just like them in the world probably readily available from your favorite importer of Far East tat. They're a wonderful exemplar of the ISO Standard Flea Market Quality Balisong Knife. Except, obviously, not a knife. I normally can't bear to even keep something like that in the house, but these I consider exempt on the grounds of novelty alone.

And if your camping buddies have the latest in technical folding titanium spoons, I guarantee you they don't have anything on these.

Overall, these are pretty traditionally constructed Balisong Shaped Objects, although you don't get a lot of quality given the low price. That's not the end of the world. I think I paid $14 for both of these. Delivered.

This should tell you what you need to know. The pivot play in these is so bad you can practically fold them over against the axis.

But they are very shiny. The handles are chrome plated. The fork and spoon parts are quite clearly stamped out of stainless steel, but I don't think we're talking VG10 or even 440C, here. I would wager they're 18/8 or 18/10 steel, like you'd make cheap tableware out of.

They are functional, but there are some compromises. The spoon in particular is not very deeply dished. It's fine for a stewlike freeze dried backpacker's meal in a bag. But trying to eat, say, a bowl of broth with it would probably take all night. Likewise, the fork has no curve in it and the tines aren't rounded on the tips like a normal dinner fork would be. It works but it feels distinctly weird.

The one on the bottom is the spoon, in case you couldn't tell. And I know why this is so -- it's cheaper, for one, and it allows the manufacturer to use the same handles for whatever other bullshit normal knives they make, without having to make any concessions (except one, we'll see later) for the depth of a spoon. Here they are closed from the sides:

You could theoretically use one of these as a balisong trainer, but the handling feel is certainly not exceptional. A brand name trainer knife would definitely be a nicer experience, albeit much tougher to eat with... The fit and tolerances are all quite crude, with the obligatory not-straight kicker pins, inconsistent pivot feel, and tough to use latches you'd expect from a flea market level knife. Also, the pivots on my spoon are noticeably draggier than the ones on my fork even after I did my best to tune it. It was completely unusable out of the box, but some needle file work in the pivot holes and fiddling with the screw tension (and some Loctite) made it usable... Meanwhile, the fork was pretty okay (albeit rattly) from the get-go. Your mileage will probably vary. A lot.

Let's, ah, see what we're up against. Ceramic bearings? Ball races? Precision shouldered spacer pins?

Nope.

The pivots are plain Chicago screws, which would normally be fine on a budget knife if the holes they go into are drilled with any kind of precision. These aren't. Ditto with the spacer screws on the latch end, which are such a bad fit they're literally hammered through their holes in the handle plates. Trying to unscrew them from the female side is a fool's errand; the heads will just strip.

The pivots ride on these clear plastic washers, and one accommodation has been made for the marginally increased thickness of the spoon. Instead of one washer on each side there are two, doubling the spacing between the spoon and the handle plates. So there are eight of these in total.

The latch fit is pretty terrible, too. Just like the pivots, the latch on my spoon is a poorer fit than on the fork. It won't even swing freely on its pin, probably owing to the distinctly egg shaped hole drilled through it. The one on the fork behaves properly.

The Inevitable Conclusion

We haven't managed to escape the price/quality curve this time. These are cheap, and it shows. On the bright side, if you live somewhere that balisongs are illegal for whatever reason it's pretty unlikely the local constabulary could do you for having one of these. Although they might give you a hard time just for being cheeky.

I rate these one step above your common-or-garden $10 flea market knife only because they are in some sense usable as a fork and spoon, whereas a knife of this level often isn't actually usable as a knife. And eating your peas with one of these probably won't get you kicked out of the Mounties, either.

In one of my previous posts, we looked at a knockoff of the ScorpioDesign Shapeshifter, a semi-custom knife with a big price tag that comes from Germany. Its design philosophy was to have a folding knife with a blade capable of being longer than the handle once deployed. That knife is a very clever, very elegant design by Gunther Löbach.

This knife... isn't.

Although it is clearly another attempt at a similar concept.

This is (deep breath) the "MADSABRE Tactical Folding Knife with Rosewood Handle and Sheath, Foldable Long Blade 12.7-in Outdoor Pocket EDC Hunting Survival Tool, Big Blade Fishing Camping Knives Gifts for Men." Yes, another Chinese non-model with a description made for search term robots and not human beings. I'm sure you can find the same or similar from the usual scumbags at your preferred wretched hive of scum and villainy. Don't bother asking for it by name.

The MADSABRE Folding Tactical et. cetera has a blade that's about 7" long, which is clearly quite a bit longer than its handle. So when folded, this little sheet metal tail can be deployed which covers over the remaining exposed portion of the blade.

Once the blade is open this little tail is left sticking out. But it can be folded into the gap left in the handle for the blade, returning the knife to somewhat normal proportions. And yes, even so this thing is enormous. Over a foot long, nearly 12-3/4". Its tacky wood handle scales and clip point, Bowie-ish design makes it look like a schlock '80's movie prop. The villain in some Reb Brown film should be waving this around in a jungle someplace.

This is a slip joint knife, meaning it doesn't have an actual lock. But once you stuff the extension tailpiece into the handle, it wedges up against the heel of the blade and... sort of... keeps it held open. The entire arrangement is very gimcrack, and the fit and finish of every component is quite poor. But the tailpiece is the most crude, just being made out of sheet metal that looks like it was folded over by hand. It's not even straight, or creased evenly.

I'll also draw your attention to the prominent "U.S.A." marking on the blade. If you actually believe that, I have a pagoda to sell you. Actually, this knife came in a completely nondescript brown box which bears absolutely no insignia, description, or place of origin. It doesn't even have any gratuitous Engrish on it we can all laugh at. Just, nothing.

The shape and finish of the blade really puts me in mind of the cheap daggers and various other fixed blades that came out of Pakistan in the late '90's and early 2000's that used to festoon every farmer's market and flea market stall across the world. But I can't prove it came from Pakistan, and if I had to bet I would put my money on the PRC instead. Somebody somewhere is making an actual living stamping these out in a factory someplace, and they haven't gone out of business yet somehow. It's positively baffling.

Oh yes, and the astute among you have probably already figured out that with a blade that's 7" long, this thing can't be any less than 7" long when it's closed, either. And you're right. So that makes it highly unlikely you'd want to put this in your pocket. It's comically gigantic even when folded.

But that's okay! Because it also comes with the most craptastic nylon belt sheath I've seen this century:

That offset little Velcro strap actually does retain the knife, by the way, by going over the hump behind the tail extension piece. So it's got that going for it.

Everything about this knife is exceptionally crude. I didn't even bother to take it apart since the screws seem set to strip as soon as you so much as look at them. We already know what we'll find in there, which is not much other than grease and file marks. I will point out, however, that the blade geometry is ridiculously out of whack. Here's what the grind looks like:

It's got a pretty sawtoothy edge which is also extremely out of true, as you can see. It would not surprise me to learn that this was "sharpened" by someone just buzzing it down a grinding wheel by hand and then tossing it into the box for shipment.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This knife (and the inevitably numerous others of its ilk) is just bad. I can't see any reason to carry this instead of a basic fixed blade. And its ridiculous blade length is certain to make it illegal to carry just about everywhere. I think the problem it's trying to solve is one that really doesn't exist. I can't think of any other redeeming features to apply to it, other than the novelty factor.

And it is certainly novel.

Outdoor Research knife. Slathered by an orange paint pen to mark it as mine and make it more visible if left somewhere. Additional thumb stud screwed onto it for easier opening.

Despite my achievements in the realm of balisong knife collecting, it is with great shame that I have to admit that I've never actually managed to get my hands on either of the Spydercos, the Spyderfly and the Smallfly. But! Just the other day I did score one example of the updated re-release, the Smallfly 2. That makes me a very happy nerd.

The "new" (it's been out for two years) Smallfly 2 is very similar to the currently-unobtanium original Smallfly, but with the important distinction that it now has a new blade shape with a full flat grind, and made out of S30V. Yes, please. It's also of convenient EDC size, comes with a reversible pocket clip, and it's got a spring loaded latch. I was doing that Vince McMahon meme while I was reading the spec sheet. You should have seen it, it was a riot.

I like a good EDC oriented balisong knife. This one checks all the rest of my boxes, too. To see what I'm on about, here it is compared to my by now very familiar Kershaw/Emerson CQC-6K:

(Take a drink every time the Dork says "Kershaw/Emerson.")

And while we're cockling the snoot at modesty anyway, here it is compared to my Model 32:

Closed, the Smallfly 2 is about 4-1/4" long. And it's visibly very tapered, a full 1-1/2" wide at its widest end. It's 91 grams exactly (3.21 ounces). The blade is 3-1/4" long measured from the ends of the handles when deployed, with about 2-15/16" of usable edge. My caliper says it's 0.126" thick and it does taper down towards the point. Curiously, it does not have any kind of choil at all. The base of the edge just ends in a little ricasso. There isn't even a perfunctory cutout for any kind of "zen" kickerless spacers, because...

...the Smallfly has these really wide, really flat kicker pins. They engage cutouts in the handle liners that are concealed by the G10 handle scales.

You can just see them here behind the pivot points. You can also get a peek at the bronze pivot washers. More on those later.

The blade has a nice usable drop point shape and sports a decorative hole, because Spyderco is contractually obligated to put a hole in the blade of every single knife they manufacture. The maker's mark also specifies that it's made in "Golden, Colorado, USA, Earth" in case you thought it might've been sent from space.

To be fair, the Smallfly does have really funky alien looks, with its skeletonized flared handles decorated with more of Spyderco's signature holes. The handles are a sandwich construction with flat G10 scales over steel liners, and there's really not much of a bevel or any other kind of rounding on them. The handles are very grippy and the flared ends will probably serve to keep the thing from flying out of your hands, but you feel all the points and corners as you allow the handles to roll while you flip it. The pivot action is of course very smooth and low effort (again, more on that later) but the grippiness and short handles make this a lot more of a workpiece than a showing-off toy. I heard a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth back when the original two Spyderco balisongs were hitting the streets about them "not being good flippers," probably down to the very greebley design. Well, that may be so if you're used to your usual latchless competition knife with super round matchstick handles. This isn't that.

That's because short and grippy handles do not a pleasant balisong experience make, usually. But the Smallfly 2 is nearly exactly the same dimensions as my beloved Benchmade Model 32, and I can make that thing work for me. So I can make this work as well. Deployment is very speedy, and thanks to the steel liners the handles do still manage to carry good inertia. It's pretty quiet, too, helped by the fact that the G10 scales dampen a little bit of noise and also that the spring loaded latch is held out and under constant tension even when deployed, keeping it from flapping around.

You cannot, by the way, latch the knife in the open position. The latch isn't long enough, and the weird asymmetrical flared handle shape wouldn't allow it anyway. This also means that it can't contact the opposite handle in any way while you're flipping off as you do. I'm fine with that, really. I pretty much never bother to latch my balisongs even when I'm using them for something. You'll just have to unlatch it again before you put it away, and that's annoying. I find it might more convenient (and it encourages onlookers to continue to gawk) to flip it shut again when I'm done without any other steps to get in my way.

Here's the business end:

This picture illustrates why the headline image of this knife is currently my most retouched product glamor photo ever. That's because the flat satin machined surface of the Smallfly's blade kept doing this with the ring light in my little photo box:

Stripey stripey.

Right, let's void that warranty.

I only did one handle because they're the same, other than the pin holes for the latch, and due to the liners-plus-scales design the whole thing would break down into eight handle components plus all the screws and stuff. That would be a very wide spread for me to try to take a photo of.

Here's the part I kept alluding to earlier. Spyderco's entire jam with this knife is apparently to just machine everything to a really exacting standard. Normally that's just a good way for a knifemaker to show off for no other reason, but in this case they've worked it into the design. The pivots are these big shouldered pins that are threaded through both ends. They're very firmly press fit into one side of each handle liner, and engage with a D shaped hole in the other.

Here's one of the D shaped ends. The bronze washer that's not in the blade in that photo is actually captive between the handle liner and the pivot pin. You'd need to drive the pivot pin out with a punch or something to get at the washer, but there's no reason to.

That's because the length of the narrow ends of the pivot pins is exactly the same as the thickness of one washer and one handle liner. The wide sections that go through the blade are exactly the length of the thickness of the blade. And that has a very unusual effect: Unlike every other simple washer pivot knife I've handled, the tightness of the pivot screws has absolutely no effect on the tightness of the blade. Normally the torque you put on the pivot screws is a balancing act, because the tighter you crank them down the more they sandwich the face of the blade until you can't pivot it anymore and it all just locks solid. Not so with the Smallfly -- even with the pivot screws buttoned down all the way the blade still pivots freely.

That's really weird. But I like it.

The latch is sprung by a torsion spring which is also pretty unusual. When the knife is latched shut, it will pop out all on its own if you squeeze the handles together. The handle spacer on that side also acts as the block that allows the torsion spring to keep tension. If you take that section of the knife apart you'll have to spin the spring against the spacer in the right direction so it'll be back in tension. This is not hard to do, but it's easy to forget.

Note also that not only is the clip reversible, in that not only you can put it on either side of the bite handle (the one the edge slots in to) but there are matching slots on the other two handle scales as well, so you could even move it to either side of the safe handle if you wanted to. I'm not sure why you'd want to, but you could. (Our forefathers fought and died so we'd have the freedom to set our knives up in a dumb configuration, and Spyderco is apparently happy to continue to oblige.)

The clip is a springy wire affair, and it's held in with the head of a single screw. The screw sinks into either of the vaguely triangular handle spacer blocks. Do note that the screw holding in the clip is slightly longer than the other three screws in the alternate clip positions. If you move it elsewhere, you should also switch the screws.

The wiggle test:

The Smallfly 2 actually doesn't score super great here for a premium knife. Which is odd, given how precisely its pivot arrangement goes together. I think part of this is down to the fact that the handles are actually pretty flexy, including in the vertical direction. My example also has one handle always pointing slightly off axis than the other, even at rest. While I was able to tune a lot of that out by fooling with the pivot screw tension relative to one side versus the other, I wasn't able to eliminate it entirely. It doesn't affect functionality, though, including engagement of the latch.

Since this is a new knife, I still have the box sitting on my desk. So here's the unboxing bumf.

The Smallfly 2 comes in a nice slide-out box with a shiny foil Spyderco logo on it.

Inside you get not only the knife itself, but a little leaflet and a sticker you can put on the lid of your laptop, thereby signalling to all the ladies of the world that you're a highly sophisticated cutlery nerd and they probably shouldn't waste their time talking to you unless it's about crucible steel composition, or something.

The leaflet contains a whole bunch of purple prose about the Smallfly 2's design philosophy, which I could transcribe if anyone really wants to see it, but that kind of thing just makes me want to find whichever floor the marketing department is on and rampage through it with a fire extinguisher.

Curiously, there is also a strongly worded paragraph about the restricted nature of "automatic knives" (which this certainly isn't), along with a very authoritative passage claiming that there will be "ABSOLUTELY NO DIRECT SALES OF RESTRICTED KNIVES" without a physically signed Acknowledgement And Representations Form. Uh, okay. Sure.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Should you buy this knife?

Yes.

Well, if you want an EDC tailored and highly functional balisong knife in a pocket friendly size. And if you're got the better part of $300 burning a hole in your pocket. Or if you've been lamenting never being able to get your hands on a Benchmade Model 32, especially -- get out your credit card and order one of these before they're gone, because I'm sure just like the last go-round, these'll be hen's teeth again in a couple of years and you'll never pry one out of a collector's hands. (Spyderco, I'll take my commission in the form of gold bullion or, if at all possible, any new in stock OG Spyderfly units you may have lying around. Thanks in advance.)

~~Everything you buy on Wish is a rip off.~~

Almost everything you buy on Wish is a rip off.

Blep.

I was reminded to write about these because the other day BudK, after a rather long hiatus, once again mailed me one of their stupid catalogs. I haven't given BudK any business for many many years. Being infamous purveyors of crap knives has nothing to do with it, because as we all know I am a veritable connoisseur of crap knives. No, and while I proudly identify as a redneck most times, it's their particular fixation on venerating the confederacy and confederate stuff that brings my piss to a boil. I can buy shitty knives anywhere these days, so I don't have to buy them from fuckheads.

Anyway, before I chucked the damn thing in the trash I noticed they're now selling the exact same little switchblades as these -- but they're hawking them for about double what I paid for these on Wish. So if you've been eyeballing one of those for whatever reason, here you go.

I do like a good switchblade. And these... well, aren't that. But they're actually not that bad. Fully functional, definitely usable...

...And they're just so little and precious. (Pictured here compared to my usual Kershaw/Emerson CQC-6K for scale. Warning: Not a banana, do not attempt to peel and consume.) They're the perfect size for you and your half-scale gang of greasers.

This'll be a twofer, because while the designs of these are a little different they are definitely two chips off the same block. I ordered them at the same time a few years ago and I think they arrived from the same seller. Probably from the same factory, but who knows. The green one, the double edged version with the switch on the face. The silver one, single edged with the switch on the side.

Specs on both of them are pretty much identical: 3-1/4" long overall with about a 2" blade. 30.7 grams (1.08 ounces) each. They're also only about 1/4" thick, not including the toggle on the green one. The bodies are anodized aluminum, machined pretty crudely on the inside. The blades are allegedly made of "440C" but as you'll soon see, mine have developed some small rust spots despite never having existed in any environment harsher than around my desk.

If you are, say, Death The Kid both of these will annoy you mightily because they dispense their blades in an off-center fashion. They're asymmetrical because all the mechanical gubbins are all on one side, as we'll see soon.

Quality? Well, the edge geometry is a little whack and the blades can be wiggled a fair bit when they're deployed. But that's par for the course with OTF switchblades; they kind of just do that. I find the action on mine to be pretty reliable, and since I use these things as desk fidget toys I've probably snicked them in and out (especially the green one) several thousand times by now. Neither one has failed me yet, although I haven't asked anything out of any of them more demanding than slicing an envelope.

Due to the nature of the design there's not a whole heck of a lot holding the heel of the blade when it's in the extended position, so it wouldn't be too tough to break one of these if you used it as a prying tool or a screwdriver. So don't do that. These are novelties, not collector's items or workhorses.

Everyone always asks this, and no: You can't do much of a mischief to anyone by holding the knife up against them and flicking the switch. Even a quality full sized OTF switchblade doesn't power the blade for anything like its entire travel, and these little things are positively wimpy. You can just about puncture a sheet of paper if you fire the blade at it from an inch away, but even that slows it down so much that it won't lock open afterwards. (You can just gently pull it to its full extension to lock it if that happens, and then it'll close normally. There's no need to yank it sharply, which I see people doing all the time and then cutting themselves. So don't do that.)

You ever wonder how a switchblade works?

I'll be taking this apart in two steps, here, so you can see how all the mechanical parts fit together. Both of these knives use near identical mechanisms with many interchangeable parts, so I only took apart the one.

The concept is pretty simple but it's tough to wrap your head around visually, because there are several layers (literally). The crux of it is that there are a pair of notches in the heel of the blade that engage with those two little latches, which serve to hold it locked in either the extended or retracted position. You can see them in the left half in the picture above.

People often think that the blade is under spring tension all the time, but it isn't. At rest, the spring is totally relaxed. These knives use a titchy little extension spring, which in the above photo is underneath the bare steel plate on the right hand half. Here it is removed:

There are two hooks in either end, one of which grabs the base of the blade for extending it and the other of which engages a little pin going through it to retract it. When you push the switch one way or the other, you extend the spring a little bit and preload it with some tension while one or the other of the little latches holds the blade in place. The switch is also attached to the steel plate, which has two ramps on it that after some travel distance hit the latches and release the blade. Now under spring tension, it flies in whichever direction -- towards the open or closed position, depending on which way we're going. The spring actually only powers it for about a tenth of its travel distance and the rest of the way it's just carried by inertia.

When the blade is nearing the end of its travel it'll run over the latch on that end, which acts as a one way gate. There is a tiny, hair-thin spring behind each one which closes the latch behind it, but is wimpy enough that it doesn't rob much force from the blade as it passes by. The latch locks the blade in its new position, either open or closed, and now the spring is slack again. Then you can repeat the process in the other direction.

Here's one of the springs. They love to ping off into the void when you disassemble the knife.

Here's the whole shebang, in component form:

Notice the missing latch spring. I still haven't found the damn thing, and I ultimately gave up and replaced it with a slice of a pen spring. And yes, there is surface rust all over the steel components. It just kind of did that, and I presume the plate inside is just made of plain old mild steel. It probably wouldn't hurt to put a drop of silicone oil in these every once in a while.

The Inevitable Conclusion

For a couple of bucks, these are a neat little fidget toy that actually has some small modicum of function. I like mine, but only as a curio. I wouldn't be in a big hurry to try to use one of these for an EDC knife, for instance.

As a significantly less regulated marketplace of made-in-China tat, Wish is occasionally a good place to get your hands on an item that is otherwise on the naughty list -- Balisongs, little switchblades, vape stuff, and all the other sundries they won't let anyone sell on Amazon. Provided, of course, you don't wind up with something that totally isn't what was in the picture. Or just a tall frosty glass of nothing with your refund on the slow boat from China.

Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip,

Banana knife!

(Doot doot doo doo doo doot)

Click clack click clack click clack click,

Banana knife!

It's made by Benchmade

But in a weird shape

Plasticky, noodly, no collectability...

Despite having the highly desirable Benchmade "Bali-song" marking on it, the Model 53 somehow fails to command the spectacularly insane resale value of Benchmade's other models. Maybe that's because it looks so weird, with its bent shape and handle gap being bigger when it's closed than when it's open...

...Or maybe just because it's actually kind of ugly.

Even so, I rather like the Model 53 as more of a utilitarian object and less of an artistic expression, or straight-to-the-velvet-bag investment vehicle. Maybe this could be, ye gods forbid, a Benchmade balisong that's actually meant to work for a living?

I've seen the Model 53 called the "Marlowe" a lot online, probably because of this marking. But Marlowe isn't what it is, it's who designed it: Charles Marlowe. I bought it back when because it's got a couple of properties that I really like in a knife -- a size that's suited to being an EDC and not too large (4-1/2" closed, 7-3/8" open), a D2 blade with a full flat grind, and the rare inclusion of a pocket clip on a balisong knife. (A reversible one, no less!) And it comes in army green.

Actually, it only comes in army green. And that brings us to discussing one of the... unusual... aspects of the Model 53. Those army green handles are made of G10. Not "with G10 scales," not "embellished with G10 inserts."

Made of. G10.

All the way through.

There are no metal handle liners in this knife at all. Just two wedge shaped spacers made out of titanium. That means the whole thing is really light: Only 95.7 grams (3.38 ounces). As you would then expect, most of the weight is actually in the blade, which is 3-1/8" long with a roughly 3" long usable edge. It is stonewashed, and has a very usable drop point shape with a small offset choil at the base.

Just about everything about this knife is offset, come to think of it. Like the heel of its blade, showing a section of jimping on one side and this weird hammerhead wedge on the other.

The kicker pins shown here and even pin pressed through the latch are longer on one side than the other, and at this point I'm not entirely sure if that isn't intentional.

The Model 53 has an otherwise "traditional" dual kicker pin design, even though you think it wouldn't to avoid bashing the pins into the soft G10 handle material. The latch -- also titanium -- isn't spring loaded. That's practically Benchmade's calling card, so what's up with that?

Due to the choice of materials the handles are also super flexy. In the closed position, the latch rests home in its little groove very firmly. It's basically impossible to kick it loose with your pinky. But it can actually be made to drop free by giving the handles a really big squeeze, which can bring them closer together by at least a quarter inch. That actually feels pretty alarming, but my example has been withstanding that for years with no issue so I guess it's just how it's supposed to work.

The latch has a limited range of travel and is stopped by the end of the spacer wedge on its side. It can't touch the blade, but it can touch the inner surface of the opposite handle and as you can see, my example has some visible marring on the corners there from being repeatedly bashed with the pin in the latch.

The overall package just has an uncanny vibe. Maybe it's because all the contact surfaces are metal-on-G10, and some deeply buried portion of all of our brains recoils as this since it's just so clearly wrong. All the pieces are precisely machined and fit together well, but they way it all works and feels as designed is just... strange.

The Model 53 flips very nicely but the super lightweight handles don't carry a lot of inertia. That feeling definitely takes some getting used to, and owing to its light weight and short handles the '53 probably isn't the best choice for a show-off trick spinning knife. It's definitely meant to be more of an EDC tool which just happens to also be a balisong.

Here's what's inside:

I've been deliberately avoiding mentioning this so I could keep it as a surprise. The Model 53 has ball bearing pivots.

Ball bearing pivots. On a knife with handles made entirely of soft composite. How?

Well, there are no fewer than eight of these little machined aluminum spacers in there with races milled into them for the balls in the bearings. There are four bearings, and each one of them gets two of these: One facing the handle, one facing the blade. The bearings are why this knife is so easy to flip even though the handles don't weigh anything.

Even the pivot screws are asymmetrical, with this D shaped design that fits a matching cutout in each handle. Thus they can be smooth headed "impossible" screws, but which don't require any tricks to undo.

The rest of the Model 53's construction consists solely of a quartet of Chicago screws that go through the handle spacers, holding the non-pivot ends of the handles together. They're press-fit into the handles, and while you can remove them it takes quite a shove and there's no reason to. The handles can come part while leaving them in place. The latch just swings on a pin that sticks through a pair of holes on the very end. And the screws holding down the pocket clip are just chunked straight into the G10 material, with no threaded inserts or anything. I always found that a little concerning, but mine hasn't ripped out yet.

Here's the wiggle test.

You can get the tips of the Model 53's handles pretty far out of whack relative to each other, even when the pivot screws are buttoned down. Usually that's not the case for bearing pivot knives, but in the case of the '53 I can't exactly prove that just not down to the sheer bendiness of the handles. It probably is.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If any of the rest of the usual suspects in the balisong world aren't hipster enough for you, maybe consider the Model 53. Just think of how much fun you could have explaining to everyone how it's an obscure gem that was underrated in its time. And even when it was new it only retailed for $170. If you can snag a used one it shouldn't be much more than that. I think at this point it's probably the cheapest way to get a balisong with that Benchmade butterfly logo on it into your pocket.

If said pocket is in a pair of army surplus fatigues, the '53 might be the perfect way to accessorize. Canvas messenger bag, flannel button down, and beard wax optional.

This thing really just about speaks for itself.

The Mantis Gearhead would be a perfectly unassuming normal-ish liner lock folding knife if it weren't for the fact that it's a solid contender for a knife with the most overwrought opening mechanism ever. It's got a planetary gearbox in the pivot that converts the press of the lever you see there into a full 180 degree swing of the blade.

No, really.

This also makes it a one handed opener via the aid of this... mechanism... without the need for any type of spring loading. Thus it is another one of our entrants in the Very Definitely Not A Switchblade category, which is sure to annoy some legislator somewhere if only they knew about it.

This composite is downscaled quite heavily, but it gives you the idea. Note the rotation of the planetary gears and their sun ring, and movement of the lever. They're not just on there for decoration. All the little gears turn when you open it. All the little gears are used specifically to open it. There's no other way. And there is no reason to do this. It is pants-on-head loony and I love it.

The Gearhead is quite chunky, at a good 5/8" thick (not including the pocket clip). It weighs 119.2 grams (4.2 ounces), with a blade length of 2-3/4" and about 2-5/8" of usable length. The blade is pedestrian 440C steel, 0.104" thick, and presented here in this doofy tanto point. Other options, including drop point profiles and variants with brass rather than silver gears are allegedly available. But out of stock everywhere, so I have to take what I can get.

So enough about that: How it is as an actual knife?

Well, terrible.

The problem with the Gearhead is that aside from its clockpunk opening mechanism, it's otherwise just an ordinary cheap folding knife, not made to any particular standard of precision and without much thought towards usability.

The big one: It takes an incredible shove on that lever to actually open the knife. In order to turn the very short lever press into the very long opening arc, it's geared up significantly. Its gear ratio is 1:4. Not 4:1! It's not a gear reduction. It's an increase. So it takes four times as much force against the lever as it'd take to open the blade itself by hand. (I counted a lot of tiny gear teeth to bring you this info, by the way. 48 on the ring gear, 12 on the sun gear.) And since it's just an ordinary cheap liner lock knife underneath, the beginning of that lever press also has to employ enough force to overcome the little detent nub that holds the blade in the closed position.

It's kind of a thumb-buster, is what I'm getting at.

And there's no thumb stud if you'd like to open it the normal way. I'd also argue that the detent is really unnecessary, since there's more than enough friction across the pivot and geartrain to prevent the knife from flopping open in your pocket. The mechanism can't freewheel -- if the blade is moved, the gears have to move, and vise-versa.

And then, it's actually remarkably difficult to hold the knife in exactly the pose that allows you to mash the lever hard enough but not get you palm in the way, either to block the blade from moving or just grazing your palm with the tip as it passes by.

The rear of this knife has this oddball backing disk that's trying really hard to look like it needs a fancy five-pronged spanner to remove it. It's cosplaying as one of those weird retainer nuts from a Boker folding knife, perhaps. But it's fake: The disk actually spins freely and serves no purpose other than as a decorative spacer. What's actually holding it together is the normal screw head in the middle.

Also located there is the non-reversible pocket clip. The clip's very basic, but at least functional. I can see no reason it could not be mounted to the other side other than pure cost cutting in not drilling the requisite holes. It's the perfect length to go on the slab on the front side of the knife just as well as the rear, but you just can't put it there because no provision was made to do so.

Whatever. Let's see if this thing is as complicated on the inside as it looks.

Yes. Yes it is.

As expected, the geartrain drives the sun gear (in the middle of that black disk) which is attached to an axle that directly turns the blade. The blade has a semicircular slot in it that rides in a peg screwed into the liner. This is probably to ensure it doesn't wiggle much and keeps the gear teeth meshed.

The sun gear takes the full brunt of the opening force and is just peened to its axle. If this were to fail mechanically at some point, this is where I'd expect it to happen. I really would have liked to see it riding on a splined shaft instead, but let's face it -- that was never going to happen.

All of the internal gears are made of sheet steel, most likely laser or waterjet cut. The outer sun gear ring with its lever appears to be cast, with some machining work done on its inner teeth.

Oh, and you probably spotted it already: The blade rides on the cheapest, flimsiest thrust bearings I've ever seen in my life. The carriers are molded out of plastic, and I'm not entirely convinced the balls within actually turn. I think when you spin the knife everything just rides over the nubs.

The drive end of the axle is D shaped with a flat on it that engages a matching one in the blade. One thrust bearing sits on top of the blade between it and the gear stack, and the other one goes on that backer disk we looked at earlier, and explains why it spins freely. The second thrust bearing is probably unnecessary, but its thickness is accounted for in the design so you can't leave it out if you expect to tighten everything back up when you're done.

The planet gears themselves just ride on some shouldered Torx head screws. There are no other bearings or anything. The Gearhead thus comes liberally gooped up with grease from the factory, which is why it's so ugly in all my photos. Degrease it at your own peril; the whole thing would probably grind to a halt instantly if you did.

As it happens, getting the Gearhead back together is a bit of a faff. You might think it'd be possible to assemble it wrong, but that's really not so. Actually, it's even worse. It goes back together precisely one way, and if you get any of it even slightly out of place you'll find that the screw holes don't line up. The hard part therefore isn't necessarily figuring out where everything goes, but rather making sure the planet gears wind up in there in exactly the right way so that the teeth mesh and you can still get their axle screws through. I had to use tweezers. Your mileage may vary.

So the upshot of all this is that this thing isn't really a knife you can take apart and tune to perfection.

Oh, the other factor is that the geartrain is completely exposed all the time. There's no cover over it, not even a perfunctory piece of clear plastic, so every particle of grit, fiber of pocket lint, and molecule of dirt is going to find itself nestled in your gears as soon as you take this thing anywhere, with laser-guided inevitability. Taking it apart to clean it on a regular basis is not really viable, either.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you wear a top hat, a scarf, and goggles on a daily basis, this might just be the knife for you. Otherwise, an entry level regular liner lock folder will be cheaper and arguably easier to use. And if you want fast one handed deployment for Tactical Ninja Operator purposes, a spring assist or pushbutton switchblade will be infinitely easier to use.

If you're in an area where such a thing is illegal, the Gearhead might raise eybrows as well. A lot of laws prohibiting switchblades go on to specify "spring action, gravity, or any other mechanism" and I don't think it gets much more any-other-mechanism than this.

But as we know, good, bad, and weird are not always directly related. If you're the right type of weirdo, to see this was to want one right at the start. Nothing else I said here really mattered after you saw that first picture, did it?

More leetle kneefses.

The Kershaw Cinder is a positively diminutive little liner lock folder. I think it's the smallest non-novelty folding knife I own. Here it is next to my usual EDC and becoming-oft-compared Kershaw/Emerson CQC-6K, and a US quarter for scale:

It's 2-11/19" long closed, about 4-1/16" open, and only 25.3 grams (0.89) ounces. That means it's not much longer than the ISO standard Swiss Army Classic everyone and their dog has hanging from their keys, although it's wider and weighs a hair more. It also hasn't got a dinky pair of scissors or a useless nail file, but in exchange it is considerably better at actually being a knife.

The Cinder has this funky asymmetrical design with more of the blade being exposed on one side...

...Versus the other. It opens with a regular thumb stud on the right hand side and can be done one handed (unless you're a lefty). Meanwhile, I dare you to open a Swiss Classic with one hand. And without resorting to using your teeth, if you think you're so clever. Yes, you in the back row; I see you.

The tail sports a stout lanyard or keyring hole, and also a hook that makes it usable as a bottle opener. This prompts Kershaw to call the Cinder "multi functional" as many times as possible every time they talk about it, because apparently you just can't stop the marketing department, even with a baseball bat. There is no pocket clip, although the knife is so small that might be silly. You also get to bring your own keyring if you want to use it that way. If you don't, I'm not sure there's a pants pocket on earth this thing wouldn't fit into. If you wear regular jeans you could probably fit a dozen of 'em in there.

Due to its slightly offset pivot and overall funky design, what makes the Cinder cool is that actually presents its entire blade length as a usable cutting tool for a wide variety of tasks, even cutting down against a flat surface -- unlike the Swiss Classic and its myriad clones. The cutting edge is angled up quite noticeably compared to the axis of the knife and is actually subtly curved along its entire length, leading to an edge that's "all belly" similar to the Boker Gome we looked at the other day. Just even smaller, and as a folder.

That blade is 1-1/2" long from the end of the handle scale overall, and manages a usable cutting edge of 1-1/16". Believe it or not there is a choil at the base which means you really can use all of that edge if you need to. But it's certainly not very fancy, and is only made of 3cr13. What do want? This thing retails for $10.

For such a tiny knife, the Cinder breaks down into a surprising number of components. The black plastic scales and steel liners are separate, as is the bottle opener heel which is quite a bit thicker, and acts as the spacer between the liners.

The pivot is D shaped with the same flat spot as is common to other Kershaw folders. The whole thing really goes together exactly like one of their larger knives, just really shrunken down. And as you can see, the pivot action is aided only by two cheap black plastic washers which are not terribly fancy nor precise. Not that I was expecting limited run collector's grade componentry in here or anything, but now we know. On a larger knife the pivot action would be pretty terrible, actually, but on this dinky thing it really doesn't matter.

The tolerances between the blade, pivot, and washers are just awful. But this isn't meant to be a Tactical Operator Battlefield Ninja Knife, so who cares.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you want a tiny knife, and you don't want it to be any of the tiny Swiss Army models or their clones for any particular reason, the Cinder is in my opinion a much better knife with half decent build quality, cool looking, and it's not like it's going to break the bank. It's compact and light enough to forget it's there on your keyring until you need it, and in a pinch it'll open your beers. And it's just so cute and little. What's not to love?

I'll bet it's so damn small and inoffensive that it'll be legal pretty much anywhere, too. Unless you live in one of those hellholes where locking knives are illegal. Then I don't know what to tell you... Or what you're doing here.

If it's too small for you, they also make a slightly larger "Ember" now (whose name I kept getting mixed up with this one all throughout writing this) which is about a 2" long blade and a little more traditionally styled.

Hey! That's not a balisong. That's not even a folder. He can't do that! Can he do that?

That's right, I'm breakin' the law. You can't stop the Mad Flipper What Flips At Midnight! However, it's not much of a stretch of "pocket" to apply it to this, the Boker Gnome. Here's why, with a US quarter for scale:

Leetle kneefses! It's just so cute.

In the exciting and occasionally baffling world of the fixed blade microknife, the Gnome stands out as one of my favorites. That's because unlike many attempts at this kind of thing, the Gnome manages to be designed in such a way that it's actually useful for something. It's designed by Jesper Voxnaes, who is also behind quite a few of Boker's other knife models. That might have something to do with it.

The Gnome is near as makes no difference to 3-7/8" long overall. That's it. The blade is about 2-1/4" long with 1-7/8" or so of very usable edge. The blade is 1/8" at its thickest, tapering down towards the point, in a pseudo-Wharncliffe profile and a subtly hollow grind. The beefy Micarta handle is a solid 1/2" thick, though, which really aids in your ability to grasp the knife between your index finger and thumb without much risk of fumbling it. It weighs 44.3 grams by my scale, or 1.56 ounces (just the knife, not including the sheath), so it's not exactly going to pull your trousers down if you put it in your pocket. Put it back in the sheath first, though, unless you're wearing your chainmail underpants today.

The blade on this version is relatively pedestrian 12C27. So it's not capable of hammering nails or sawing through a brick. But it is easy to sharpen and is very corrosion resistant.

Here it is, sheathed, compared to my usual EDC Kershaw/Emerson CQC-6K:

The whole ensemble is actually slightly shorter than a typical folding pocketknife. Neat.

You would think the Gnome is a usability nightmare, what with being so small. Surprisingly, it isn't. The grip methodology is basically, "Oops, all choil!" There is a small ricasso at the very base of the blade, presumably to keep you from nicking yourself while you use it. Otherwise, your index finger goes in the huge circular cutout on the bottom of the handle (a quarter fits in it easily) and your thumb goes over the top. you can get your ring finger on there as well at the base of the handle. The blade's edge is actually curved. None of it is straight, its profile basically describing a very small section of an arc of a very large circle. This essentially makes it all belly, so you can bring any part of the edge down on a flat surface for cutting -- you're not just limited to ineffectually scratching at things with the tip, like most mini-knives.

The Gnome is very competently and precisely machined, as is typical from our friends in Germany. This despite the rather prominent "China" marking in the finger notch. The next time one of your friends tells you "everything made in China is crap," just show them this. Mine came with a pretty keen edge on it from the factory and I made it even keener still, which was easy due to the precise and even blade grind.

The Micarta handle, as you can see, is embellished with these red spacers for, er, I guess vibration reduction purposes while you use this tiny knife to baton tree trunks? Actually, at this size they're purely aesthetic, but they do match the design language of several other Boker fixed blades I own -- the Rold and PSK leap to mind.

Both handle pins are hollow. The larger one would make a good candidate for putting a lanyard through, if you're into that kind of thing.

Here's the business end. You can see the arc of the edge here really well.

The Gnome comes with the Kydex sheath you see here, but doesn't include any other carrying provision. It's easy enough to just toss it in your pocket, of course, but you can also use your favorite through-hole mounting thingamabob to stick it on a belt or pack strap. Me, I use a length of paracord to convert the Gnome into a neck knife, because I bought it to use as a little utility blade when I'm kayaking. I'm often wearing swim trunks doing that, which don't have pockets.

Now, it's the disassembly section of the review!

...

...I can't disassemble the Gnome. Not without destroying it. The handle pins (tubes?) are press fit and probably peened into place as well. It's not coming apart. Hey, if you guys want to donate me one of the new fancy D2 ones of these maybe I'll destroy mine for you and take pictures. But since the Gnome is a full tang knife, and the tang is exposed, we already know what we're going to find under there anyway.

The Inevitable Conclusion

It's not just a boat knife. The Gnome could be equally useful around the camp site for cutting cord, whittling, and food prep. Or around the office slicing envelopes with definite, but dainty, authority. If you are considering a neck knife for use as some kind of tactical operator ninja concealed self-defense holdout, don't. But if you want something that you can use as a neck knife that's actually useful for real world tasks, consider this.

My previous two Throwback Thursday knives have been related to my time in the BSA as a Scout. Today's is no exception.

The Craftsman medium Stockman pattern, near as I can tell, was made by either Camillus or by Schrade for Sears. This one happens to be model 95223. I've not found any correlation between model numbers and manufacturing dates but that's ok in this case because I know the year this was made.

This knife was a gift from my maternal grandmother on a special day: the day I became an Eagle Scout. She had it engraved with the date, something you can just about see in the main photo.

It was always my grandmother's intent that the knife be used as a knife and not as just a gift. I was (and am) very proud of it and I have a fond memory of receiving it from her.

But unfortunately wear and tear was affecting the visibility of the engraving. I did not want to lose this, nor do I want to try and have the engraving deepened, So it has been sitting in a box for a long while. A few rust spots developed and it needs a bit of a cleaning and sharpening.

I'm kinda tired of it sitting unseen so I think a shadow box is in order this weekend. It gave a lot of service but hiding it away is not honoring the gift nor the giver.

Mom, I want a Benchmade Model 42.

We have Model 42 at home.

Model 42 at home:

This is the Bradley Mayhem. Unlike the Bradley Kimura we looked at earlier, the Mayhem was made for Bradley back in the day by... You guessed it, Benchmade. And it shares one big similarity with the legendary Model 42, which is...

...The very positively spring loaded squeeze release latch, exactly like the '42 has.

I think the Mayhem was going for some kind of wonder material super-knife vibe, aimed squarely at nerds, collectors, and spec sheet obsessors, and possibly no one else. More's the shame, really. It has an S30V blade with a stonewashed finish, the darling supersteel of its time. The handles are matte titanium. The pivots ride on phosphor bronze washers. And the handle spacers are this swanky blue anodized diabolo design:

Here you can see the tension spring driving the latch's spring action, too. It uses a kicker pin-less design which Bradley called "Zen Pins." So everything about it seems to be tailored towards a specific type of individual.

Heyoo! Guess who.

I must shamefully admit that I actually used this knife for quite a while, and it rode in my pocket on a daily basis for probably about a year. Thus, it's accumulated a couple of wear marks and little scratches that have probably totally ruined the collector's value. Oh fuckin' well.

Of course, the first thing you'll probably notice about the Mayhem is the rather distinctive curve in it. Strangely enough, despite this rather pronounced Banana Factor, the blade is actually straight once you get it out. When fully deployed it's about 8-3/8" long overall, with the curve extending downward through the last half of the handle. There's a finger relief for your index finger in the handles, and a section of jimping on the spine of the blade. The spine is also nicely rounded over. The blade is 3-3/4" long from the tips of, uh, the furthest forward handle. Actually, that's a possibly a point of contention because one pivot sits further forward than the other when the blade is out. Contemporary sources call this a "four inch" blade, which I guess it is -- specifically if you measure starting from the center of the pivot that's furthest back to the tip. I'm not sure why you would do that. (It's like TV's back in the day. "32 inch screen!" Sure, if you count the two and a half inches of tube that's behind the bezel that you'll never see.)

The usable edge is about 3-3/8", which a pronounced choil at the base which also acts as one of the two pockets the "Zen" not-kicker pins fit into. The blade's width is 15/16" at its widest, and it's 0.151" thick. At 120.8 grams (4.26 ounces), the Mayhem is actually rather light, but still has a good heft in the hand. Most of the weight is in the blade thanks to those titanium handles.

Wonder of wonders, the thing actually does come with a pocket clip, so you can EDC it. Actually, it comes with one whether you like it or not -- it fits into this neatly machined pocket, and will leave an obvious void there if you remove it. It also can't be relocated in any way, shape, or form. There is no alternate pocket on the other side, and you couldn't even fudge it because there's no matching screw hole on the other side. Plus, one of the clip mounting screws goes into the threaded end of the latch pivot pin, and the other end of it has a smooth head that's bigger than the screw. You can't insert it backwards, even if you tried. Which is a bit of a bummer, because as usual it's on the wrong side of the handle, in my opinion, for right handed users to clip to their right hand pants pocket.

The pivot pins also have smooth heads on the reverse side, adding slick "impossible" screws to the list of bullet points for the spec sheet.

Despite being light, the handles pivot very cleanly on the bronze washers within. Manipulating this knife definitely takes some getting used to. The curved handles have a really weird feel in your hand if you're used to a knife with straight ones, like most other balisongs. The cross section of the handles is also kind of square. None of the edges feel particularly edgy, and they're all rounded over, but you are definitely aware of the flats as you roll the handles. The super matte surface is also a little grippy. It's not unpleasant, just different.

The spring latch design is really simple, but it brings a couple of extra tricks to the party. It works exactly like the latch on a Model 42, no surprise, which means it sticks straight out the bottom all the time and is held there by its spring tension, unless you push it home into the opposite handle either latching the knife open or closed.

Here it is compared to a '42. Same same. That constant spring tension keeps the latch from flapping around while you're flipping the knife, so the Mayhem is spookily silent. The handles don't make much noise when they hit the rebound pins, either, just a soft click. Because the spring pulls the latch into the dead center position all the time, you can also squeeze-to-unlatch when the knife is locked open, not just when it's closed, which is something that cam style spring latches can't do (like the one on the Morpho, or that Boker I reviewed the other day).

The mayhem is actually a little shorter overall than a Model 42. That makes it a little easier to carry as an EDC pocketknife, if you're the type of weirdo who's into that sort of thing. Not that I'd know anything about that. But I hear they're very handsome people, those types of people. That's what somebody told me.

I will now proceed to tarnish my collector's value further.

Here is the Mayhem reduced to its constituent components, consisting of all four handle parts, that blade with its funky offset pivots, shiny blue spacers, and many, many little screws.

The wide bronze pivot washers. Curiously, my knife came completely bereft of lubricant on the pivots from the factory and it hasn't seemed to need it, ever. So far I've just left it alone. The bronze in these types of washers and bearings is actually minutely porous, and will hold in lubricant applied to it semi-permanently. The washers feel very slick, but they're not wet.

You can also see the round head of one of the pivot pins here, free of any type of screwdriver head.

Wiggle test time:

Premium though it may be, the Mayhem is actually kind of bad in this department. I actually never really noticed until I measured it, but here it is. The free play is about 5/32" at the tips of the handles. This isn't noticeable when you're using it, though. A tiny, tiny turn of the pivot screws can completely eliminate the play, but then the handles won't move anymore. There's zero threshold between locked solid and 5/32" of free play. Strange.

The ring light in my photo box also reflects trippily off of the shiny button on the end of the latch.

OooooOOOoooOoo...

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you want a very competently built and certainly unique balisong that's made of various fancy supermaterials, the Mayhem might just be the knife for you. Of course, they don't make the things anymore, so it's not like you can just pedal your bicycle down to your favorite knife retailer and buy one. So my telling you all this was pretty much academic, and probably doesn't serve a whole hell of a lot of purpose other than allowing me to rattle on about silly old knives that I like. But you can't fuckin' stop me; I'm like the Mad Flipper what Flips at Midnight. Well, maybe you could stop me if you pay my ransom... Perhaps enough to by a Flytanium or two, and a used Spyderfly in good condition. Leave it in unmarked, nonsequential bills by the old oak tree down by the bend in the river. Make sure nobody follows you.

But I'll tell you what, the Mayhem's got a lot of the charm and some of the chops (har) of the much sought after Model 42, while even on the used collector's market it'll cost you a damn sight less... For now. If you can get your hands on one, you should. Even if it's just to put something different in your collection.

It is that day once more, my dudes.

This is the Mantis Bottleneck BK-3B, or possibly just "Bottleneck" to its friends. And I've been sneaky and buried the lede here a little bit with the headline photo. Because here it is next to a US quarter for scale:

Yes, it's tiny. Just absolutely chuffing piccolo. And it looks like something we should be sending up with the astronauts. Alien looks, overwrought design, speed holes -- the Bottleneck's got it all.

Mantis bills this as a collaboration with Hawk Designs, and also makes some noise about it being a "50 state legal butterfly knife," which I think is a highly dubious claim. I think they're doing this because the blade is tiny, just under 2" long. But there are states -- California leaps to mind -- where butterfly knives are illegal full stop, regardless of size. So out the window that goes.

The Bottleneck's funky design terminates in a bottle opener ring behind the blade heel. The bumf says that the opener can be used while the knife is still mounted to a keyring (not included), which I guess is true if you affix it in the apparently intended way, which is looping a ring through the latch like so:

I shouldn't have to point out that this is actually rather a dumb idea. It really doesn't take much of a tug at all to bust it loose, and then a flapping-open knife falls down the inside of your shirt, or wherever else you've stashed it.

Also, you know, let's use this thing to help us chug beers while we fiddle with a knife design that's notorious for being tough to use even when you're sober. That sounds like a great plan.

The Bottleneck would just be a small ugly little balisong knife if it weren't for some strange and let's face it, rather questionable design decisions.

The latch possesses no end stop, so it's easy to make it strike the cutting edge of the blade. That's a bit of an oversight. It also tends to get jammed there if you're not paying attention when you close the knife, which makes it even worse.

Although in some respects, the Bottleneck deserves a little credit for being an absolute master class in cost cutting. This thing retails for around $33 (which if you ask me is already too much), but balisong knives typically contain a lot of parts which require some care and attention to detail which amounts to cost. On this, the handle plates are just single thickness laser or waterjet cut steel. No scales, no contours, no chamfers, no embellishment at all. Simple, cheap, no separate parts. Mantis has saved a nickel by making all of the kicker pins not pins, but rather just commodity Torx head Chicago screws. This completely eliminates having to do any precision drilling or press fitting at all. The tolerances between the holes and these "pins" can be huge -- and they are. That's because once they're cranked down, they won't wiggle anymore regardless of how off-center they may wind up. The bottoms of the screw heads will also ensure that they're reasonably square. Clever. Ugly, but clever.

The business end. The Bottleneck has this funky flared tanto point arrangement, although other variants are available with this funkier still double edged pointless configuration. (That variant would be illegal twice in California, I think, also qualifying as a "dirk or dagger." Don't quote me, though, I don't even pretend to play a lawyer on TV.)

Latch tension is provided by slots cut into the handles which allow them to flex, providing spring action via the sheer bendiness of the steel. That's probably required because otherwise the handles would be far too short to flex far enough to allow the latch pin to clear, like on a traditionally sized balisong. This creates another unfortunate condition, though, in that the Bottleneck's pocket clip is near useless because the location of one of these slots makes it nigh impossible to actually clip to your pants.

That's because the low point of the pocket clip is located right over one of the flex-slots in the handle, so it directs the edge of your pants' fabric right into the slot and the knife snags there. This is as far as it'll go, unless you spread the clip away from the knife body before trousering it which is, how shall we put it, impractical. And also pretty dumb. That means this knife has not one but two intended ways to carry it, neither of which work right.

Here it is from the side, showing the clip. Note the slot cut right below it there, which intersects with the contact area of the clip:

The Bottleneck is also damn difficult to use, for a couple of reasons. The major one is this: If you handle any of the possibly thousands of models of balisong made over the last several hundred years, you'll notice one common feature of all of them. That is, few to none of them have any bullshit sticking out past the end of the heel of the blade. Well, the Bottleneck has a fuck-off giant bottle opener back there which is half or more of the length of the blade itself. So the bottle opener catches on the web of your hand every time you flip it open, making most balisong opening techniques impossible to perform even if you wanted to. This would be less of a problem if the handles on the thing weren't only three inches long. Way to go, guys.

Even if it weren't for that, the thing is so friggin' short that the handles barely carry any inertia, so fooling with it as if it were a regular balisong isn't a charming experience anyway. The latch is also weird, requiring very little effort at all to undo from the closed position but a monumental amount of squeeze to get it to snap over its home to lock the knife open. And then you'll notice that there are two bumps where it can rest in the locked open position, one of which is right and one of which is wrong. Getting it unlatched from the further in wrong position is much tougher than if you land it in the right one.

Well, maybe it'll be redeemed by having fancy ceramic bearings in there or something...

But you didn't really expect that to be true, did you? The blade rides on the cheap plastic washers you see here. The pivot play and handle rattle on this thing is immense, not that it matters much beyond contributing to the cheap feel.

One other strange detail I noticed was that the screws holding it together appear to be a random hodgepodge of whatever was lying around, furthering my impression that this is a parts bin knife.

All of the screws on the latch side handle were T6 Torx heads, but the ones on the other handle were all T7. Uh... What?

The Bottleneck's edge grind is also seriously out of true. Usually this type of thing is not readily apparent without magnification (or until you try to sharpen it) but on this thing it's clearly visible if you just look at the nose of it. Mine came out of the box with a near butterknife level of sharpness, but we can see even putting an edge on it is going to be quite a lot of work.

Here's the transition between the, er, "main" portion of the edge and the tanto point. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

From all of this I can conclude that the Bottleneck is purely designed as an object that's not meant to be used for any purpose, except maybe cracking beers. But as usual we're not here for what's good, we're here for what's weird.

Or "II," if you prefer, since Bradley now seems to express their model numbers in terms of Roman numerals. It takes all kinds, I guess.

On our last foray we took a look at the Kershaw Moonsault which I ultimately put in my Not Recommended pile on the grounds of it having very slick technology, but having crap for feel in the hand despite coming with zooty ball bearing pivots. I said there are better similar balisongs for the money. Which ones?

Well, this one, for a start.

Here's the Bradley Kimura. This is kind of an OG; Unlike the last pair of knives I've looked at, it's not new. In fact, I've had this knife in my collection since 2012. Thus, in the pictures you will see some wear from use and pocket lint. I did give the thing a quick spritz before doing the photography but, as you'll see, maybe I could have done a better job. Oh well.

This particular model, the Kimura, 2 is not made anymore. But the Kimura series as a whole is, in an array of various handle styles and colors, and near as I can tell the mechanisms are identical. As usual for Balisongs, some of these models don't stick around on the market for long. And then when they disappear they tend to become collector's items. I paid $90 for this Kimura 11 years ago, and current ones go for $130 or so. Sometimes you can score one for around a hundred bucks. I guess that's inflation for you, but really in this kind of market it's not too awful. (I know I've linked to BladeHQ a bunch of times lately, and I promise it's not because I have any affiliation with them -- other than giving them a lot of my money over the decades.)

Superficially the Kimura 2 has one big thing in common with the Moonsault: Both of these are full steel knives, with both the blades and handles made out of metal and no liners, handle scales, or any other materials. The Kimura's not as comically enormous, though: It's 5-1/8" closed by my measure and 8-7/8" in length when open. Closed width is 1-1/16", as usual not including the ears on the blade or the distance added by the head of the latch. The blade is 3-7/8" long from handle tips to point, with about 3-1/2" of usable edge. That's a bit nebulous, because there is no choil and where the cutting edge actually becomes defined enough to be useful is up for debate by a small fraction of an inch. Blade width is 29/32" at its widest point, in the middle of the belly. Blade thickness is 0.121", just under 1/8".

Due to the all steel construction, the Kimura is pretty weighty. 159 grams by my scale, or 5.6 ounces.

Taken all together that means it has a pretty similar design intent to the Moonsault, which is a solid weight in the hand, with heavy handles that provide a lot of inertia. But it's still noticeably smaller and a little bit lighter, which I think works in its favor.

Here's a comparison lineup between the Kimura (top), the Kershaw Moonsault (middle), and the venerable Benchmade Model 42 (bottom). In this shot I lined them all up by their latch ends with a ruler, so you can get a feel for the difference in size. (I have to say, I honestly never noticed until this very moment that the Kimura is noticeably shorter than the Model 42. I certainly would have gotten that question wrong on pub trivia night. Yesterday I would have sworn to you that they were the same size.)

So that's that. And then, just about everything else about it is totally different.

The Kimura is a very traditionally designed knife with a normal dual kicker pin design. The blade is spear pointed with a very pronounced belly, widening in the middle and thinning a bit at the base and especially the tip. This makes it almost a leaf point, if you ask me (although a tanto point variant is also available). It's single edged, of course, and doesn't make any pretension whatsoever of having a false edge on the back. Much of it is a flat grind as well, which is very nice. It's made of 154CM, so not exactly an exotic supersteel, but mine's held up perfectly well over the years. It has the same nice satin finish on the blade as the handles. Although, the big "Bradley" logo in the middle of it is a little gaudy, in my opinion. The reverse bears the inscription that, yes, this knife is made in the USA. Strangely, the type of steel used is not marked on the knife anywhere. That'll make it no good for showing off to your friends. You'll have to impress them with your flip tricks instead, I guess.

Here's the reverse, only because the two sides are different. One side has these flush fit smooth heads on the pivot pins, while the other side has button headed screws. It's quite minimalist, very Bauhaus.

You can also see that the kicker pins are very even, very straight, and have nicely machined tops. No swarf, splines, or other ugliness is visible. This is usually a pretty good sign of quality.

The latch has a round fillister head (there's your word of the day) and is a plain swivel with no squeeze release or spring. It's very easy to kick open with your pinky when you're holding the knife, though. Its travel is stopped by the handle spacers and while it has enough free arc to strike the opposite handle, it can't touch the blade. It also has a pretty close tolerance against the handle scales it's sandwiched between, which makes it feel pleasingly precise -- and also keeps it quiet.

By the way, it looks like there is a screw missing opposite the latch pivot, but there isn't. The handle scales are mirror images of each other, front left to rear right and front right to rear left. Only having to make two parts instead of four probably reduces machining costs a bit, but that means there is an empty screw hole in two of the scales in the void where the latch head goes.

Between the handles are these groovy diabolo style spacers. One of these also serves as the end stop for the latch so it can't swing too far.

The Kimura's feel is excellent. The pivots ride on sintered bronze washers which provide a nice level of glide. The pivot tolerances are also very close and high quality, leading to a knife that spins and flips very freely, aided by those heavy handles, and is pleasingly free of rattle and any kind of noticeable play against the axis.

It's quiet, too. The latch makes a pleasant click when it strikes the end of its travel, and doesn't clank or jingle. On rebound against either of the kicker pins, the entire knife makes a solid sounding but not excessively loud single clack. Notably, nothing resonates, buzzes, vibrates, or rings. Each impact event is single and contained, and doesn't carry on for ages like the Kershaw Moonsault did. It sounds dumb but I think this genuinely makes the knife a little easier to use gracefully since you can feel precisely when you've hit a rebound. The feedback is instant and short, never muddled or vague.

It also helps that there isn't a single hard edge anywhere on the handles. The handle edges are all exquisitely rounded, and all the holes are nicely chamfered. This allows it to roll nicely in your hand and it feels pretty good while you're doing it. Not the best of the best, but certainly very good.

There's no pocket clip or any other provision for carrying it, though. The knife doesn't even come with a pouch. For my purposes, I made a little Kydex belt holster for it. Up to you if you want it bouncing around in your pocket or not, but if I were you I would not put anything else in there with it lest you scratch up that nice satin finish.

Wiggle test! The Kimura scores pretty well, with maybe a hair under 1/8" of play at the ends of the handles, if you push up real good on one and down on the other. That's really not bad for a knife that doesn't actually have any fancy bearings.

Ancient Ninja Secret: If you want to get the Kimura apart, the key is to undo the pivot screws while the knife is latched shut. If you don't, the female end of the pivot pins will just spin in place and obviously there's no screw head on that side to put a tool into. When it's latched, they lock in place due to the tension running down the handles. The same trick is required on reassembly.

Here's what the inside of the Kimura looks like, complete with 11 years of accumulated grit, dirt, and pocket fuzz. All four of the spacer screws are identical; the only oddball is the longer screw that goes through the latch. I only did one side since with the exception of the latch they're the same. I took apart four knives back to back today and I'm running out patience for little tiny Torx screws that want to leap under the furniture and vanish. Sue me.

Here you can see the bronze washers, and also one of the pivots disassembled. The pivots are Chicago screws, threaded only in one end. The bronze washers provide a low level of friction between the blade heel and inner surface of the handles.

I don't normally get into this sort of thing, because I always thought it was really dumb to say something like "really sharp!" like you read in every single Amazon review of every knife ever. Of course it's sharp -- it's a knife. If it's not sharp, it's not a big deal to make it sharp, and I hope you're equipped to do so or else you won't be using your knife very long, will you? I mean, duh.

Ahem. Anyway, here's a loupe shot of my Kimura's edge. Special mention has to go to this knife, I think, because I found that the edge grind on mine was extremely consistent out of the box, and it took a dressing from my Spyderco Tri-Angle at 30 degrees like it was friggin' designed for it. The consistency of angle between both sides (or "trueness") of the edge grind on any given knife is another reasonable indicator of quality, and I found that the Kimura was dead on from the factory, all those years ago. It took a minimum of effort to make this thing stupidly sharp, which is... exactly what you want on a balisong you'll be flipping around, ready to liberate a fingertip. Right???

The Inevitable Conclusion

Should you buy one? Well, do you want a very solid and very nicely made balisong knife for a non-insane amount of money? If so, the answer is yes. You can't buy this one, though. You'll have to pick from the array of new handle styles. But this knife is in my opinion every bit of 85% of a Benchmade Model 42, except a '42 will cost you the thick end of a thousand dollars if you can even get your hands on one at all, but this thing you can have shipped to your door tomorrow for 130 bucks.

As previously stated, the value proposition of most balisong models is not quite the same as regular pocketknives bought by Normal People. Balisongs are a niche product and by and large fairly expensive for a given quantity of knife. If you just want to use the thing for opening your Amazon packages or whittling around the campfire, it's probably not a very good value nor suited to the task. It is also not an EDC knife. It's still pretty big compared to most EDC's, has no clip, and doesn't come with a holster or pouch. What it's for is flipping, and playing with, and showing off, and then when you feel like it really showing all those envelopes who's boss.

If all you've got is a $20 cast potmetal piece of shit from the farmer's market the Kimura will be a revelation by comparison. If you have a $900 exotic semicustom limited production run collector's flipper, well, you might just handle this and wonder what it was you paid for.

Kershaw, another of my favorite big brand knife makers, now makes a line of balisong knives. They're the ones behind my really truly every day EDC, the Kershaw/Emerson CQC, and also the venerable Junkyard Dog and many others. Since I've always known them to make a decent quality and usually not too terribly expensive knife, I picked up the Kershaw Moonsault -- the funkiest looking of their current lineup.

This was also partially inspired by BladeHQ's "Best Butterfly Knives" list. The sibling to this knife, the Kershaw Lucha, prominently holds the top spot on that list. I figure I ought to see what all the hoo-hah was about, and the entire Kershaw lineup seems to be mechanically identical, so my thoughts here ought to apply more or less to all of them. Notably, they all have ball bearing equipped pivots. That's a big deal.

The ~~Moonsalt~~ Moonsault is actually kind of huge. It's 5-7/8" long closed, and a whopping 10-1/4" long when open. The blade is 4-3/4" from the tip of the handles to the business end, about 7/8" wide at its widest spot in the middle of the belly, and 0.150" thick at the thickest point of the spine. When closed the assembled handles are a good 1-1/16" across as well (not including the ears on the blade) which makes it quite a bit chunkier in the hand than most other balisongs I have the opportunity to compare it to. The blade is 14C28N, and the handles are also steel of some description so this sucker is heavy, too.

Weighing in at 171.4 grams (6.05 ounces), I think I'm right in saying that the Moonsault is the heaviest balisong knife I own. Without doing an exhaustive comparison, it may just be the heaviest folding knife I own, period.

Its ridiculon hugeitude sounds subtle on paper but it feels quite significant in the hand. Here it is compared to a Benchmade Model 42, which is pretty much the quintessential modern balisong. The Moonsault is noticeably longer, wider, and heavier. When swinging it around you are really aware of its length and weight.

The entire ensemble is done up in this rough stonewashed look which Kershaw calls a "working finish that hides use scratches." Well, so they may say. But mine already has some noticeable marring from where the latch strikes the safe handle, and I've only been fooling with the thing for a couple of days. My wife saw the finish and said it looks like it's galvanized, which I think is actually a pretty apt description. On the blade is Kershaw's usual assortment of logos, the model number (5050), and a Made In USA flag. There's a detail you don't get to see on a lot of balisongs.

The surface finish is superficially the same all over the knife. It's very matte, and kind of rough in the hand. There are all manner of channels and slots and other greebles machined into it, and while the outer edges of the handles are rounded over the surface still feels a bit snaggy in your hand and I feel like it doesn't roll very well in your grip.

The blade has a definite spear point sort of profile, ending in a very pointy tip. There's a false edge on the back for maybe about 2/3 of the length, but this is still a single edged knife. So it's safe to let the spine hit your hand while you're playing with it.

There is no pocket clip. Here it is from the side, looking through the scales:

Glamor shots. Here's the blade end, closed. The Moonsault does use a "kickerless" design with no need for kicker pins that are pressed through the blade.

In fact, where the kicker pins would be located on a traditionally constructed balisong are machined voids instead. Not that these really do much to make the thing any lighter.

Here's the latch end:

The latch, as you can see, is unfortunately just a standard friction fit T-bar arrangement. It's not spring loaded, and it's not a squeeze release. It's not too tough to bust loose with your pinky or ring finger, though. Due to it having no spring or any other clever mechanism, it just flaps around loose while you're flipping it, jingling all the way, and there's nothing preventing it from striking the other handle. Which is does... Frequently. It also has a significant amount of play up and down the pin it rides on, so it can actually rattle in two directions. It's perfectly okay when the knife is latched either open or closed but when the latch is free it feels a little chintzy.

The big headline feature of the Moonsault, and the rest of the Kershaw Lucha series, is that the pivots have ball bearings. And they do. You can just about see them peeking out between the blade and handle plates. (Don't worry, you'll be seeing more of them later.)

This makes the pivot and flipping action of the Moonsault incredibly smooth. The handles spin with what feels like, compared to other knives, absolutely no resistance. They just glide. It would probably be the best out of any balisong I own, except it's spoiled for me by the fact that the thing is so damn noisy.

This is what immediately struck me as soon as I started playing with it. Through whatever combination of blade and handle materials, their lengths, the mass of the handles, or maybe their shape, the whole thing just has some kind of resonance thing going on. If you tap it from the side when it's latched close the blade vibrates and rings like a tuning fork. The handles twang and bong and sproing nastily every time they rebound off your hand or the blade. The latch is always flapping away and hitting the handles, adding its own slap and jangle to the equation. The whole net result is loud and harsh and obnoxious. None of it is a nice noise. The vibrations from all of this go straight through the handles and make the knife feel really rough and unrefined, even though it clearly isn't -- the blade itself runs on those buttery smooth ball bearing pivots. It's just that as soon as you hit your first rebound, you really can't tell.

That's kind of a disappointment. Maybe I'll get used to it eventually. Or maybe I'll find some really thin knifemaker's Dynamatt or something to stick to the inside of the handles. But it's weird. No other balisong I own is like this, even the ones with single piece metal handles.

But enough about that. Dork smash!

There are now two things that failed to impress me about the Moonsault. There's quite a bit in there that does, but good lord -- Getting in there was not easy. Disassembling the Moonsault was particularly fraught because the handle pivot screws were cranked. I thought I might strip the heads before they let go, but ultimately I prevailed and I got the whole thing apart without breaking anything. The big pivot screws are T8 heads and the rest of the handle screws are T6. The handle screws are all the same as each other, and the rebound pins, latch pivot, and latch stop pins are all just that: Regular shouldered pins. I left one of the handle scales face down in that picture, by the way, so you can see the back of it. The backs are just flat, except for the pockets where the spacer pins go.

Here's them bearings. These are thrust bearings, and they provide a very low friction contact area between the blade heel and handles. Yes, mine came from the factory with some of the bearings concave side up, and some of them concave side down. I don't know if it makes a difference. I suspect it doesn't, although I was careful to put everything back the way I found it just in case.

The pivot screws are Chicago screws, and there is a subtle detail here in that the female end has a concave head, and the male threaded screw side has a convex head. Once you know this you can make your life a little easier if you ever feel like taking your Moonsault apart. I had to put a screwdriver in both sides simultaneously to bust them loose.

I didn't find any threadlocker on the screws, but as I mentioned they were on there good and tight. This is usually a bad idea on a traditionally designed balisong, because this will mash the handles into the blade so firmly that they won't pivot anymore. But the thrust bearings in this thing mean that even when the pivot screws are very firmly torqued the handles still spin freely.

I also found that one, but not the other, of my pivot screws had some kind of chalky crud all over the threads which make it even more difficult to remove. It wasn't threadlocker -- I think it was possibly the result of some kind of galvanic corrosion. So that's weird, and also somewhat worrisome. All of the other screws were clean. (You can just see this in the bearing photo. Look at the screw on the upper left, compared to the one on the right.)

As ever, one of the hallmarks of a good quality pocket knife is how precisely all the parts fit together. The Moonsault is kind of a mixed bag there. You can see where the cost cutting is happening: The rebound pins and latch pivots are plain pins whereas in fancier knives they'd be screws. And you could just about throw a cat through the gap between the pivot screws and the hole they pass through in the blade. This turns out not to matter much (see below), but it makes the mechanism feel a little janky when you're reassembling it. The tolerances on the pin through-holes are pretty good, but none of the pins are chamfered or anything so sandwiching the handles, bearings, and blade back together required a lot of jiggling and rocking back and forth before it all allowed itself to be lined up and mashed back together.

Another quick shortcut overall quality check you can make on a balsong is to see how much play there is in the pivots vertically to allow the tips of the handles to get out of square. Well, the Moonsault managed to impress me there. So much that I actually bothered to take a picture of it.

In this picture I'm pressing down with my index finger on one handle and up with my thumb on the other. And that's it. That's all the play present in the handles. They're exceptionally solid against the pivots, and I'm not entirely convinced most of that difference is not just sheer flex along the length of the handles themselves rather than actual play in the pivots.

That's the best I've ever seen, bar none. It's like 1/16". Maybe not even that. It's rock solid.

As before I'm doing this back-to-front, so the unboxing is at the end. The Moonsault comes in one of Kershaw's red and black cardboard boxes, similar to most of their other knives I've amassed over the years.

Really, I've got oodles of these damn things by now. They're all practically the same.

This is something I can get behind. The box is just a box, and it doesn't have any stupid complicated hinged parts, or double layers, or a hipster matte finish, and it doesn't come with custom laser cut pieces of foam and a sprig of parsley in it. It is a box, one each, holds and protects the knife tolerably well during shipping, that's it. I like to see that a manufacturer's money was actually spent on the product, and not the damn landfill fodder it comes in.

Sorry. Obviously I have Views about this sort of thing.

Inside that partition and rolled up quite tightly is a little double sided glossy leaflet. Usually I skip talking about the bumf because, really, who cares. But in this case I present to you scans of both sides of it below because I found a couple of points interesting.

The exterior contains a listing of the "complete" Kershaw balisong lineup, which... does not appear to include this knife. So that's a thing.

The inside makes at least some kind of attempt to teach you one way (of possibly an infinite number) to open and close a balisong knife. The instructions aren't great, and they don't really convey to the reader a good sense of the motion involved in my opinion, but they're something. And I've never seen a balisong from any other manufacturer even make the attempt. The pictures you get are your lot, and I can only imagine it would have raised the bill of materials cost significantly if Kershaw had invested in physically including a video in the packaging. (But not impossible! )

And again, the knife depicted in the pictures isn't actually this one. It's the Lucha instead.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I really like the Moonsault's ball bearing pivots. I really dislike just about everything else about it. Just, that twangy buzzy clankiness turns me off so much in the use and feel department. And that's really the entire point of a balisong. If we didn't want to have a fun and lets be honest, pleasant experience flipping it around we'd just use a normal damn folding knife. It's too big, and there's no clip or any provision for carrying it, and all that length means it would really be an unwieldy object to just keep loose in your pocket. No attempt is made, not even a little perfunctory nylon belt pouch. So it's impractical, too.

If I were king of the world I would keep these pivots, but bust the knife down to maybe a 4-1/2" overall length or so. Add a pocket clip. And do something -- make the handles out of a different material, dampen them with some G-10 scales, hire an acoustic engineer, I dunno -- to keep the damn thing from buzzing so much every time it rebounds. Would I add a spring release latch as well? Of course I would. I'd put a spring release latch on anything if I could get away with it.

At a $200 MSRP it's kind of tough to recommend the Moonsault when there are other balis out there that are in many respects better and much cheaper besides. But the value proposition on balisongs is always tricky, because the balisong collector's price curve and tolerance for paying silly amounts of money for silly knives is, lets be honest, kind of whack compared to that of normal people buying normal folding knives. I have mine, I'm keeping it, and it's going in the collection for sure -- but I'm not in a big hurry to rush out and buy its siblings to complete the set.

Boker, one of the largest knifemakers in Germany, a county where balisong knives are illegal, now make a selection of balisong knives. I find this fact so deliciously incongruous that I just had to go and buy one. Boker is one of my favorite big name manufacturers anyway, and I am kind of the Balisong Guy. So it was really inevitable either way.

I settled on the model 06EX228, which stands out from Boker's lineup by having a spring loaded squeeze release latch, and I do like a squeeze latch myself. Boker's balisong models in said lineup don't really seem to have any kind of memorable names except for their "Papillon" models, and otherwise just have Efficient Germanic Model Numbers, which makes the whole thing kind of hard to keep straight. So, 06EX228 it is. This overall design comes in two sizes, large and small, and this one here is the "large." And that fact raises part of a very interesting observation which we will address in a moment.

Apropos of nothing, I finally got around to buying one of those product-review-photography diffuse illumination boxes, so you guys won't have to look at knives sitting on my grungy mousepad anymore. But, my current level of investment means that I'll only make one hyperartifical backgroundless picture, which is the headline photo above. The rest of them will have shadows and lint and shit. I'm sure you'll be able to deal.

Anyhoo, being one of the select few people insane enough to actually occasionally use a balisong knife as an EDC, let alone a nice one, my personal favorite knife in that area has always been the Benchmade "Morpho," and the one I have is the Model 32 or "Mini Morpho" variant. One of the main reasons for this is the spring loaded squeeze release latch. The other is that the 32 is just below the legal public carry blade length limit where I live, so no one can touch me for having it. And as you can see, the Morpho comes in both large and small variants just like the Boker. I have the big Boker, but the little Morpho. Here it is:

So, about what I mentioned earlier. I'm going to make a lot of comparisons between the Morpho and this Boker, not necessarily because I like banging on about the Morpho so much (although I do!) but because these two knives are remarkably, suspiciously similar.

The Boker 06EX228 has a blade made of D2, my favorite steel. So does the Morpho. The Boker has that spring loaded, squeeze release latch with a low profile round button head on it. So does the Morpho. The Boker has a kicker pin-less design. So does the Morpho. The Boker has G-10 handle scales over metal liners. So does the Morpho! I'm sensing a pattern, here.

Here's a comparison of their pivots. They're really remarkably similar.

Morpho on top, Boker on the bottom. They both have these ridged handle spacers which are, again, remarkably similar!

Even the profiles of the mechanical ends of the latches are damn near identical. They both use the same cammed heel concept, with a flexible prong in the liner providing the spring motive. I find this entire ensemble especially unusual, because at the time of the Morpho's release Benchmade made a lot of noise about the cammed spring latch and kickerless design being patented. Either that patent expired yesterday, or there is some kind of licensing scheme going on here.

There's one big difference. Well, three, really. The Boker's liners below the G-10 are steel, and the Morpho is titanium. (And blue anodized, and jeweled. It's really groovy looking in person.) That means the Boker is a damn sight heaver, which some people may prefer for flipping, but due to not being made out of spaceship material it's also around half the original MSRP. Oh, and the Morpho is discontinued and the 06EX228 isn't. (And I have one. Neener neener neener.)

On the specs front, the Boker's blade is nearly precisely 4" long, from the ends of the handle scales to the point. The usable cutting edge length is 3-11/16". It's exactly 3/4" in blade width at its widest point, from the spine to the belly on the edge, and my caliper puts it at 0.127" thick at its thickest point -- almost exactly 1/8". It's not super girthy, but then balisongs rarely are, and its length puts it squarely in the "full size" or "traditional" size category for a balisong. Most balisong knives are roughly of these proportions, give or take a bit, which means that mini knives like my little Morpho and probably the smaller version of this knife feel a little stubby if you're used to more traditionally sized models.

While we're at it, a couple of more glamor shots. Here's the blade heel when closed, showing the distinct lack of kicker pins through the blade:

What the 06EX228 has instead are two very stout spacer pins just behind the pivot pins, which strike the blade in the portion below the area of the cutting edge to provide the rebound action. (A balisong knife with no rebound mechanism at all would just allow the blade to windmill clear through the handle until it bit you, and would not be able to lock open in any capacity either. I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this to readers of this sub, but you never know.)

Here's the other end, showing the surprisingly small pocket clip and the latch:

The clip is pretty short, and it lives on the bite handle (that's the side with the latch, and the side you probably don't want to hold while you're flipping the thing around because it's the side the sharp edge seats into), and although it's small it does work tolerably well. It's unusual for most balisongs to make any concession for pocket carry at all, so its presence is appreciated. In my opinion it comes from the factory on the wrong side -- if you're a righty, when you clip the knife to your pants the clip is on the handle that's furthest from the rear of your pocket, which makes it prone to twisting and I find that annoying. You can put it on the opposite side by undoing the screws if you like, but you can't place it on the other handle because the screws are different between the two handles (more on that later).

And here's the smooth button on the end of the latch, presenting every photographer's secret nightmare -- a highly reflective object as the main subject of the shot:

Now it's time to take it all to bits. Here's the 06EX228 nearly fully disassembled:

In case you were wondering, time from unboxing until the above warranty voiding was about two days. That's exceptionally restrained for me.

Some things that balisong nerds will like to take note of are, the pivots are threaded steel sleeves which are held on either end by T8 Torx screws. I found just the merest hint of blue Loctite on the pivot screws from the factory. The blade runs on black plastic washers, which were liberally greased from the factory. No fancy bearings here, not even sintered bronze or even plain brass washers. Maybe this black plastic is some kind of low friction wonder-material, I dunno. I left my flame spectrometer in my other coat. Even so, the pivot action is quite smooth (somehow I failed to mention this earlier) and the tolerances on the pivots are extremely nice.

I also noted that all of the screws through the knife are actually not Chicago screws as we're accustomed to in the pocketknife world, but they're all (with one exception) completely cylindrical threaded sleeves which have one screw each in either side:

This includes the pivots, and the sole exceptions are the bottommost two screws on the safe handle (non-latch) side, closest to the tail. These mount the scales directly to the steel liners with no sleeves. They're also a different coarser thread than the other screws so you can't mix them up.

Don't mix them up anyway. Nearly every screw in this thing is a different length from all the others. The screws other than the pivots have Torx T6 heads, by the way.

While we have it apart, we can have a good look at the prong cut into the handle liners which provides the spring action for the latch:

There's one of these cut into both liners for that handle side, and they engage with the heel of the latch via a little round pin which is prone to leaping out and vanishing forever as soon as you disassemble the knife. I found that keeping that in place was the only fiddly bit when reassembling, other than keeping track of which screw went where. This is damn near verbatim Benchmade's design for this as well, and you'll find that the few other spring-latch balisongs in the world use tension springs hooked to the latch and one of the handle pins instead.

You can also see how the "kickerless" action works, here. This is one of the through-pins that the blade rebounds against. They're the beefiest things in here, other than the pivots themselves.

A good indicator of the quality of a balisong is how square everything remains and how closely the pieces fit together. Particularly the tolerances between the pivot pins, where they go through the handles, and where they go through the blade. Well, the tolerances on the 06EX228 are extremely close. You'd expect them to be, what with the thing being made by Ze Germans and all. I thought this would make the knife a faff to reassemble as it often does, but in this case it really didn't. All of the pins and sleeves sit dead square in the handle liners which makes everything index into place almost automatically when you sandwich it all back together -- with the exception of that damn pin for the latch. Once you tweezer that into place, though, the entire ensemble will actually stay together even without any of the screws in it. That's fairly remarkable.

A handy shortcut to judging the quality (or lack thereof) of a balisong is to see how far you can wiggle the ends of the handles up and down, opposite each other, when it's unlatched. The Boker scores pretty well in this regard with about 1/8" of play when the pivots are adjusted just so the handles spin freely. Try that on a flea market knife some time; you may get a laugh out of it.

Yet another indicator of build quality you can check is the straightness, cleanliness of press fit, and equal length or lack thereof between both kicker pins. Since this knife hasn't got 'em, though, I can't show you that test.

And while I'm yammering anyway, and since I bothered to take pictures, here's the box and what comes in it.

The knife comes in a nice matte presentation box that's made out of rather thick cardboard. I couldn't get it quite into frame, so you get to see the ugly edge of my photo box. Sorry about that.

I always found this sort of thing to be rather pointless but I guess knife makers like to point out that their knife is supposed to be really nice by putting it into a box that they think is really nice, too. I'd rather the money for the box be spent on some sintered bronze bushings or something instead, but hey. At the end of the day, the thing is still just cardboard. It's not like it's a wooden display case or anything.

You also get this rather unnecessary zipper pouch...

...Which contains the knife as packed from the factory and also these two little business card sized pamphlets:

The pamphlets are superficially identical but one of them is in English and the other one is in German. For Germans, presumably, in Germany. Where balisongs are illegal so they can't buy this knife anyway. Go figure.

The inside of the pouch has a bunch of separate pockets for some reason. They're very flat and have little to no stretch, so I don't know what they expect you to put in them. Putting another knife in there along with this one without having them rub against each other, for instance, would be impossible. So it beats me.

All in, I have to say I am pleasantly surprised by the 06EX228. Yes, I guess I wish it had fancier bearings and I definitely wish it had a snapper name. I sure didn't expect the thing to be a poor man's Morpho when I bought it, but now that I have it in my hands I'm just tickled to bits to discover that's exactly what it is. If you always wanted a Morpho but can't get one, or you want a reasonably nice balisong with a great feature set that doesn't cost an asinine amount of money, give this a look.

Figured I would pass this along. If you're not a fan of Amazon or We/Civivi/Sencut then ignore this post. :)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B7J5ZYQT/

There are a few versions of the Sencut Scepter on sale right now for a ridiculously low price of $22. Yes, it's 9CR18MOV steel but you're getting a 3" blade and good, grippy micarta for that. If not a knife for you, these make for great gifts. I've had a now-discontinued blue G10 version for a long while but couldn't pass up the green micarta.

Don't you just dread lending someone your knife? Someone who is not a knife person?

Never mind the potential of them cutting themselves, or marring what was until 15 seconds ago the flawless satin bead blasted finish on your newest hyper-exotic S30V-and-titanium limited production run designer piece. Worse. Here's a familiar nightmare:

"No, don't try to force it shut. Push the lock to the side. The lock. Right behind the heel of the blade. In the handle. No, don't try to force it. See the little ridgy part? Push it to the left. Your other left. Don't try to force it. No, push the lock first, then the blade. NODON'TTRYTOFORCEIT. Just... Just give it here."

Keeping that in mind, meet the melodiously named (as is becoming tradition by now) "SDOKEDC SD604A VG10 Damascus Folding Knife Tactical Pocket Knife Yellow Sandalwood Handle Mechanical Lock Outdoor Camping Survival Hunting Multitool." I think you'll excuse me if I just call it the SD604A.

This knife will completely eliminate all of the above, because never mind closing it; Nobody from the unwashed masses will ever even figure out how to open it.

Have you guessed how it works yet? If you're looking for a hidden latch or release, you won't find one. Just trying to flip it open like an normal folder isn't going to work, either.

Is one pivot not good enough for you and your knife, and two is still too few? Well, this sucker has three. Four, arguably, if you want to count the crossbar that goes through the blade. It has no lock keeping it either open or closed, but all of the pivots are more than tight enough to keep it from falling open in your pocket (more on that later), and when in the open position your grasping action serves to keep any part of the mechanism from moving. There is the unfortunate detail that the point of the blade passes through part of the handle ready to deliver you a poke if you open it incautiously, but we'll just edit that bit out.

I would say accept no imitation or substitute at this point, but as we're becoming accustomed by now, there are oodles of this exact same knife and similar all over your favorite marketplace of white box Chinese goods under a ludicrous variety of non-brand monikers. Either with black synthetic scales or wood, plain steel or this "Damascus" (not really) pattern welded arrangement, and I've seen different point profiles and blade shapes out there, too.

Belated update: Curious Canid points out in the comments that this knife is a clone of the ScorpioDesign Shapeshifter. I should have inserted that into the text here weeks ago, but I was lazy. That knife costs $650 euros! And this one was 40 bucks. For as silly as this thing is, I think I'm a lot happier with my purchase of the clone than I would be torching the better part of $700 USD on the real deal...

But I, of course, just had to get the zooty pattern welded steel which the product description alleges to be VG10, which automatically comes with the gaudily stained wood handles you see here. (And if that steel actually is VG10 I will eat my hat with chopsticks.) The scales are at least genuine wood of some description, judging by the end grain visible in them that I'd doubt the factory would bother to invest in moulding in.

It's a chonky boy, too, partially thanks to those wooden handle scales but also due to a rather significant gap between the blade and steel handle liners. All of the pivots, and also the crossbar that runs through the channel to the blade to keep it aligned, ride on thick Nylon bushings which take up that gap. All of this adds up to make a knife that is solidly three quarters of an inch thick. It's five and a half inches long, also, with no pocket clip, lanyard hole, or any other provision whatsoever for actually feasibly carrying it. So, despite what I mentioned earlier about pocket-safe carry, it's pretty unlikely you'd try to put this in your pocket anyway.

But that's okay! Because it came with this "leather" sheath:

...Complete with "turquoise" embellishment in the middle of the button snap.

So SD604A holds the ignominious distinction of being one of the very few knives in my collection that, as far as I can tell, has no real use case. It's difficult to open, let alone open in a hurry, so has no self defense merit; It's bulky, hard to carry, and made of fragile materials so it's not much use an an EDC; It'd do a lousy job killing zombies. If it weren't for that channel milled through the blade to accumulate crud it might just about be able to manage to slice fruit. Look, I don't collect these things because they're necessarily any good. I have tons of good pocket knives that are all well built and competently designed, but those are boring.