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.
