PocketKNIFE

The skyline rising over trees

Skyline swaying in the breeze

The skyline set this city alight

Radiate into the night

Thin, light, easy to carry. We've been talking about that a lot lately, vis-a-vis Benchmade's current crop of wafer-thin and expensive plastic handled EDC knives. So here's a different runup at that idea, which has the first thing but not the last two.

At the time, I said we could do nearly as well for less. How? Well, this is the Kershaw Skyline, a now sadly discontinued budget EDC knife that probably does just about everything most people shopping in this category would want. Made in the USA? Check. Good build quality? Check. Light weight? Check. Svelte dimensions? Check. Blade made of 14C28N, arguably the king of non-crucible stainless steels? Check that, too. Just one thing, though: The Skyline is/was only $30. Used examples can be had pretty readily for not a lot more.

Kershaw accomplished this by not packing anything zany into the Skyline, which probably went a long way towards keeping the cost down. It is one ISO standard unit of pocketknife with no surprises. In fact, it makes an excellent comparison point for any given cheap and/or knockoff knife you may be looking at. If you ever need a demonstration that there's no excuse for a $30-ish knife to be crap, just look at the Skyline. Is the thing in your hand as well built? No? Well, then it's probably not a great value for money.

The Skyline is a regular liner locking folder, with dual ambidextrous thumb studs and a flipper heel on the back. Despite the flipper on it, it's not spring assisted. The drop point blade is precisely 3" long, with the entire knife measuring out to 7-3/8" long open, and 4-3/16" closed. With that blade length and without any spring loading it thus ought to be widely legal to carry making it the perfect knife for the everyman. It only weighs 71.8 grams (2.53 ounces) which is more than a Benchmade Bugout, but noticeably less than other similarly constructed knives in its length class.

That's because it's only 0.410" thick across its G-10 scales (not including the clip) which is again a little more than a Bugout but really not by a lot. This is thanks to a somewhat unique design that includes a full length steel liner -- but only one of them. The other side is a G-10 scale with nothing underneath. This cuts both weight and thickness, and as we all know that's the name of the game here.

The blade is 0.89" thick at the spine, precisely the same as the Bugout. It's hollow ground, and comes down to a very thin edge which both makes it feel very sharp, and provides a high degree of cutting performance versus the types of materials a light duty EDC knife is likely to face: Cardboard, plastic packaging, envelopes, small diameter cordage, and maybe the occasional apple or sandwich.

The clip is not a deep carry design, probably because the Skyline's initial release slightly predated that trend. It is not reversible owing to the fact that it screws into the liner, and there's only a liner on one side. It can be relocated to the other end, though, for either tip-up or tip-down carry. So it can cater to either camp, regardless of whether or not you are a gallant and upstanding individual, or a depraved philistine.

The Skyline is, if the point hasn't been driven into the ground yet, thin. How thin?

Here it is compared to the Bugout, as well as the standard CQC-6K. It is thicker than the Bugout on paper but doesn't really feel like it in the hand. Mathematically the difference is negligible. It is noticeably thinner and lighter than the CQC, though. It's noticeably thinner and lighter than most similar knives, in fact.

The Skyline does have one thing going for it in that it is massively more rigid than the Bugout. Part of this is down to the single full length steel liner, but the G-10 scales are also a much less flexible material, noticeable even on the side that's not supported by anything. You can make the Skyline flex only a little, and only if you specifically try by squishing its handles together while it's open. It has a very generous cutout for your index finger as well, with both attributes combining to provide a much more confident feel in my opinion.

I predict this is part of what annoyed some people so much about the Bugout, myself included. Not in how it is designed per se, but rather that there's already this dinky little thing from Kershaw that manages to feel more premium, despite being purchasable with the type of chump change your typical Benchmade owner loses down the back of their couch without noticing.

I have heard whining on the internet in the past, possibly due to the presence of the thumb studs as well, to the effect that the Skyline's flipper apparently "doesn't work."

Um. Yes it does?

Beneath its clip, the Skyline has this rather Zero Tolerance-esque hex nut head on the back side of the pivot screw. I can't prove if this is the first time Kershaw ever used this design -- it probably wasn't -- but it was the first time I ever recall seeing it. This caused me a bit of a challenge for this photo shoot, though, because 2014 me got this knife tuned to pivoting perfection and then slathered it in entirely too much Loctite and never touched the screw again.

I had to... ah... modify the screw a bit to get it back out just now. Otherwise it was just spinning in its socket despite the flats, and there's no other way to grab it. Muh resale value: Ruined. Oh well. The pocket clip conceals it anyway.

What you get inside is this. The Skyline's pivot rides on phosphor bronze washers which is quite nice for the price. I imagine a lot of other manufacturers would have been tempted to use plastic ones at this price point.

The backspacer is held down by these very loooooong screws, which go all the way through and...

...engage with a pair of nuts in the scale on the other side.

The pivot screw is completely round, with no anti-rotation flat on it. That's supposed to be accomplished by the hex head on the back of the screw. And it probably is, if you don't glue the thing together like a dummy.

I think the lockup is very clever, despite being a regular liner lock mechanism. There's no end stop pin, nor does it need one. Instead, a protrusion on the back of the blade heel prevents it from pivoting past the open position no matter how hard you try. Even if you deliberately hold the lock down you can't over-rotate the blade because the thumb studs will eventually hit the handles. I can't imagine this added any more machine work worth mentioning, but what it did do was allow Kershaw to omit not only the end stop pin from the bill of materials, but also not have to figure out a way to anchor it without a steel liner on both sides. I like it.

The Skyline is actually narrower, that is across the scales and in total width, than the Bugout. So there. It's a damn sight smaller than the CQC-6K, which is what I personally consider to be on the larger end of what most normal people would want to carry on a daily basis.

The steel question is, I think, answered thusly: 14C28N is a very tough alloy and also more corrosion resistant than the S30V the Bugout is made out of, which is a better idea for the types of non-enthusiast people who are likely to wind up with one of these. It should tolerate abuse, misuse, careless storage, and lack of cleaning much better than an awful lot of high alloy steels, including the current popular supersteels. And it'll be both tougher and more corrosion resistant than the 440C or 8Cr13MoV that such knives are likely to be made out of while having similar edge retention characteristics. Now, there are steels that will hold an edge better versus abrasion than 14C28N, but I think the same hypothetical person who might be intended to buy this knife would appreciate it not being a battle to resharpen. Those to aspects are of course mutually exclusive. And the thin hollow ground geometry means that this knife should cut very well even if it's been inexpertly sharpened.

Then, of course, there is the notion that the minutiae of different modern knife alloys doesn't really matter that much for the types of non-critical use that the vast majority of pocketknives are used for by normal people, if they are even used heavily at all. Remember that even current cheap steels are loads better than good steel was at the turn of the century, and this continent was conquered by men carrying knives made from metal that wouldn't be a patch on even middling knives from today. That's my position on the matter, and if you want to fight me on it you'd better consider yourself on notice that I've got a lot of knives to fend you off with.

It's a shame the Skyline is gone, but there's hope. There is a Mini variant which is still in stock at the time of writing. It also had a revival a couple of years ago with a re-release made in 20CV steel, too. These are now hard to find, but not impossible.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Light is seen from outer space

UFOs crush human race

Alien rebuild city anew

Alien knife nerds have Skylines, too

With all the talk about Benchmade pricing, it's nice to find a good deal.

Looks like both BladeHQ and KnifeCenter are clearing out stock of the full-sized Benchmade Griptilian 551-BK for $100 and $110 respectively.

~~www.bladehq.com/item--Benchmade-Griptilian--6223~~

Edit: BladeHQ is sold out

~~www.knifecenter.com/item/BM551BKS30V~~

Edit: KnifeCenter is sold out

And full-sized is key here. This is not a small knife. 3.45" (8.76 cm) blade with an overall open length of 8.07" (20.5 cm). It's also 3.82 oz (108.3 g) which is more than 2 full sized Bugout knives.

But for $100 with S30V steel and very sturdy scales (even if it's not a full liner) this is a really good deal.

Ceci n'est pas une Benchmade.

No, really. It's not.

With all this talk of Bugouts and Minis and Bailouts lately, obviously I've been building up to something. So here it is.

This pisses me off.

No, not because it's an obvious copy of the Benchmade 535 Bugout. This is in fact the "HUAAO 7.4 Inch Manual Open Bugout 535 Folding Knife," the titanium version. I don't know who the hell HUAAO are, other than one of those bare minimum five-letter Amazon nonbrands, although their name has crossed my desk before. The gods alone know who actually make this thing.

It's yours for $47.49 from Amazon, available here. No, that's not an affiliate link -- I won't gain anything if you click. More the fool me, perhaps, for that being the case.

This pisses me off because of the state of the world. Because it's exactly what it says on the tin, and it's less than $50, and it fixes so much that annoys me about the genuine Benchmade Bugout, which costs four times more.

I like this knife better than the Bugout. That's... really just digging my hole deeper, isn't it?

I could go over the specs of the HUAAO but that's not too tough to do. Copy and paste what I said about the Bugout; this is the same. In fact, I will: It's 7-3/8" long open, 4-1/4" closed, with a 3-1/8" blade. The blade's the same 0.089" thick. It is a copy down to submillimetric precision.

It has an Axis lock, and it even makes a respectable presentation of reproducing the tumbled stonewash satin finish of the original on the blade. Note, however, that it doesn't even pretend to have a Benchmade logo on it. In fact, it bears no markings whatsoever. No brand, no maker's mark, no model number, no serial, no steel descriptor. It doesn't even say "made in China," even though it obviously is.

This weighs 93.3 grams or 3.29 ounces. It's still pretty light, but that's 42.2 grams more than the Bugout -- for one very simple reason. Just like it says, the handles are machined out of titanium. And insofar as I'm able to determine they genuinely are. The scales weigh 25.9 grams each.

Of course you have to have a grain or two of salt handy to deal with the Country That Fakes Literally Everything. But a magnet doesn't stick to them, they're clearly denser in the hand than a roughly equivalently sized block of aluminum, but they're far too light to be zinc or any other potmetal. I have a pair of titanium tweezers that I use for arranging all the fiddly little screws and pins and bits for my photo shoots and comparing those to these, they definitely feel like the business. I don't have any other really nondestructive ways to test them.

Titanium is simply not an option on the Bugout. The Bailout comes with an aluminum handle for a massive upcharge, and the Bugout itself can be had in the 535-3 variant with carbon fiber handles for a similarly ludicrous markup. But there is no metal handle option at all. Flexy bendy plastic is your only lot.

The easy to carry svelteness of the Bugout is its headline feature, and the HUAAO knife has that. It's 0.405" thick in total, as usual not including the clip. That's damn close to the thickness of the Bugout, and who knows how accurate my original measurement of the Benchmade was. The OG Bugout has a diamond grip pattern embossed into it and the HUAAO hasn't, so maybe my calipers fell into a valley in those. Or maybe the handles flexed. I couldn't tell you for sure. Either way, that's only a 0.016" difference.

The handles on the HUAAO do not flex. At all. This thing is solid as a rock, exhibiting no perceptible bow whatsoever even if you give it your mightiest squeeze. The surface is subtly rounded and has a satin bead blasted finish that provides a decent amount of purchase, although without any machined or molded texture it's not as grippy as the diamonds molded into the Bugout. It feels much more refined and gentlemanly, though, which in comparing the two is surely heresy of the highest order. The spine is squared with a slight fillet, whereas the Bugout has a slight but definite chevron angle along the rear edge which is barely perceptible but makes it deceptively difficult to stand the thing up on edge. This has no bearing whatsoever on anything in the real world unless you're trying to stand it up to take photos of the thing, in which case it's maddening. No so with the HUAAO; it'll stand up resolutely on a flat surface.

Anyway, as you can see above the clip is ever so slightly taller than the Bugout's and it has a different radius to the semicircular part. It works pretty much the same way and just like the Bugout's it is too tightly sprung. But the surface of the HUAAO is smoother, and that makes for a nicer draw from the pocket in my opinion. So it scores better there as well, dagnabbit.

Instead of the diabolo spacers Benchmade uses this unitary machined and anodized back spacer. It accepts a pair of screws in the same positions, though. It has grip ridges machined into it, and forms a lanyard hole where the handle scales are cut out for it. I feel this gives a much more confident lanyard attachment point and yes, the inner edges of it are even chamfered slightly so it doesn't slice through whatever cordage you use.

Already we're up to three things I like better about this knife than the OG Bugout. What about the action, though? This is a knockoff knife, so surely that's crap, right?

It's not.

The HUAAO opens with satin smoothness. This is with no tuning at all, straight out of the box. Pull the Axis lock back and the blade just falls open, as if it were a gravity knife. The lockup is exactly as solid and precise as the original, and it has zero blade wiggle.

That's because the HUAAO has ball bearing pivots. The Benchmade Bugout and its ilk, needless to say, don't.

"Glide" isn't even the right term to describe how it feels manipulating this knife. While the Bugout is serviceable, possibly even bordering on pleasant if you've taken the time to tune yours correctly, the HUAAO is instead impeccable. I hate it because I love it so much.

Here's what you get inside:

That is indeed a better than complete mechanical copy of the Benchmade. The blade heel is different because it's got a pocket milled into it for the bearings. Otherwise, many of the parts are even interchangeable. Even if you're a snob and you absolutely cannot countenance not having that butterfly etched onto your blade, you could steal the handle scales and backspacer off of this and swap them over.

Here is one of my HUAAO's scales on my Bugout. As you can see, everything lines right up. You'll also want to bring some of the screws over, though...

Because unlike the Bugout, some of the screws are different. On the OG, all of the screws are the same except the one that goes in the middle of the handle, into the tail of the liner plate. On the HUAAO, that screw and the one that goes into the endstop pin are a smaller diameter. The middle one is also shorter, and don't mix them up or else you'll scratch your blade with the excess screw length sticking out into the channel. The two that go into the backspacer on each side are the same as each other, and also interchangeable with the Benchmade's screws.

There are other construction quirks, as well. For instance:

The pivot screw is D shaped, with an anti-rotation flat on it just like the Benchmade's. But the liner plates and scales don't have matching cutouts. Their holes are just round. (There's also a gouge in the inner surface of this plate from the factory, but this doesn't seem to affect anything.) So presumably to compensate for this the pivot screw in my example was glued -- yes glued, I believe with superglue -- into place.

Some of that also escaped onto the plates. This didn't impact functionality, but it annoyed me and I had to dissolve it with acetone. Here's what that looked like on the workbench.

For what it's worth the liner plates are totally interchangeable between a real Bugout and this. So if you really gave a shit you could swap those over, too, and have matching holes to go with your D flats.

Okay, so, some cost cutting measures have clearly been taken. That's to be expected for the price. Certainly no one is going to machine something to Benchmade specifications for a non-Benchmade price. And the blade, right, it's obviously crap. Right???

Well, the grind is dead true. How about that.

Sharpness is a tough attribute to convey in text, or indeed even in a video. And beyond exceptionally bad instances it's kind of immaterial, since sooner or later you'll be bound to be resharpening the thing yourself anyhow. But my example came out of the box quite serviceably sharp. It has no problems cleanly lopping the corner off of a Post-It.

HUAAO allege it to be made of 440C and given what we've seen to be readily available from other Chinese makers like Ganzo I don't think it's a stretch to trust them on that. So it's not a supersteel, but for a sub-$50 knife with bearing pivots and titanium handles I don't think that's a major knock against it. 440C is a perfectly cromulent alloy, if you ask me. It's got decent edge retention characteristics and while its toughness is not on par with some of the current high end supersteels, you're hardly going to be prying nails and beheading zombies with this little thing anyway.

The real Bugout's steel is better. That's just how it is. But I'm okay with 440C, and just for sake of argument I'd snap up a D2 version of this in a heartbeat. Conversely, I'd pay half the price for a Bugout if Benchmade would just make it out of, say, 154CM and be happy with it.

If you're looking to identify one of these in the wild, you won't get any help from the box. This knife came in the most nondescript packaging in the history of the universe. You get this black lift-off cardboard box with no identifying information on it. It's nice in its way, sturdy with a nice woven texture in it. But it says nothing. Literally nothing. No brand, no model number, nothing's printed on it at all.

Inside rests your prize. Mine came in two plastic baggies nested inside each other. But likewise to the box, there is no manual, no tag or label, no instructions leaflet. Nothing else comes in the box but the knife itself, and a piece of foam glued to the bottom.

On the bright side, this isn't really pretending to be a Benchmade. I could see some charlatan slathering it up with fake logos, and I respect the manufacturer a little more -- whoever they actually are -- for not trying that.

The Inevitable Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons to shell out for a Benchmade. A warranty, for one. The HUAAO certainly hasn't got one of those, at least beyond what you can wring out of its reseller.

But underneath it all, as an object this is a better Bugout than the Bugout. That's infuriating. Not because of what this knife is, or who makes it, but because Benchmade didn't. This goes beyond getting cloned -- this is an improvement over the original in several respects and for significantly less in the bargain. This is the knife Benchmade should have made all along, for the exorbitant amount they already charge.

Sure, you can buy aftermarket titanium scales for a Bugout and it won't flex anymore. Now your $180 knife is $276. You could probably pay a machinist to mill out your blade to take thrust bearings, too. There goes your warranty, while you're at it. Would you? I wouldn't.

This puts us at a crossroads. It does for me, anyway. I like the HUAAO a lot. Sure, I would like it more if it weren't a replica of someone else's design. Say if they took all the same features and materials, made it the same size, but in a different shape. Would anyone be howling about it being a "Benchmade ripoff" then? It'd just be a hidden gem of a little off brand knife. We've seen those before and even talked about them here. Is there such a thing as an ethical reworking of the very shape of something else? I don't know. At the end of the day, it's just a pocketknife.

But I'll be carrying this instead of my Bugout. It feels better. It opens better. It looks better. And if I destroy it, I'll be a lot less sad about it than my Benchmade. And that right there is where the rubber meets the road. Regardless of how well it's made or what kind of fancy steel it uses, is a knife you won't use "better" in a real world sense than one you will?

I submit to you that it is not.

Bugout too small for you? You're covered. Try the Benchmade Bailout, which is -- Wait, didn't we just do this?

Here it is, standing tall. The Bailout is the biggest brother in the Benchmade 53x series, sporting a very similar design philosophy to the Bugout and Mini Bugout vis-a-vis being very thin and lightweight. Benchmade say it's "2 ounces," but by my scale it's actually 59.3 grams or 2.09 ounces, so they must be doing the old backpacking gear trick and omitting the clip from the weight measurement.

The Bailout also has tactical aspirations. Benchmade sell this as one of their "black box" knives, whereas the Bugout and Mini Bugout are "blue box" ones. If you believe the marketing, the black box models are supposed to be designed for professionals and the rigors of use as employed by police, firefighters, military men, etc. That says maybe in this case, given that the Bailout is designed exactly like the svelte little Bugouts which seem to be marketed towards backpackers, urban carry, and lighter duty everyday use.

This incarnation of the Bailout is the OG polymer handled version. One of the complaints I shall make herewith, as if we haven't heard the same old song and dance enough already, are solved by the M4 variant which has aluminum handles instead. That one also has a fancier CPM M4 blade rather than the base model's CPM 3V. But it's also the thick end of $300, whereas the normal model is an already princely $200.

The Bailout, see, has pretty much exactly the same construction as the Bugout and Mini Bugout. But it's bigger: 8-1/16" long overall, 4-5/8" closed, with a 3-3/8" blade that's tanto pointed this time around to appeal to all those ~~whackers~~ professional operators. The blade is also coated with a finely textured epoxy finish.

But. It has the same number of handle spacers (two) and nearly the same thickness of handle slabs (0.414" in total, not including the clip) made of the same material, so it has the same problem as the Bugout but moreso. With a yet greater distance between its handle spacers it's even more flexible than the normal Bugout. In fact, so much so that just taking up the knife and imparting a not-too-out-of-the-ordinary grip causes it to noticeably bow inwards. On the Bugout at least you had to try to do it on purpose.

There are a couple of other changes as well. All of the hardware is painted satin black, rather than shiny anodized. This extends to the clip, also, which is matte as opposed to the Bugout's glossy one. The Bailout is trying very hard to be sneaky.

The other addition is this aluminum lanyard slot, which is its own block that's separate from the plastic handles. The Bugout's lanyard hole is just a triangle molded into the plastic, but this one should be tougher. The fancier aluminum handled variant also adds a glass breaker to this, but on this OG model the back end is just square.

The Bailout's blade has got enough meat on it to be able to freely Axis flick open and closed, at least. The finish is attractive and Benchmade seem to think it will hide scratches from use, but I'll bet you it won't. In my experience, coated blades start looking like crap with their first scuff and only ever get worse; you can never get them looking the same as new ever again, and brushing or re-polishing the blade is out of the question unless you're fanatically dedicated. And suddenly okay with it not being coated anymore.

I'm not generally a fan of tanto points, either. I was when I was younger, believing as we all did that an angular point was absolutely necessary for sufficient ninja cred, and of course everyone knew that a tanto point was better at penetrating soft body armor which I have to say in my four decades or so on this planet is not something I have ever had occasion to actually do. To Benchmade's credit, at least the longer primary edge is not a ruler-straight line as they so often are. There is a subtle belly to it which might at least contribute some modicum of practicality. Even so, I prefer a normal drop point which when executed correctly is just as capable of the stabby-stabby, but is also considerably less annoying to sharpen.

Further contributing to the Bailout's tacticality is a handle profile that differs slightly from the Bugout. It has a rise just forward of the pivot, providing a thumb stop and very minor crossguard-eque shape. I have to say I like the feel of this.

What I like a bit less is the overall lack of thickness. Yes, I get and I keep harping on how the thinness is the point of this entire series of knives. The Bailout is supposed to disappear into your pocket until you need it which is fine as far as it goes. But if this is supposed to be a fighting knife used in a situation where, just as an example, you might have gloves on I think that's really the opposite of what you'd want.

Other police-fire-rescue models, even Benchmade's own, are all considerably chunkier and often spring assist as well, for good reason. With its tiny low profile thumb studs, barely-there handles, and tightly sprung little pocket clip I think the Bailout would be difficult to impossible to use in a high stress situation or with gloves.

So, you say, don't use it for that. Fine. But then don't market it like that, either.

The size comparison between all three knives in this family reveals that the Bailout is about as much bigger as the Mini Bugout is smaller, as compared to the original Bugout.

Inside is the same story. The mini-plates in the Bailout are black rather than shiny, but it still doesn't have full length liners.

Here's how the tailpiece works. It is retained by one of the handle spacers as well as an additional dedicated pin.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Bailout has the same drawbacks as the full size Bugout, only moreso. Everything you read about it takes great pains to mention the "Benchmade quality," and how well its made, and how sturdy it totally must be, while stopping short of actually proving it.

Well, I'm sure the Bailout is just fine for what it is. Nobody's sponsoring me and this isn't a press knife, so I'm not about to go torture testing it. But all in all, I think the "tactical" direction of this is silly. I would much prefer this knife if it were just a Maxi-Bugout, with the drop point profile and just bigger. As it is, its combat pretensions and black box presentation are patently absurd, just like the price.

I'm sure the 3V steel will hold up well to stabbing and twisting and whatever else, being a very high toughess alloy. But it trades edge retention for that toughness. For the use case this knife is certainly more likely to actually see, which is certainly not combat, I think a little harder steel with better edge retention instead might have been a better idea.

The Bailout is undoubtedly a very nice knife. But I don't think it's $200 worth of knife in reality. With that, though, the trifecta is complete.

~Mini~ ~me...~

Bugout too big for you? You're covered. Try the Mini Bugout, which is exactly what it says.

After I just got done mildly eviscerating its regular sized counterpart yesterday, all the Benchmade fans will surely put away their torches and pitchforks when I say I like the Mini variant better.

And that's not because it's cheaper, although it is. And not by much, though: $170, or $10 less at current prices. Provided you stay away from the mega fancy S90V-and-carbon-fiber 533-3 variant which MSRP's for a monumentally ridiculous $320.

No, it's because the Mini Bugout actually fills a niche that otherwise remains unserved except by Benchmade themselves, at least as far as I can tell, and that's for a truly compact knife with an Axis lock. Sure, everyone and their grandmother makes an Axis clone knife now, but all of the offerings from other brands seem to be full or plus sized. If you want a little one your choices are much more limited.

The Mini Bugout, meanwhile, measures 6-7/16" open and 3-9/16" closed. Its S30V drop point blade is 2-3/4" long, below the magic 3" number that makes it widely legal to carry. The blade is exactly the same 0.089" thickness as on the full sized model.

Thin is what the Mini Bugout has got. At 0.393" not including the clip, it carries over exactly the same raison d'etre as its larger counterpart. Thin and light, able to ride unobtrusively in your pocket. It's only 40.8 grams by my scale or 1.44 ounces. Significantly less than other knives comparable in size.

Every single construction detail is identical between the Mini and full sized Bugouts. Benchmade just stuck the original in the copy machine, pressed 80%, and here it is.

It has the same deep carry pocket clip that grips a little too hard, the same pair of anodized diabolo spacers, the same thumb studs, the same shape to the handles, and the same nearly-all-plastic design with only minimal steel liners in place for the Axis lock. Hell, even the screws are interchangeable between the two differently sized models. All seen here in this blue variant, which is of course no longer available. Today's options are black, white, grey, purple, and sage green. Tomorrow they'll be different.

Inside, of course, is more of the same. Nothing is changed with the mechanical formula.

The Mini's blade rides on the same brass washers. One difference in the feel department other than the size is that the blade is literally too light to Axis flick. Unless you loosen your pivot screw to an unwise degree, at least, you'll have to open this knife like a normal person.

The other difference is, owing to the handle slabs that are the same thickness but reduced in length, it's actually tougher to pinch the sides together than on the full size model and the Mini Bugout actually feels noticeably more rigid.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Mini Bugout is a serviceable tool for its intended purpose, which is an ultra light, ultra slim, ultra unobtrusive EDC knife designed for light duty tasks.

The elephant, however, is still in the room. It doesn't matter that he's got a doily thrown over him and is wearing a lampshade. We can all see him, standing right there. The Pachyderm of Price cannot be ignored.

The asking price for this knife is criminal. $170? It would be on my short list of recommendations if it were maybe half of that. The Mini Bugout is a fine example of design and craftsmanship. Its larger counterpart is, too. Take of leave the flexy handles and the thin blade; these are design choices for its chosen use case. But I can't in good faith tell anybody who isn't a knife collector that there is $170 worth of knife in there.

Notwithstanding that I own one. And the bigger one. Us collectors aren't normal people. We all must be whacked in the head.

It is not possible to type the letters E, D, and C in close proximity to each other on the internet without that one guy reflexively parroting, "Just get a Bugout!" Or often, an entire chorus of them. It seems this is one of those laws of nature. Sun comes up in the east, spring follows winter, punters on the internet all have the same opinion.

(Watch out -- Rugged in-the-rain photo!)

So, Benchmade's model 535 Bugout has been what "everyone knows" is the best EDC knife. The default choice. The starting point. It's svelte, lightweight, easy to use and carry, and has that trusted Benchmade quality. So everyone says, at least, sounding suspiciously like the brochure for the damn thing.

It is time, therefore, for the slaying of a sacred cow. The Bugout is just an alright knife. I actually don't like it very much.

The Bugout is part of Benchmade's "500" family and certainly the most ubiquitous of the bunch. Its siblings include the 532 Mini Bugout and the 537 Bailout, which we'll get to in due time. All three of these knives share very similar construction methodologies. So does the current incarnation of the Griptilian series, sort of. The major difference between all of them is size.

The Bugout is the medium sized one: 7-3/8" long open, 4-1/4" closed, with a 3-1/8" blade made of fancy S30V steel. The blade is flat ground with a drop point profile, and is actually rather thin at 0.089" at the spine.

The entire knife is very thin, which is really its entire deal. All in, not including the clip, it's only 0.389" thick. It's very light, too, just 51.1 grams or 1.8 ounces. Hence, the "easy to carry" bullet point all the sales-brochure-memorizers are always so keen to bring up.

The Bugout's got the now popular, bordering on mandatory deep carry pocket clip. It's reversible and for tip up carry only. The handle halves are spaced out by a pair of machined aluminum diabolo style spacers, brightly anodized in whatever color you choose.

Mine is desert tan, with gold spacers and thumb studs. The available colorways on offer seem to change constantly with the moon and tides; Benchmade's sole contribution to proceedings lately seems to be fidgeting around with those offerings incessantly. I'm surprised they don't list "Bold New Graphics!" as a bullet point on the spec sheet, like Kawasaki does.

It is, of course, an Axis lock knife. That part of it is very nice. Of course it is; Benchmade invented the Axis lock as I'm keen on harping on about all the time, and I'd be surprised if they of all people didn't get it right. The pivot rides on brass washers, it opens nicely, closes nicely, and you can flick it either way with the lock held back with no problem.

The handles are made of Grivory, a fiber reinforced injection molded Nylon. That is to say, not the handle scales. The handles themselves.

The Bugout exhibits Benchmade's current fascination with making pretty much the entire damn knife out of plastic. It does not have steel liners like most knives. Instead, there are just a pair of short steel plates to support the lock crossbar and endstop pin.

Here's what that looks like.

Benchmade bill this as, "Designed for the modern outdoor adventurer, incorporating the lightest, best performing materials in an extremely slim yet ergonomic package." And, yes, ditching the liners does indeed make the knife very light.

But it also compromises the rigidity significantly. The Bugout is a wet noodle in the hand. Fiber reinforced though the material may be, stiffening waffle pattern it may have, but it still doesn't take much of a pinch at all to bow the handles in like this. The flex is also highly noticeable when the knife's in use as well. And regardless of what the math might say about the mechanical properties of the plastic, the feeling still doesn't inspire confidence.

You can ask any backpacker and they'll tell you that to achieve lightness some sacrifices have to be made. That's fine as far as it goes. And it would be if the Bugout were a $40, $60, or even $80 knife.

But it isn't. It presently costs $180.

That makes the Bugout a fantastically awful value for the money. And we're supposed to be suggesting this thing to first time knife buyers, non-knife people, like it's some kind of gold standard? That's really starting off on the wrong foot.

The other slap in the face is Benchmade's recent price hikes on this and indeed all of their knives. The ones left that aren't currently inexplicably discontinued with no replacement, I might add. I touched on this before, but in 2019 the Bugout was $105 which was already not a great deal. But even adjusting for our recent hyperinflation, that should only be about $130 in today's money. So don't ask me where they pulled $180 from.

Yes, it's made of S30V which appears to be the current supersteel darling of the knife world. Fine, but does a plastic handled mini-EDC designed for light duty occasional use actually need to be? The majority of people will probably use this for nothing more than opening their mail, Amazon boxes, and slicing the tops off of their backpacker's meals. Would they endure any detriment if it were made of D2 or 14CN or 440C, but for half the price?

By way of usual comparison, here's the CQC-6K. A little larger, easier to deploy, with full steel liners and a quarter of the price. You won't be afraid to use the CQC lest you scuff your resale value, and no one will get mad at you for throwing away the box.

Compared in terms of thickness, though, you can see just how thin the Bugout is. If that's what you want, the Bugout's got it. Expensive, thin, and light: The iPhone of knives.

I'll also point out at this juncture that I don't like the Bugout's clip. I like it in theory: It's nicely proportioned and a deep carry design. But it's too tightly sprung, and it plus the combination of the diamond texture on the handles which isn't interrupted underneath the clip's contact area makes the thing cling to your pocket like grim death. It's entirely too difficult to draw, and to make matters worse the exposed square corner at the heel of the blade tends to snag on the fabric as well. This knife is a seam-ripper, and while Benchmade will sharpen it for free if you mail it back to them I don't think that offer extends to also mending your pants.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Bugout is an expensive but middling knife. Its humongous price tag isn't backed up by much if you ask me. We ought to stop suggesting it to everyone left, right, and center all the time. We can do better for less.

Oh boy. It's time for that knife.

You know, that knife. The one that's in all those TikToks and Shorts or wherever the sponsored influencers are waving gadgets around these days: You Won't Believe This Crazy Knife, Can Your EDC Do This???

This is the Paragon Warlock and it is definitely a chart topper for all those online lists of weird knives. Perfect then, for an appearance here.

It comes in a dizzying array of handle styles, blade profiles, and colors. This is the "Satin Sorcerer" variant and it is of course inevitable that, given the opportunity, I would choose the green one.

This is a side opening folder with a rather bodacious crenelated texture machined into the blade surfaces. The pictures don't quite get across how humongous it is: 5-3/8" long closed, 9-1/4" open with a 3-3/4" S30V blade...

...That's double edged, presenting this wicked dagger point.

It's really thick, too. 0.857" in total not including the clip. The handles are machined anodized aluminum and all together it weighs in at 181.2 grams or 6.93 ounces.

Of course, how it opens is the wild part.

You grab the two textured buttons at the business end and pinch them together.

Through some manner of mechanical wizardry inside, this causes both halves of the handle to split apart not just at the end where you pinched, but evenly down the entire length.

The blade is then able to swing out freely.

This is a gravity knife, so once unrestrained the blade pivots easily under its own weight. It's not under any kind of spring loading, nor is any required.

Only the merest wrist action is required and you can easily flick the blade in and out. When you let go of the buttons the handles snap back together, locking the blade open or closed. That is, provided you time it right and don't just sandwich it partially between them.

The Warlock does include a clip and it's even a reversible one, but it's mounted very far down from the tail of the knife and leaves a lot of it sticking out of your pocket. It's unlikely you'll be carrying this much anyway, though. As not only over 4" in blade length but also as a gravity knife and a dagger it's virtually guaranteed that the law will find some aspect of it to frown upon. Possibly more than one, depending where you live.

Actually deploying it also takes a bit of practice and skill. The blade will, of course, only swing out one way. You can't make it do a complete windmill which is probably good news for blood retention but also means it's perfectly possible, if you're not paying attention, to utterly fail to deploy the blade because you're holding the knife the wrong way around. This will leave you looking like a chump. Remembering which side is the "out" side relative to the pocket clip is probably the best play.

And then, you do have to ensure the blade is completely and precisely swung out to the end of its arc before you let go of the buttons, and you didn't jump the gun and let go too early. If you do you'll wind up with the blade either not locked out, or only mostly closed with a little bit of the edge still exposed. You can generally tell by the sound when this happens, though. The Warlock makes a very distinct -- and satisfying -- sound when the handles snap shut correctly.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Of course the Warlock has to be made of fancy S30V steel and come with a full flat double sided grind and all the rest of it, because otherwise it would be inauthentic and wouldn't have enough street cred for knife nerds to want to buy it. But the specs really aren't the point -- It could be made of aluminum foil for all the difference it would make. This is a knife for showing off, and for fidgeting with, but at $250 no one in their right mind would actually use this as a working knife for any purpose.

It is one of the quintessential entries in the category of wonky knife designs, though, and therefore has a well deserved place in any collector's assortment of weird knives.

Just the other day I posted a picture of my entire selection of balisongs, and I'm reporting to you now with great satisfaction that this picture is already out of date.

This is the Böker "Papillon," model 06EX116SOI. Just like the last Böker I sung the praises for a few days ago, this knife is in the process of discontinuation and is thus heavily marked down. I paid $40 for this, same as the 06EX227. But I notice right now at the time of writing BladeHQ actually has these slashed to $30. Link here, no affiliation as usual.

"Papillon" means butterfly in French. Indeed, that's what this knife is. (It's also a breed of dog. That's neither here nor there.) If you think that's gratuitous, look, it's better than if they named it in German. Then we'd have wound up with the "Schmetterling."

You can get this knife in a few colors... Black. Grey. Bor-ing. Instead, I just had to go with this Imperial Stormtooper aesthetic white model for something different. It's really quite striking.

The handles are gloss painted, and they are very, very white. This actually presented a bit of a photography problem for me because as you know, my trademark is knives floating in an infinite white void. Knives usually aren't white so this isn't normally a problem. I just overexpose the pants off of the shot so the background ends up pure stark white and I can bring out the contrast on whatever dark colored knife we're messing with, maybe paint over any stray specs of dirt or grease left on the background, and away we go.

Well, I can't do that here. If I do, the handles become invisible. Oh, sure, I could go find some black felt or something and shoot on a black background. But then the blade would disappear. I can't win.

Plan C is to fastidiously doctor every single photograph, hand-preserving the shadows, highlights, and edges. That's what I did in this shot, for instance, but my patience for this sort of thing is finite.

So some of these photos are going to show hints of a little more background than usual. You'll just have to put up with it.

Right. The Papillon. Is it any good?

Eh. I like it a lot less than the little 006EX227 Böker. This knife is a fair deal at $30 or $40 but if you ask me the quality is not in line with its original $90 asking price.

There, that's really the whole thing dealt with. I failed to hang on to the suspense until the end; if that was the only question you needed answered you can click away now and none of the rest of this treatise actually matters.

The Papillon is a full traditional or "competition size" knife at 10-1/16" long when open, 5-7/8" closed. The clip point blade is 4-5/8" long measured from the forward ends of the handles with about 4-1/8" of usable edge. It's powdercoated or painted or whatever in a matte black finish, made of D2 steel, and 0.147" thick. The blade has a full flat grind on it which is a little unusual, and a pronounced choil at the base of the edge because this is, as is becoming popular these days, a kicker-pin-less "Zen" pin design and the rebound pin on the bite handle slots into the choil (and the other one goes into a matching cut opposite it on the spine of the knife).

There is no clip provided. That's probably just as well; the Papillon is really just too humongous for practical daily carry.

The dimensions and construction methodology of this knife put me in mind of the Kershaw Moonsault and its related brethren, the Lucha and Balanza. Actually, there even is a "Stormtrooper White" variant of the Lucha already. This knife and those have very similar feature sets.

The Papillon, however, has a much more traditional shape with a tapered profile flaring wider towards the latch end. The handles are unitary slabs of steel, flat on the insides and milled with weight reducing slots and are concave on the outside. It's lighter than the Moonsault: 123.5 grams or 4.36 ounces.

The latch is a fairly traditional T shape and is not spring loaded. My example is also far too tight due to the handles hitting their endstops too far apart from each other, ultimately requiring a heroic squeeze to get the knife either latched or unlatched. The singular review of this knife on BladeHQ mentions the same thing. I also figured out why this is, which I'll get to.

Because of this it's already rubbed through the paint where the latch head rides over the tips of the handles.

The latch does at least have two endstop pins that prevent it from rotating more than 180 degrees. The blade is thusly protected from being struck and potentially damaged by the latch. So that's nice.

The pivot action and handle feel are also nice, although a distinct lack of refinement is evident as revealed by the wiggle test:

Which is weird.

Because the Papillon totally does have ball bearing pivots.

Normally this is an easy path to rock solid handle feel with no play, but that's not the case here. And once again, nothing in the product description or specs anywhere mention the presence of the bearings. I sense a recurring theme, here, and I really can't fathom why this is.

The pivot screws themselves are plain round Chicago screws with no indexing or D flats or any other niceties. So yes, if you try to unscrew the wrong side the entire thing will just spin, accomplishing nothing. The pivot holes in the handles on mine appear to be a little wonky, and I can't tell if that's down to the machine work or just buildup of the paint. I suspect there's a not insignificant amount of gap between the pivot screws and the handle holes by design -- if the handles are painted after the final machining, which it seems that they are, the tolerances there by necessity would have to be pretty wide to guarantee that the holes don't get so gunked up with paint that you couldn't get the hardware through.

Here's the whole thing in bits:

The knife is held together with the pivot screws and just one spacer in each handle, down towards the end, with a pair of screws in each side. There's quite a bit of flex in the handles themselves. And on the safe handle, with only two points of contact, the handle halves aren't kept square with anything relative to one another. The rebound pins, latch stop pins, and latch pivot pins are just slices of round stock and are not precision machined, nor are their tips particularly square, nor are they shouldered or indexed in any way.

The handle slabs aren't precision machined, either. For instance, due to a slight inaccuracy in the pocket drilled for it, one of my rebound pins always rests sightly crooked, as pictured below.

The hole it homes into is visibly slightly mis-drilled:

And it's no good swapping the handle parts around to try to luck into a better fit because the bite handle and safe handle halves are not the same, with the bite handle having one more pair of screw holes.

I did ultimately cure this by ~~precision remachining~~ hogging out the offending pin hole with a Dremel and a tiny carbide end mill bit. It worked; the latch is now noticeably easier to undo albeit still not perfect. I could go as far as grinding an offset into the pin but, do you know, I can't be bothered. If ever there were a candidate for de-latching a knife, it would be this one.

Note also that there is no cutout for the bearings to rest in on the insides of the handles. The blade is pocketed, but the handle slabs aren't. So the balls will just chew a groove into the paint like you see here.

On the previous Böker balisongs I reviewed I commented on the precise fit of the parts and ease of reassembly brought about thereby. Well, that's not the case here. Getting the Papillon's handle halves fully back together took some wiggling and fiddling around every time I did it.

Here's how the latch endstops work. This is simple, effective, inexpensive, and there's really no excuse for every balisong manufacturer not to do something like this.

One other foible I noticed is how close to the outside of the handles the edge rests when the knife is closed. This is thanks to the pronounced belly in the shape of the blade. I stuck the tail of my calipers down there and this reveals that the edge is only 0.054" away from the outside surface of the handle on that side. It is definitely possible to mash the tips of your fingers into the gap between the handles hard enough to touch the edge. So maybe don't do that.

Aesthetically, I really do like the Papillon. The black-on-white colorway is certainly fresh and, dare I say, attractive. Since it doesn't need kicker pins pressed through the blade, it instead has these hemispherical cutouts which are pretty cool. And it's got an actual name this time rather than just a meaningless robotic alphanumeric string. It's even fun to say: Papillon, Papillon.

Like apparently all Böker balisongs, the Papillon comes in one of their little fleece lined zipper cases.

This case is identical to the ones I've gotten before, including the one that came with the 06EX227 (which I did not mention due to rattling on so long in that writeup already).

It has various pockets in it, although as usual I can't explain why since they're all so flat there's no way you'd be able to cram more than one knife in this thing. It comes with the customary two pamphlets from Böker, one in English and one in German. I didn't post them because we've seen them before. They appear to be identical for all current Böker knives.

For your comparison, the Papillon (left), Kershaw Moonsault (center), and a CQC-6K (right). The Papillon and Moonsault really are nearly identical in length and for the most part width, notwithstanding the taper on the Papillon. The Moonsault is better built, dang it, but it also costs a lot more than $30.

If you ask me, the Papillon's feel in the hand is actually better, though. It doesn't have the clangy resonance issues of the Moonsault, and I like the smooth finish better, paradoxically, despite it having the potential to be more slippery. The Papillon is pretty quiet as you flip it. Even the latch doesn't make too much noise. So flawed though it may be, it actually has it where it counts.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Papillon turns out to be a middling knife. An in-betweener: A cut above flea market made-in-China garbage knives, but several pegs below the premium balisongs not only made by other brands, but by Böker themselves.

Maybe that's why it's presently standing poised to get the chop.

If you look at it from the perspective of being a poor man's Kershaw Lucha, though, it starts to become a little more appealing. At $30 it's a reasonably good bargain, and probably the cheapest way at the moment to get your hands on a ball bearing balisong. (Say that ten times, fast.) At the full original list price, though? Not so much.

I told you my next post would be shorter. Useless trivia of the day. The plural for "axis" is "axes." This is also the plural for "ax."

Edit: I didn't sufficiently caption this originally, did I? From lower left, going up the arc rightwards:

• Benchmade Full Immunity
• Benchmade 532 Mini Bugout
• Benchmade 556 Mini Griptillian
• Ozark Trail 6835
• Benchmade 560 Freek
• Ozark Trail 6842
• Benchmade 535 Bugout
• Ganzo G704
• Benchmade 537 Bailout
• Benchmade 550 Griptilian
• CJRB Crag
• Ganzo G729

Got your eye on the Spyderco Para Military 2, but haven't got $200 burning a hole in your pocket? Or, do you like the Spyderco but really wish it had an Axis lock? Brother, have I got a deal for you.

This is a Ganzo G726 and, yes, it bears a rather striking similarity to a certain aforementioned knife. Doesn't it just.

But it has a couple of key differences. The first is, yes, it's got an Axis lock rather than Spyderco's "Compression Lock." (Which Ganzo calls their "G-Lock," and have similarly equipped on many of their knives.)

The thumb opening hole is also teardrop shaped rather than round, presumably so Ganzo don't wind up getting sued right into the dirt. And while the Para Military can have the clip reversed and swapped between tip up and tip down configurations, this knife has mounting holes for tip up only. It is still reversible, and with the ambidextrous opening method and lock this knife is thus suitable for left handed users. The clip is similar to, but uses a different hole pattern than, the Spyderco one. So alas, interchanging parts or installing custom scales and clips that fit the Spyderco will be impossible. Bummer.

And then, the blade is 440C rather than Spyderco's CPM SPY27 custom crucible steel used in their current incarnations. It's a shame that this is not one of their models that's also available in D2. But we can probably excuse that, given that this model is only $22 at the time of writing.

And for $22 you get a lot of knife. As with the last Ganzo we looked at, despite coming from a Chinese manufacturer prone to, ahem, "borrowing" design elements from time to time and all the connotations that brings, the fit and finish of this knife is pretty much perfect.

This is 8-3/16" long when open with a 3-1/2" blade, 3-1/8" of which is usable edge. The blade has a full flat grind all the way to the spine which is very nice. The G729 is pretty broad, a full 1-5/8" across when closed at the widest point, which is the peak above the thumb opener hole. The blade is precisely 1/8" thick: 0.125". It's 117.3 grams (4.14 ounces) altogether, with textured G-10 scales over steel liners. You can get this in a variety of colors but I chose this nice slate blue finish just to do something different for a change. The world knows I have quite enough boring black knives.

Suffice to say, this is a knife on the larger end of the EDC spectrum. It's to be expected, considering it's pretty much exactly the same size as the knife it's mirroring.

The clip again apes the Spyderco one -- mostly, at least, see above -- and is not deep carry nor does it have any other fancy features. It's not even engraved. But it's got a good balance between spring tension and the grippiness against the scales. This knife draws easily from your pocket, but stays put confidently otherwise. That's more than I can say even for a few more expensive knives from a manufacturer whose name starts with "B," and ends in "enchmade," and makes knives that bite onto your pocket's seams like grim death.

The halves are separated with some nicely machined diabolo style spacers with little stairsteps in them. Swanky.

The G729's pivot rides on one bronze washer and one nylon one, which is a little weird. These are visible just peeking through the gap, there. It works, though. The blade centering is good, but that's easy to do when you cheat and use an Axis lock rather than a liner lock. With no mechanism inherently pushing the blade to one side, it remains resolutely square despite the mismatching washers.

I have to say, I really like the feel of the G729. That's not to say, I like it "for the price." I like it objectively, overall. The lockup is perfect, the action is nice, and the thumb hole feels good despite being a wonky shape. It opens and closes easily, smoothly, pleasantly, with no grind or drag or weirdness. There are no telltale signs of cheapness. Blade wiggle, none. No corners visibly cut, no details inexpertly executed. The spine of the blade feels nice. The subtly rounded jumping feels nice. The full flat grind helps make this an excellent cutter despite the broad blade and the edge geometry, at least on my example, is very good.

The lock mechanism and thumb hole opener bring to mind one other blue-grey knife from a particular manufacturer. The G729 (center) is longer, broader, but slightly thinner than the Griptilian (right): 0.518" across the scales and without the clip, whereas the Griptilian is 0.600". I think the textured G-10 scales ironically give you a better grip on it as well, and I like the full length steel liners of the Ganzo a lot more than Benchmade's current fascination with making most of the knife out of plastic and only putting little metal plates at the end around the lock. The surface finish on the Griptilian's blade is a lot nicer, but you'd fuckin' well expect it to be for $138 more.

It's bigger than the usual CQC-6K, also (left).

I don't have a Para Military to compare it to. Actually, I only own two Spydercos at the moment and one of them is a balisong, and the other one is made out of wood. So sorry, I can't help you there.

The G729 disassembles like you'd expect and looks like a typical Axis lock folder, mechanically speaking. Although the steel liners have speed holes in them presumably for lightness, which is pretty cool.

It's easy to take apart in theory, but I did encounter a snag. The male side of the pivot screw was the singularly most gooped up with threadlocker screw I have ever encountered in my life. It's ridiculous. Look at this:

An alarming amount of grunt was required to get it to let go. This was not helped by the wrinkle of having to guess which side is the male head and which side is the female, because the pivot screw is indeed D shaped and the female side will not spin freely in its hole. This is normally nice to see, but not when you're applying 600 ft-lb of torque to a tiny T8 screw. Especially if it turns out to be the wrong T8 screw. But I did ultimately figure it out (it was the left side, the side with the clip on my example, for what it's worth) and it let go without the head stripping. So the hardware is quality. But differentiating the screw heads would have been nice. Or, you know, not putting a Torx receptacle in the side you bloody well can't turn.

There was so much threadlocker on that screw, in fact, that some of it that'd likely been spilled at the factory was also gluing one of the scales to one of the liners. This was easy enough to push free through one of the big holes in the liner. So there is your obligatory Chinese Knife Baffling Construction Detail identified and sorted out. It could have been worse.

Note also the dissimilar pivot washers.

Everything else inside is typical. The usual hair springs, the pair of spacers (which are aluminum), the lock crossbar, and the endstop pin.

The lockup. I went through the trouble to take this picture, so you're going to see it. The blade has a fine as-machined surface finish on it which is very Spyderco-eque, and also causes it to go all striated under the LED's in my photo light.

My example would "Axis flick" closed with the lock held back, but would not open that way in its out of the box state of tune. Backing the pivot screw out about 1/8 of a turn (after busting it loose...) solved this.

Oh yes.

The Inevitable Conclusion

~Here~ ~it~ ~comes...~

Ganzo has once again made a decent knife and made it available for not a lot of money. Now, you get to make your own decision on the ethics; how you feel about somebody coming along and undercutting another manufacturer on what's pretty much their own design. I can't make that determination for you. But really, my take on the matter is this isn't really a knockoff of a Spyderco considering it's actually mechanically different. But it's definitely an alternative aimed at the same hypothetical buyer. Sure, Ganzo has copied Spyderco's homework, but they've also copied Benchmade's and put it in there as well, and changed the words around just a bit to keep the teacher from noticing.

The opposite point of contention here is that, overall excellent cutlery that they may be, the asking prices coming from some of the established major manufacturers -- Spyderco, Benchmade, Zero Tolerance, Microtech, Tops and all -- has really gotten out of hand in the last few years. And this is a point I'm probably going to be harping on a lot for a while going forward, so brace yourself. It seems like even in this hobby we can't escape corporate greedflation. Prices rose during COVID; inflation, transportation, labor shortages, I get all those excuses from then. But now it's now, it's also becoming apparent that all these brands are intent on keeping their prices at that elevated level forever. One wonders how much extra profit is there to be gained, though, by pricing your products out of reach of a greater portion of potential buyers? A plain Bugout was $105 in 2019 and it's $180 now. The Para Military was $140 in 2019 and it's $190 now. And so on.

That's not to say I don't respect these manufacturers, especially for being the pioneers who invented the mechanisms and some of the designs we take for granted today. Those which paved the way for others to follow. Buying a Benchmade or a Spyderco supports American jobs, pays back the R&D, and nets you -- historically, at least -- some guarantee of quality. Look at this picture. Count them Benchmade boxes. I don't think I, of all people, have taken a single morsel off of anyone's table in Oregon City.

But the fact of the matter is, regardless everything, right now at this very moment we live in the best time there's ever been for knife enthusiasts. Yes, prices on big premium brand name knives are high. But! These days there is a huge selection knives from all of these fresh faced makers like Ganzo, Civivi, CJRB whose products are frankly excellent. And not to mention that the selection and quality you can get from established budget brands like Kershaw, Boker, and CRKT is better than ever. I think nowadays it is no longer true to say that the "best" default answer is just to go out and buy a Spyderco or a Benchmade, because now there are so many options that are cheaper but damn near as or exactly as good.

Then there's the steel question.

Is it nice to say that you have a knife made of the current crucible process wonder-steel, S30V or S35V or CPM-154 or VG-10 or CPM-20CV or CruWear or whatever? Sure, of course. But is it actually, in this day and age, necessary?

Well, no.

Look. I own, at current count, 107 knives. At least, the ones I am able to lay my hands on right now and are not squirreled away somewhere inconvenient. I just counted. And not counting the swords or the multitools. Premium ones, cheap ones, new ones, old ones. I like to think I have a pretty wide cross section to play with, and getting wider all the time.

I remember back when 440C was the king of pocketknife steels. Teenage me cut a lot of stuff with 440C with no problem. We were none the worse off for not knowing about future supersteels. 440C was what to look for back then -- not 300 series, not 420, not 4116. Well, the properties of the stuff haven't changed. Only our perceptions have.

Maybe CPM-20CV is "better" than 440C in some specific property as measured in a lab. But is it 8, 10, 12 times better for the price? Of course not. Fancy steels are not more expensive because they contain much different or better ingredients. The processes they use may be a little more precise, sure, but they're mainly expensive because they're produced in small amounts and the economies of scale aren't there. But the "budget" steels are also produced with amazing consistency these days, and not to mention in great quantities. 440C wasn't a budget steel in 1999. It is now only because mass manufacturing has it figured out. That doesn't magically make it worse.

I also remember a time when a $22 knife would be guaranteed crap. So think on that one. All of this I say in defense of the Ganzo. Surely it'll never be worth anything more than what it is. It'll never be a collector's item or an investment vehicle or sought after once it's discontinued. That's not the point of it.

I like the Ganzo G729. I like it despite where it came from and what it's made out of. I think it's a fantastic value for the money. And I will end on this, which is perhaps a dangerous thing to say: If you're going to use it, and not just lock it in a drawer, I think it's a better value for your money than its Spyderco twin.

There's been a distinct lack of serrations recently so I figured I'd post my EDC.

I've had it for ~2 years really like the ABLE lock mechanism on it.

So, one of my very first posts here back when was an inventory of my array of balisong knives. I am happy to report that my collection has since grown.

Even if, it must be said, a couple of its members are... silly.

Top row, left to right:

• Kershaw Moonsault
• Benchmade Model 42
• Generic bali-fork
• and bali-spoon
• BudK Bali-comb
• Some weird thing I got on Wish (top)
• "Guro" Balisong (bottom)
• Jin Jun Lang JL-13A

Bottom row, left to right:

• 105XSSL
• A goofy brandless Chinese thing
• Benchmade Model 32 Mini Morpho
• Böker 06EX227
• Spyderco Smallfly 2
• Benchmade Model 53
• NedFOSS Karabit-Thing, Mantis Duja Ve Clone
• Böker 06EX228
• Bradley Kimura II
• Bradley Mayhem

Not pictured:

• Mantis Bottleneck
• Böker Papillon 06EX116SOI
• And I guess I forgot the Spyderco BaliYo

Hello, I am just learning more about pocket knives as I suddenly developed an interest in them recently after trying to get one and finding it fell very short of expectations (some cheap Gerber?). I replaced it with a civivi element 2 and have been loving it, but the original buy was meant for my wife and I don't think that the element will fit their needs. Here are their list of needs:

• The main usage of the knife would be related to their ecological research, so mostly removing bark or cutting twigs for analysis. They also camp, but we do that together so we have the element 2 on hand for anything "heavier", but something to cut through paracord or other fine material. I don't know how this would impact the blade metal type, but expect saps and other organic stickies)
• She has small, weak little hands, so tall knives (>0.75") seem to be out of the question for comfortable handling
• 3" seems huge and unweildy to them. I'd think something in the 1-2 range would be more than enough I think?
• They are still uncomfortable with blades (again, bad experience with their first getting stuck open because of lack of hand strength), so something where their thumb isnt in the way of the blade while closing is a requirement of theirs (slide locks and buttons were okayed, back lock was acceptable). One handed opening is also preferred, as they may only have one hand to work with and, again, weak hands.

And, the kicker, they don't want to spend a lot of money on it (<$100 pretax).

What options could we be looking at?

PS were in VA, so I'm unsure if they can have an automatic (or assisted?) knife, but if it is an option I'd be down to get one/ask more questions about those.

Dudes. The Day. Once more.

This is the CRKT Cottidae and, once again, I find myself at a loss for any authoritative indication of how you're supposed to pronounce its name.

This knife is a Jesper Voxnaes design, as the engraving on the blade will tell you. We've seen his work before. We will certainly do so again; I have at least one other knife in my collection known to be done by him.

As you may have also guessed from the logo, the Cottidae is a ball bearing pivoted flipper opener. So confident are CRKT and Mr. Voxnaes in these ball bearings that it has no thumb studs or equivalents whatsoever, and barely any of the spine of the blade is visible from between the handles. The only way to open it is via the very low profile rear flipper.

The handle scales are unitary slabs of textured aluminum.

The Cottidae has a drop point D2 blade that's a sturdy 0.135" thick with a full flat grind. That ought to give it very good cutting power despite its rather diminutive size. It's only 6-5/16" long opened, 3-3/4" closed, with a 2-9/16" blade. About 2-3/16" of the edge is usable due to a very long, squared, shallow choil at the base that forms a finger notch in conjunction with the flipper, which makes it easy to choke up very far with your grip.

It's thick for its size. 0.513" not including the (reversible) deep carry clip. It's dense, too. 93.6 grams or 3.30 ounces, giving it a solid feel in the hand. The ergonomics are pretty nice despite the overall squarish Bauhaus minimalism to the shape. The opening action is, of course, impeccable due to the presence of the bearings even if the tiny flipper takes some getting used to. The detent resistance is very light on this knife, possibly the lightest out of any pure non-spring-assisted knife I own.

Yes, I am deliberately beating around the bush here. "What is so damn weird about it?" I hear you shouting at your computer and/or phone screen.

Well, I've been coy and I haven't shown you the other side of the knife yet.

There's this switch thingy. "Aha!" Say the comments, "So, it's got some kind of goofy lock."

Well, no. It is a normal liner locker inside.

The switch pivots to the side, and then slides forward in its track like so. And then what happens is...

...the entire knife just...

...falls apart.

That is what Patent 10,226,871 is. CRKT calls this "Field Strip Technology," and for most intents and purposes this knife can be dismantled as far as normal people would want to take it with no tools.

No screws, no bits, no drivers. The Cottidae is apparently held together by witchcraft.

How it actually works is, there is a sliding metal plate between the aluminum handle scale and the liner on that side of the knife. When you toggle the latch, the plate is allowed to slide forward and a pair of keyhole shaped cutouts in that plate disengage themselves from the main pins inside.

Here is the pivot pin hole in both positions. Note the crescent moon slice of metal visible in the hole in the first picture that's gone in the second.

The tips of the main pivot pin and the tail pin are grooved, and these grooves get engaged by the plate.

These remain captive in the liner lock side of the knife when you take it apart. As does the pivot endstop pin, which rides in the semicircular channel in the blade. So there are no small pieces that can fall out and get lost. There are no little pins, tiny screws, springs, washers, or spacers. The knife breaks down into just three major components: The two handle halves and the blade. It should therefore be safe to pop this apart even in the middle of the woods to ungunk it, without fear of any of your vital hardware disappearing to live with the fairies beneath the forest floor.

You can take the rest of the knife apart further by undoing the screws on the outside which will ultimately release all the pins and liners. But doing so is totally unnecessary for normal cleaning and maintenance.

Inside, the thrust ball bearings and their carriers are plainly visible, and are semi-captive in cutouts in the heel of the blade. Note also the aforementioned channel for the endstop pin.

Compared to the traditional CQC-6K, the Cottidae's compactitude is thusly evident. This isn't small enough to truly count as a micro-knife, in my opinion, but it should be well within the bounds of blade length limitations in most places. Plus it hasn't got any springs, gravity action, or other Naughty Features. The blade isn't even black. So it ought to be legal to carry in a wide variety of locales.

The Inevitable Conclusion

For the habitual knife-fiddlers in the audience, this one gives you a whole new way to play with it beyond the usual flicking it open and closed, an action that tends to, with sufficient repetition, put everyone in your office on edge and slowly drive them insane.

Instead, you can incessantly reenact the scene of Forrest Gump field stripping and reassembling his M1 carbine in company record time. I highly recommend it.

(And if you want a larger but more expensive version, you can check out the CRKT Bona Fide, which uses the same system.)

Fellas, I think I might be in love.

And that's a problem, because you know I already have a gal and it's the Benchmade Model 32 Mini Morpho. But I want you to meet the Böker "Tactical Small" Balisong model 06EX227, and I'm in trouble because this one presses all my buttons.

This despite the decidedly unmemorable name and model designation. The 06EX227 is, obviously, a Balisong knife. An EDC sized one, too, not some kind of massive competition flipper, at 4-1/2" long closed, 7-3/4" open or so with a 3-1/2" blade in a shape that's a little weird. But we can look past that. Did not Francis Bacon say, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion?" Of course he did; Top Gear told me so.

Anyway, If those dimensions sound awful similar to that of the Benchmade Model 32 Morpho, that's because they are. And just like the Morpho, the Böker's blade is D2, which is a steel I like a lot. The blade is 0.100" thick. She's 93.4 grams or 3.29 ounces, so despite being roughly the same size she's a tad heavier than the Morpho due to having steel liners rather than titanium.

I'm going to stop referring to this knife as "she," now, because it's silly and we all got the joke by now. Right?

Aside from being nearly the same size and made of the same steel, there are a lot of obvious design similarities between this and the Morpho. Both knives have "Zen" kickerless rebound designs, with the choil in the blades as well as their opposite acting as the pockets and rebound surfaces for the same. But on the Böker they're elongated and stylized.

Both knives have composite scales over metal liners, G-10 in the Böker's case, and both knives have squeeze-to-pop spring loaded latches powered by flexible prongs in those liners. Yep, you know I like that a lot.

And I know what you're thinking. Didn't I already review a Böker knife that was the spitting image of the Morpho, and didn't I go on raving and mention all the similarities about 467 times back then, too? I sure did. That was the Böker Model 06EX228, which was also my very first post using my now-trademarked infinite white photography void! That knife is a lot larger than the smaller Model 32 variant of the Morpho whereas this one obviously isn't. And it has quite a few other little details that set it apart.

One of them a portion of you have probably failed to notice, but shortly will not be able to unsee: The 06EX227 has concealed pivot screws. See? Totally invisible. The blade pivots on magic.

Böker also figured out that the "ears" sticking out the sides of a traditional balisong knife are not, in fact, strictly necessary. So this knife hasn't got 'em. There are just two little vestigial bumps there which stick out just far enough to be tactile and let you know the point where you really ought to stop choking up on the handle before you slice your fingers off.

On a traditional bali these may have served as some manner of crossguard for fighting purposes, but these days I certainly hope none of us are fighting anyone with our pocketknives. I'm certainly not. So we can dispense with them, conveniently leaving nothing sticking out to snag on your pocket. (I also feel compelled at this juncture to point out that I already figured this out myself last year, when I designed my silly but functional 3D printable Harrier Utili-Song. Plug, plug, plug.)

And whereas the Morpho's scales are ventilated to show off the fancy finishwork underneath, the 06EX227 's aren't because the liners are just plain flat steel. Instead, you get these carved double helixes. They're attractive, but understated. This gives me an ace-of-spades sort of feeling, but I don't know why.

Here it is (center) compared to my 32/Mini Morpho (left) and the big Böker 06EX228 (on the right).

The Morpho comparison is really tough to escape. The 06EX227 is definitely a love letter. A tribute. An homage. Or, perhaps, a crazed groupie. Not only are the latches so similar, but the liner spacers are even shaped the same.

But believe it or not, the 06EX227 has a couple of things about it that I like better than the Morpho, which feels wrong to say. Unfaithful, even.

I guess an obvious one is that the Benchmade Morpho is very, very discontinued. No longer produced. The only way to get your hands on one now is to go used, and deal with the used collector's market. The Böker definitely isn't. At least I think. (Edit: Actually, now it is. Get them while you can. If you're reading this in the future, well. Sorry.)

And right now BladeHQ has it for $40. Which is frankly incredible. (No affiliation as usual, of course. I bought this with my own money. If any of their staff are reading this and want to hook me up with some free stuff I'll write a big pile of words about, though, have your people call my people.)

That means the 06EX227 is an EDC-sized-spring-latch-D2-with-clip balisong you could actually carry and go out and use, without giving yourself an anxiety attack over getting a scratch on it. Nor having to part with a kidney to even obtain one in the first place.

To assist in this, the 06EX227 comes with a clip. It is steel, and very short, and I'm afraid it's not a patch on the Benchmade Morpho's clip. The 06EX227's clip is very plane-Jane and doesn't even have a perfunctory attempt at any kind of engraving on it, which means it'll be useless for showing off to passers-by what you have in your pocket. It is, however, completely and easily repositionable. That is not to say "reversible," although it is that too. As usual, for some reason, it inevitably comes on the wrong side of the handle, i.e. the one that will place the clip furthest from the rear corner of your pocket if carried on the right side by a right handed user. But it can be easily moved to the other, correct side. Or moved to either of the two remaining completely incorrect positions, which are both sides of the safe handle. This would be a stupid thing to do, but it can be done.

Another feature difference is, the 06EX227's latch can spring-pop if you squeeze it from the latched open position as well. The Morpho doesn't work that way -- it's latch detents in that position, rather than making ready to spring back to the center. So you can put the 06EX227 away just as quickly and elegantly as you can bust it out.

And the other major thing... Look, I'm going to need a minute to work myself up to this. I'm not sure I'll be able to live with myself afterwards.

Okay. Here we go.

~TheBoker'sactionisbetterthantheMorpho.~

There. I said it.

This is all the play in the 06EX227's pivots. All of it. I'm pressing hard in this photo. It's rock solid. Astoundingly so.

And yet, it flips with a degree of silky smoothness that is every bit as good as the Morpho's -- but without any rattle whatsoever. The Morpho's action feel is, of course, fantastic. But when you compare the two, you can detect the minute amount of slop in the Morpho's pivots which is not present on the 06EX227. This knife's handles swish on a mathematically precise single two dimensional plane, unerringly, always. It feels uncanny, almost artificial. Like you're manipulating a simulation, and nobody's yet added all the variables and imperfections that make it "real." And I think the added weight of the steel liners versus titanium actually improves it. That can't be right, can it? There's no way.

Guys, the Böker 06EX227 has ball bearing pivots.

I was not prepared for this when I put it in my cart. Go ahead and check out Böker's listing for this knife, or even BladeHQ. This isn't mentioned anywhere. Nobody said anything about ball bearings when I bought it. I thought it was just going to ride on plastic washers like the bigger 06EX228, or maybe brass or phosphor bronze like the Morpho if we were lucky.

It should not be allowed to be this good.

And now, on to the strip tease.

With its clothes off, you can see how the 06EX227's pivot screw heads fit into matching recesses in the scales.

The pivot screws themselves are D shaped, and fit into matching machined holes in the liners. This is very nice; Böker could have easily cheaped out here, especially since regular users would never even see the screws concealed as they are, but they didn't. There are Torx heads only on the male screw sides. The female sides are completely smooth on the heads, but since the pivots are keyed by their shape there is never any need to get a driver into the opposite side anyway, and undoing them once revealed is easy. (This is also different from the last Böker balisong we looked at all those months ago; that one used threaded barrels for the pivots with a screw in each end and is very sensitive to changes in screw tension.)

You can also see how the spring latch works. This mechanism is nearly exactly like that of the Morpho (and the bigger Böker from earlier), in that a pair of prongs in the liners are joined with a cross-pin, which engages the hook on the latch.

The natural flex in the metal puts this under tension all the time when the knife is latched, but all it takes is a squeeze to let the latch head clear and it pops out on its own via the spring action.

Once removed, you can easily see that the latch has two hooks on it, one of them replacing the little hill and valley present in that spot on the Morpho's latch. As above, the Böker's latch will not detent in the open position. It puts the spring prongs under tension in the opposite direction instead, ready to spring out when squeezed in the open position as well. But just like the Morpho, the spring latch design prevents the latch head from being able to contact the blade and potentially nicking it when you're flipping the knife. Which is excellent, and something a lot of makers somehow miss.

Here is the full, as it were, spread. The 06EX227 was very easy to disassemble, with none of the screws being tough to undo or overtorqued from the factory. There are only a few hidden pitfalls for the unwary: The latch spring cross-pin, in particular, is retained by the scales themselves and can fall out once one of them is dismounted. Same with the two large cross-pins that hold in the liner spacers. The spacers are also threaded to accept two each of the scale mount screws, one per side, and until these are in place they can pivot on their pins. You have to make sure these didn't get out of alignment upon reassembly or else you won't be able to put the last screw into each of the scales.

Reassembly's pretty easy. The pivot screws are foolproof. They'll only go in the right way, and as is typical with ball bearing knives the torque on them really doesn't matter. Just button them down until you have all the play removed from the handles and you'll still probably find that the pivots work freely. All the scale screws are the same as each other, save for the three that go into the spacer blocks. Why three? Because one of those is also one of the pocket clip screws, and these are the longest of the bunch. Other than that, get the screws in vaguely the right locations and they're all otherwise interchangeable. The parts fitment, as with the previous Böker, is all excellent. All the pins slot home easily but don't wiggle, and sandwiching all the liners and scales back together gave me no trouble. The only bugbear is, once again, that damn clip. Its screw holes are drilled a little large which means it can slide around and get out of alignment if you don't carefully, and thoroughly, torque down its screws.

There's one other personality defect with the 06EX227, and that's this:

There is a massive amount of gap left over from the difference in the thickness of the latch heel and the space between the liners. The latch can slide up and down its pin noticeably, and while objectively it can't move far enough to actually affect latching or unlatching mechanically, it still annoys me on principle. But, as has been said by many a swain, I can fix this. I will absolutely be able to lap down a pair of washers to precisely fit in that gap and center the latch. It should only take a few moments.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Don't sleep on this. The Böker 06EX227 is hands down the best value I have seen in a production balisong knife in a long time -- possibly ever.

Edit: I made a gaffe, here. The number on the blade I was under the impression is this knife's internal model number in fact, isn't. It's the serial number. I confirmed this via the simple expedient of buying another one of them. 1760 is the serial of my first example. 1818 is the serial of the second. 06EX227 is the correct manufacturer's model designation of this knife.

Also, BladeHQ has apparently noticed the popularity of this model and raised the price to $60. Even at $60 this is a great deal. But what the hell, guys?

I herewith swear that I will write this entire post without ever once making a joke about that Kudu that you do so well.

...Damn.

This is the Cold Steel Kudu. Specifically, the ring locking version.

As is typical for Cold Steel, they've come up with a story with the intent of attaching some manner of vague mystique to this knife's design. Cold Steel knives are seemingly always a style once used by traditional ninjas, or Navy SEALS, or KGB operatives, or Shaolin Monks, or Aztec warriors or Scots berserkers or Cherokee indians or Sir Francis Bacon or Elvis or whoever they think will help get whackers to buy the things.

This time they bill the Kudu as a modern reimagining of traditional ring pull folders, specifically singling out the ones commonly used throughout Africa. Which probably has, it must be said, at least some historical validity. You can read the entire block of bumf here if you're inclined.

This isn't something you hear about very often but there is apparently a small but very dedicated fanbase devoted to these sorts of knives. And some prone to affixing to them... let's just call it a helping of nebulously quasihistorical woo. Check this sort of thing out, for instance.

Significance of the mystical symbols, my left toe.

Anyway, suffice it to say that the idea of this type of ring pull folder has been around for a very long time, far predating the advent of mass manufacturing, and was most likely initially of European origin and then spread throughout the world via the usual channels. (I.e., white men in tall wooden ships sailing around planting flags on shores that already belonged to someone else, bringing all their junk with them.) Today's machine made examples are to some extent surely mechanically copies of an idea that craftsmen have been hammering out by hand for centuries.

The Kudu and its ilk are back locking folders, but not in the typical manner we're used to seeing on this continent and in this era. As you pivot the rather large blade it humpity-bumps over six very distinct detents thanks to a series of lobes around the heel. Only the last position truly locks, with a square edged peg going into the matching slot on the external lock bar which is a single piece of springy steel riveted to back of the handle.

This locks it in place quite solidly, but if you pull up on the attached ring (which is clearly just a regular split keyring that otherwise dangles freely) it'll unlock and allow itself to be closed. The lock bar is extremely stiff and doesn't bend very much, but you hardly need to lift it any distance at all to unlock the blade.

It must be said that closing it with one hand is difficult, but opening it with one hand is outright impossible. This is quite possibly the least "tactical" knife design ever devised.

The Kudu is surprisingly large. It's a full 10" long overall, with a 4-1/4" clip pointed blade made of 5Cr15MoV. The blade is 0.90" thick and is polished to a near mirror shine which both causes it to smudge like a son of a bitch and also makes it tricky to photograph. Closed, the knife is about 5-5/8" long and measuring its breadth is a tricky proposition because of the presence of the ring. So minus that, it's about 1-5/16" across at its widest point which is the peak of the blade. It's 0.637" thick including the heads of the rivets holding the lock bar on.

The handle is made from glass filled nylon (which Cold Steel is calling "Zy-Ex" this time) and has a hot-rod flame inlay in it which is made out of some type of steel. It's probably some manner of austenitic stainless like 304 or 18-8 because a magnet is only weakly attracted to it.

The inlay is only on one side, so the reverse isn't nearly as interesting. The markings on the other side of the blade list the manufacturer, steel, and made in China origin.

There are no thumb studs, but a large fingernail nick is provided. Both the marketing and the markings on this knife try very hard to play up its Africa-ness, and the critter depicted on the blade is, well, a kudu: An antelope endemic to southern Africa that's got some very spiraly antlers.

From a latter-day EDC perspective, the Kudu is enormous. Mostly it's just very long. It just towers over the CQC-6K, which is already on the larger end of the spectrum of modern EDC knives.

Since the Kudu is partially riveted together I did not bother to take it apart. The blade is held on with a pair of Torx head screws and is thus theoretically dismountable, but since the mechanism on this knife is on the outside I don't think there's much to be gained there. How it works is already on display for all to see.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The appeal of a ring-pull folder like this is in a way its simplicity, and the Kudu definitely has that. This is a super budget knife, usually retailing for around $10. But despite that it seems to be built tolerably well. I personally put it in the same category as the various twist-lock Opinels, slip joint Texas Toothpicks, Svords and other extended tang friction folders, and similar low tech knives. This is a crocodile: archaic in its way, largely unchanged since ancient times, but that's because it didn't need changing.

Due to its length, lack of clip or any other carrying provision -- it doesn't even have a lanyard hole, although I guess you could tie one through the ring -- and awkward protrusion of the ring itself the Kudu would actually be kind of tough to carry in the typical way that we're used to. But it'd make a great camp knife, scout knife, or tool to leave in the shed or tackle box. Or, if you must, to be carried for hipster purposes.

The beauty of the, frankly, crude mechanical design means it should continue to work even if it gets dinged, dented, abraded, or otherwise fucked up in a manner you probably wouldn't want to subject one of your exotic supersteel pieces to.

Plus it's neat. That's got to count for something.

~~Numerous Knife Disorder~~ New Knife Day it is once more.

This here's the CJRB Crag.

Just how the hell you're supposed to pronounce CJRB is not the only unknown to me. I'd never heard of this brand until recently, and apparently it's a cheaper sub-brand of Artisan Cutlery that's been around since 2019. They have a web site, which unfortunately stops short of specifying how you're supposed to say it or even what the heck "CJRB" stands for. It does, however, go on to specify that CJRB knives carry a 14 day "no DOA guarantee." That just raises further questions.

Anyhow. The Crag.

This is a stonking huge ball bearing flipper opener with a blade made of Artisan/CJRB's proprietary AR-RPM9 steel. It's also available in D2, and I do like a good D2 knife to the point that I have at least ten of them. But for once I figured I'd give something different a shot, so here we are with the weird proprietary steel.

Artisan has this to say about their steel, which is full of the usual fluff you'd expect along the lines of their steel being so great, not to mention corrosion resistant, hard wearing, tough, and easily sharpenable -- as if several of those properties aren't mutually exclusive. Every manufacturer says this about their steel, and why wouldn't they? Nobody's going to make any sales by blathering about what specific things their steel sucks at. You can get a little more objective information on it from ZKnives, which indicates that it probably won't hold an edge as well as D2 (darn), but ought to be mechanically superior to the likes of 8cr and the 440 series. It's sure to be more rust resistant than D2, also, rust being something that's a perpetual thorn in my side on all my D2 knives. So that's nice.

The Crag has this big cleaverlike reverse tanto point. Suddenly all the cool kids seem to have this kind of blade profile nowadays, although search me why the sudden interest. Back in my day we just called this thing a Wharncliffe blade and didn't make such a big deal about it. I selected the version with the groovy carbon fiber handle scales. Other variants are available. This one has a finish on the blade described as "satin," which appears to be a tumbled stonewashy kind of process over the bare steel. The surface finish is very nice overall, especially for something billed as a budget knife, and does not sport any of the exposed machining marks we've gotten sick of looking at recently. The bevel is a hollow grind, although the top near the spine is left square.

The Crag is 8" long open, 4-5/8" closed, with a 3-3/8" blade in that reverse tanto shape. The blade is 0.127" thick at the spine, so a tad beefier than most. Despite this the Crag is not excessively large in terms of overall or blade length, but it's quite broad: The blade is over an inch and one quarter wide, 1.274" to be precise, at its widest point. The entire edge has a subtle upsweep to it that presents a highly usable "all belly" edge. There is a very generously sized combination choil and finger notch at the base of the blade, but it's forward of the kicker (which along with a cutout in the handle forms yet another finger notch) so you have to be super choked up on the blade to use it for anything.

It's similarly broad when closed as well, with the widest point actually being at the transitional angle between the main blade and the reverse tanto point on the spine of the blade, and it 1-9/16" at this location. That's huge. If you have skinny hipster jeans, this knife probably isn't going to work for you.

It's 0.510" thick not including the clip, near as makes no difference to half an inch. The clip is a deep carry design and is reversible via a pair of screws that go directly into the steel liners. With the clip it's 0.808" thick in total, including the swanky brass-embellished pivot screw heads that sit proud of the surface (by 0.058", if you must know). It's 132.5 grams (4.67 ounces) in heft, an unknown portion of that contributed to by the carbon fiber scales. The variants with other materials may weigh more, I don't know. You all are going to have to give me a raise if you want me to buy them all and compare.

The Crag is a flipper opener through-and-through and does not have thumb studs. The only way you can open it is by kicking the flipper on the rear.

The pivot is riding on ceramic ball bearings, and the opening action is buttery smooth. Exemplary. Nearly flawless. I love it.

Oh yeah, and it also purports to have a funny lock. We all know that kind of thing is my jam.

There's a liner locking version of this knife under the same name, too, but that's for boring wimps who don't get invited to parties. CJRB calls this their "Recoil-lock," but they don't mention anything more about it. In fact, the product blurb for their Recoil version still mentions having a liner lock, which this knife very definitely doesn't.

Instead there's this sliding toggle thing on the spine of the knife. It's jimped sightly on its top surface, and also has some stairsteppy grip surfaces machined into the sides. It's hard to notice in operation but it actuates aft and then back to the fore when you kick the knife open, and when you pull it rearward in its little track the blade flops around freely. (Editing note: "Machined" is the wrong word to use here. The lock trolley is clearly cast, and all of its grip ridges are part of the casting. The inner surfaces are machined to be flat, however, and the pin holes in it are surely drilled as part of some final process to ensure that they actually have sufficient precision.)

Well, there's a humdinger. A lock that toggles with the blade action and completely disengages when held back. That sounds awfully familiar.

Yep. There's an Axis lock hidden in there. But rather than expose it with the traditional two buttons sticking through either side, CJRB has added a little trolley on top of it so it's accessible from the spine.

That's... actually slightly problematic if you're not careful, because unlike the typical Axis design your natural inclination when operating this control layout is to slide the lock back with your thumb while the rest of your fingers are still wrapped around the handle, unlike the pinch operation you'd give a normal Axis knife. So if you do that, the blade can swing closed and it'll bite you. Manipulating this takes a concerted mental readjustment if you've just switched from a different knife, I find.

And yes, you can Axis flick it both open and closed. When closing, the blade is so heavy and the pivot so effortless than you can actually allow it to just fall shut. Hold it upside down and you can, with a modicum of practice, get it to fall open as well. Jury's out of this makes it count legally as a "gravity knife." If I were you, maybe I wouldn't show off that aspect of it to any policemen.

If you hold the lock back and swing the blade out to open it the knife literally rings like a bell when the blade hits the end stop pin. Here's an MPEG of it, with sound.

It's glorious. I could do that all day.

The Crag was very easy to disassemble, in that all the screws came out cleanly and without fuss, all the hardware fits together impeccably, and overall it just feels like an enthusiast's knife in general mechanical fitment.

There are hidden dangers lurking inside, though, specifically that the Crag is absolutely brimming with tiny parts that'll fall out of it and get lost if you're not careful.

The major offenders are these tiny pins that are what hold the lock trolley into its track:

Those are the ones all the way on the left. There are four of them in total, two per side, although only two are shown in this photo. The other two are safely... elsewhere. They're tiny. Like, 2mm long. Maybe not even that. They're also not held in by anything so they will fall out when you remove either handle scale and you'd better be ready for it or you're going to be grovelling around on the carpet.

Also visible there is the crossbar from the lock, and the end stop pin for the blade's travel to its open position. Or, if you prefer, the part that makes it go "ding."

Here are the bearings. They're ceramic, in nylon carriers.

The brass garnishes around the pivot screws are separate pieces. I believe this is also a contender for knife with the widest pivot screw head. Look at that thing -- it's a goddamn Frisbee.

There are no surprises to be found on the edge, neither good nor bad. Mine came sharp enough out of the box to easily cleave a Post-It in two without much effort. If CJRB's hype is anything to be believed, it ought to be a doddle to make it even sharper.

The edge on mine was just ever so slightly out of true from the factory. That's a touch disappointing, but not unexpected given the $40 or so price point. Reprofiling this on your Ruxin or whatever ought to be easy; there are no thumb studs to get in the way, and the spine of the blade has a usable flat section on it that ought to help keep everything in alignment in your jig.

Compared to the usual CQC-6K, the Crag is longer, wider, thicker, and considerably more swanky.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Ask not for whom the knife dings. It dings for thee.

Just when you thought it was safe to walk down the camping goods aisle...

Here's number two out of three. I haven't found the third variant of the fabled Walmart Axis lock knife yet, and to be honest I didn't expect to find the second one, either. We looked at the "6835" variant about a month ago and now I'm back at it again with this, SKU 6842.

Tl;dr: Walmart unexpectedly started offering a trio of "Axis" lock-alike crossbar locking folders to very little fanfare, and then discontinued them instantly. Normally we would say this is totally unexpected, if it weren't for the fact that a couple of years ago they did exactly the same thing: releasing some very similar knives that were likewise dropped just as quickly. While they last, if you can find one, these are $5 each -- A ridiculously low price point, even for trash quality knives. But luckily these aren't trash quality. In fact, if you ask me they're about on par with what you'd get for an inexpensive brand name department store knife from a few years ago. Think along the lines of a Gerber, Buck, or Camillus.

I randomly found one the other day, in addition to one (1) more of the model I already owned. I bought them both. (My double is still sealed in its original packaging... I can feel my investment appreciating in value by the second. Some day, that knife might be worth $6.50, maybe even $7.)

These come on brown hang cards, pictured both front and rear here. There is no name or model designation on these other than "7-Inch Folding Knife," and the SKU on the rear. In this case, 6842. Insofar as I have been able to determine these are no longer listed on Walmart's web site, so the only way to find one is to be a big enough nerd to paw through the selection of cheapo hang card knives at the sporting goods counter at your local Walmart(s) and look for the telltale Axis/crossbar lock.

See, there it is. Just like daddy's Benchmade. Except in every other detail.

This variant is definitely a chip off the same block as the 6835 knife, and is probably made by the same manufacturer... Whoever that is. Hangzhou Great Star Tools Co. Ltd. is my best guess, who have been the historical manufacturer of most of the previous Ozark Trail branded knives. The combination of mechanism and price is what makes these, for lack of a better word, special. They're not great knives but they're surprisingly competent given the price point. One of these would make a fine knockaround camping knife, tackle box knife, glovebox knife, or find a home for any similar application where maybe you won't care too much about its appearance or condition.

The quality and specifications of this knife are nearly identical to the last one. So I'll try not to waste too many words treading the same old ground. You get the same polypropylene handle scales -- a very unusual material -- unspecified stainless steel alloy, drop point blade that's precisely 3" long, deep carry reversible pocket clip, and 72.8 gram overall weight (2.57 ounces). That's all the spitting image of the 6835 SKU, and this one even does the same dumb thing where the screw heads inside the pocket clip aren't flush.

There are, however, some differences.

For a start, this time the blade has this fairly attractive stonewashed finish.

Oh, and the damn pivot screw heads are actually flush with the scales on this one, which is nice. And in addition to the ambidextrous thumb studs, this one's also got a flipper opener. And it almost even gets that part right!

Just like the last knife, this one came shipped packed full of unctuous crud that probably at one point had the intent of being a lubricant, but isn't anymore. So the action was pretty awful until I took the whole knife apart, cleaned it, and regreased it. But the flipper design has one other personality defect built in, which is that the crossbar can bind on the inside surface of the flipper if you pull it back all the way, and that makes it impossible to flick the knife open while holding the lock back.

Using the flipper as intended, by pressing it into the spine of the handle and adding a slight but absolutely mandatory flick of the wrist works fine and does indeed get the knife to snap open easily. (After, of course, the obligatory disassemble-clean-reassemble-tune song and dance.) But you cannot "Axis flick" this knife no matter how hard you try, because there is no position whatsoever you can hold the lock in where it won't have to contact one side or the other of the slot it rides in during the blade's travel.

What we're up against is this.

There's a track cut into the heel of the blade for the crossbar lock to ride in, but it's not actually semicircular. It's slightly elliptical, but the blade's pivot is obviously an arc of a perfect circle. So no matter what, the crossbar crashes into it at some point along its travel. That's just tickety-boo if you're opening the knife normally, since the surface is smooth enough and the springs behind the lock weak enough that it just slides over the surface. But if you're holding the crossbar still in some particular position, that just plain old don't work nohow. On a normal Axis knife you can pull it all the way to the rear so it's clear of the blade entirely. On this, you can't.

Here's the whole thing smashed to pieces. Getting it apart wasn't too tough, but did require two T6 drivers to grab the screws from both ends at once. The construction is extremely simple with the handles and liners being held down via the same pairs of screws into threaded barrels that also serve as the spacers between the two handle halves.

The pivot rides on two PFTE washers and the centering's pretty good for a cheap knife, but not perfect. The blade does not contact either liner when closed, at least. One of the thumb studs is visibly longer than the other one, too. I'm not sure what that's about.

All the screws are the same except the rearmost one in the clip, which is inexplicably longer than the others. This goes in the threaded barrel and not in the second screw hole in the clip. If you do that, it's long enough to stick all the way through the liner and contact the blade. You'll figure it out.

The edge grind is pretty good for a cheap knife and mine came off the card with an edge on it that ought to be sharp enough to please ordinary oiks who aren't knife maniacs.

If you're not one of those, you'll instead be pleased to learn that the edge (at least on my example) is perfectly within true. Turning this into a razor ought not to be too hard, then, if that's what you're into. I have no idea how long it will stay that way because no one will admit what kind of steel this is made out of.

No surprise, this knife is almost exactly the same footprint as its sibling Ozark knife. It's a hair thicker at 0.548" not including the clip. It's also not very deep across the other dimension, from spine to channel. That makes the cross section feel almost square in the hand. The scales have a crosshatched texture on them which I found give it a much more confidence inspiring grip than the other knife.

Both of them are dwarfed by my CQC-6K except in thickness.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you want to trade your ability to Axis flick your knife open for a better grip texture, a flipper opener, and a stonewashed finish that almost -- but not completely -- hides the machine marks on the blade, go with this knife over the other one. What the hell. It's still only $5.

Custom carved for kitchen wall decoration. Yes the two parts separate and can easily fit in your pocket.

Ancient Ninja Secret.

No, wait. The opposite of that.

This is the Cold Steel Spike. One of multiple variants, but this is the tanto point rendition which has, it must be said, maximum ninja cred. Just about everything you need to know about it is encapsulated in this one image.

The Spike is true to its name and it does not have an edge as such. Or rather, it is all edge. Maybe that depends on how you look at it. But it is a quarter inch thick triangle of 4116 stainless steel, tapered from spine to edge all in one shot.

And needless to say it comes to a wicked point.

If this knife is not on the Naughty List, it is only on a technicality. There is little to no utilitarian functionality built into the Spike. It is a knife for stabbin', plain and simple. Although that's not to say I haven't cut many -- probably ill-advised -- things with this knife over the years. This knife lived on one of my backpack straps pretty much full time for a while, and when you've got something like this what else are you supposed to do with it other than debark firewood, baton things, and chuck it at tree stumps around camp?

Cold Steel calls this configuration a "zero grind." This is an OG Spike, the original super dangerous version before they added the overmolded grip with built in crossguard. Without it, this variant of the Spike is incredibly slim. Employing it in the old icepick tradition, though, is a fraught proposition and you'll want to ensure you have a very confident grip over the bird's-head pommel so you don't have yourself a bad time.

The Spike is 67.9 grams, 2.39 ounces, and basically all of that is steel. The grip is very tightly wrapped in cord; undo it at your own peril. It's 8-1/16" long with 3-15/16" of usable, er, edge. The sharp part ends in a beefy ricasso with just a bit of a finger notch behind it which may or may not help said digit remain attached during use, slightly. It is every bit of 1/4" thick at the spine, at least at the base, tapering down its length finally to a needle-sharp point.

This version of the Spike is proudly (?) made in Taiwan. At about $30 back in the day this was never going to be a super premium piece of equipment. Rather, this is more the sort of thing you'd find in the back pages of all your seedy martial arts magazines, if such things even still exist in this day and age. It'd make an excellent movie prop, too. It has precisely that air about it as you'd find in something rated R and from the late 90's, early 2000's. Think the Matrix, Blade Trilogy, V for Vendetta. That kind of deal.

This is helped somewhat by the injection molded Nylon hard sheath, which just has so much of that Sam Fisher vibe. Notably, no provision was provided from the factory whatsoever for actually attaching this to anything, save for a length of black beaded chain which I lost instantly. Cold Steel apparently expect you to use this as a neck knife, which is profoundly silly. There are a pair of slots in it that will just about fit 1" webbing, and some rivet holes that are, alas, slightly too small to easily pass 550 paracord through. The Nite-ize Eclipse clip on it is not from the factory. (Eyy, "eclipse." How topical.) I added that myself to alleviate all of the above, and in my case it is solidly epoxied to the sheath. This allows it to easily ride in one of those otherwise useless little webbing loops that inevitably appear on the face of your backpack strap, or if you were a real smooth operator you could stick it through a MOLLE mount.

Oh, yeah. And you're not imagining things. The blade on my usual CQC-6K is now etched and stonewashed.

That is indeed a thing that has happened.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If your job regularly involves fighting vampires wearing Kevlar, you shouldn't leave home with out this.

Here's another oldie; a knife from my youth. I bought this when I was a teenager, I don't remember exactly when, and while it's not the oldest knife I own I do believe it's the oldest one that I still have and that I bought with my own money.

This is the Gerber Mini Remix, and all of the above is not to say I have any particular nostalgia or fondness for this knife, because I don't. But you can see that even at an early age the penchant for weirdness was already there.

That because, you see, just like John Denver's guitar this knife has a big hole in it.

The hole also comprises the pivot on the knife. Rather than the usual pivot screw, the blade rides on a hollow threaded tube that goes through the frame and it's held centered by way of two big aluminum spanner nuts not unlike the ones go on the steering stem of a bicycle. That does mean that getting it apart is a bitch, requiring an appropriately sized spanner wrench, and thus is something most owners are probably not equipped to do. I am, but I can't be bothered. So you won't see any disassembly photos today.

The hole is about a size 9 ring and you can get your finger through it for twirling around -- with the blade closed, preferably, but it's also possible open if you like to live dangerously. If you have fat fingers it's also possible to get it stuck if you're not careful. Which is bound to be a very embarrassing phone call to the fire department if you haven't got an angle grinder handy to hack the thing off. Unlike the typical mood ring, let's say you are unlikely to be able to clip this off with a pair of wire cutters if you get it stuck on one of your meaty digits.

Other silly possibilities also present themselves.

The Mini Remix is no longer produced although it's larger sibling, the OG non-mini Remix is. That's a shame, because the full size Remix is crap and the Mini version is much nicer.

Now, I'm not a fan of Gerber knives and I never have been. This was department store dreck from back in the day. I'm quite certain this particular example came from K-Mart. In those dark days Gerber had a pathological aversion to admitting what kind of steel their knives were made out of and the Mini Remix is no exception. So I have no idea. It's not published anywhere, and nobody knows. This is a cheap knife, manufactured by those without much of a budget, for those without much of a budget either. You'll never mistake it for premium cutlery.

The Mini Remix is, well, mini. At 5-9/16" long open and 3-1/2" when closed it is a very pocketable EDC size. The sheepsfoot blade is 2" long and surprisingly sports a bit of a choil at the base so the entire edge is usable. The profile should make it appear fairly inoffensive and not "tactical" in any way. You're not stabbing anybody with this. The blade is 0.097" thick and the total weight is 65.2 grams (2.3 ounces) due to the mostly steel construction. And the hole, if anyone is wondering, is precisely 3/4" in diameter.

This is an "open frame" body locking knife, which was all the rage back in the day. Despite this, the Mini Remix still surprisingly has a double-sided grind and is not a chisel edge. If this knife were produced today, that'd be the immediately obvious method of cheaping out that any budget brand would be inexorably, irresistibly, inevitably sure to employ. So be grateful we got what we got.

One side effect of this (which unfortunately did not seem to carry over to the full sized Remix) is that this pivot method effectively completely eliminates any pivot wiggle in the blade. It does ride on Nylon washers that are just visible sandwiched between the spanner nuts and blade. No other tuning tricks are required; the contact area is so broad that any minor clearances in the mechanism are practically unnoticeable. But despite this, the blade pivots fairly freely.

Mind you, the large amount of surface area in the pivot inherently adds some friction to the mechanism. You can't flick this knife open. Not even after you overcome the detent ball in the lock. The pivot doesn't grind as much as you'd think, but it does drag noticeably and you have to consciously push it the whole way through its entire travel.

With a bit of a rethink Gerber probably could have made this knife ambidextrous. But they didn't. This is especially curious because the OG full size Remix is ambidextrous. Lefties need not apply for this one -- There is a thumb stud only on the right hand side of the knife. The blade is fully exposed on the right side as well due to the open-frameness, but there is an aluminum endstop that completely encloses the edge when the knife is closed as well as provides a little bit of thickness so you can actually hold the thing when it's open. The actual closed end stop for the blade's travel is the forwardmost screw that holds this on, which contacts the choil at the base of the blade.

On the left side, or the back, or whatever you want to call it, things are very different. This is a single sheet of steel with some slots milled into it for the lock and so forth. There's a non-reversible deep carry pocket clip there, which is a little small but works pretty well. There's a lanyard hole also, which is drilled through the entire knife as well as the clip. The clip is thus rather... ventilated... with both screw holes plus the lanyard hole in it. There's not a lot of metal left around the edges and if you snag your knife on things a lot, or if you're the type of dimwit who clips their knife to the outside of their pants or off the belt, I think you'd soon find this to be a failure point.

They don't call this the "Mini" for nothing.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Hashtag, kniveswithholesin.

If you find yourself in a time warp and as part of your travels are forced to buy a folder from K-Mart in, like, 2002 you could definitely do worse than to wind up with one of these.

It's definitely novel, and compact and cheerful looking enough that you could probably get away with having it about your person in polite company. It's a shame about its inherent Gerber-ness. It'd be nice to know what it's made out of, and it'd be nice it were built out of better materials overall. As you can see my example has some rust on the tips of the screws just from sitting around, and the other materials are likely to be just as cheap.

But I kind of like it. As with so many things, we're not likely to see its kind again.

Our regular program of cutlery-adjacent shitposting will now resume.

By the way, never bring a knife to a gunfight.

Especially this one.

This is a 10-930GY from ElitEdge. What, you've never heard of them?

But they're Trusted Brand! Military-Tactical-Rescue-Outdoor and everything.

So, while I was ~~screwing off on the internet at work~~ researching as best I could for the writeup I did on that fidget spinner knife a while back, I stumbled upon the Top Quest Brands catalog, which is a rabbit hole well worth falling down. Right there on page 58 I saw, if not exactly this article, one very much like it. And I just knew I had to get my hands on it.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a knife, it's shaped like a gun. And of course it's crap. That's not the point.

The point is, this is how it works:

Rack the slide and the blade pops out. I mean. Come on. What's not to love about that?

To be fair, and if you're a wimp, you can also open this normally. It's a regular spring assisted liner locking folder underneath.

The rack-to-deploy mechanism is deceptively simple, with the slide just riding -- none too precisely, I might add -- on a track in the body with a spring behind it. When you pull it back a little nub cast into it catches the protrusion on the heel of the blade and kicks it out just far enough for the spring assist to take over.

The nub is just visible if you look down into the slot when the blade is out.

The melodiously named 10-930GY is modeled kinda-sorta after a Beretta M92, but many of the details are just odd enough that I'm left wondering if the designers only had a crunchy 240 pixel wide picture of one to work with, or if they're doing that thing where they deliberately fuck up the details in the hopes they don't get sued but inevitably wind up doing so in a way that just makes them look incompetent. We may never know.

Much of the exterior is cast zinc over some flat steel liners. And the castings definitely have a whiff of the dollar store about them. It's quite tough to measure, but it's about 4-11/16" long closed, from the muzzle to the tip of the spur on the back of the grip.

Those are... words I don't usually get to employ when describing a knife.

It's 8" long open, with a 3-3/8" blade again measured from the forward end of the muzzle, drop pointed with the expected ghastly half serration. That must be the part that makes it "tactical." (The "military," "rescue," and "outdoor" mentioned on the box are nowhere to be found, though.) The blade alleges to be made of 420C and the knife purports to be designed in the USA and "hand" crafted in China. The veracity of any of these claims is, of course, suspect. As usual there are highly visible unpolished and unrefined machining marks on the blade bevel, and the edge geometry is all wonky. I didn't bother to take a macro shot of this. Do you know what? I don't care.

The grips are plastic. You can see all the gubbins by peering down into what's not the magazine well. You can also see how deploying this via the intended slide racking method is actually more difficult that it'd appear at first blush, because if you hold the thing the way you naturally want to -- that is, like a pistol -- your fingers on the grip are in the way of where the blade wants to swing. So you wind up having to hold it like a teacup with a dainty grip between thumb and forefingers, and that makes the little bugger tough to hold on to when you find you have to give the slide a surprisingly firm yank to get it to move. I don't think a child would be able to reliably manipulate this which is really just as well, because this is precisely the sort of thing that children shouldn't have it and would give Kyle's mom the fits.

Of course this doesn't actually need sights, but a tiny part of me is disappointed that it doesn't have any anyway. I nothing else, they'd give you something more to grip.

It doesn't have a clip or even a lanyard hole, but that's okay!

Because it comes with a tiny little holster which you can stick on your belt.

I really feel that I should not have to point out that you should not go strutting around with this on your belt in public. You'll look like a real goober. Among other issues.

This knife both looks and feels remarkably similar to a ratty old .25 ACP Saturday night special I had back when I was a lad. I can't tell which comes off worse for the comparison, either: This knife, or my old gun.

Alas, your only options for fiddling with it at your desk are listening to it rattle and racking the slide. None of the controls nor the trigger move. I have to say, I had die cast Hot Wheels cars as a kid with more realistic moving parts than this. What a bummer.

The Inevitable Conclusion

There is a time in every male's life when he intensely desires a thing such as this, and that time is ideally over by the time he reaches the age of 12.

Alright, I know you all are tired of me posting nothing but low rent Sino-bullshit lately. So here's a pallete cleanser from the opposite end of the spectrum. This is the Benchmade Model 32 "Mini Morpho."

You don't have to ask the question, because this is already the answer. This knife. Is my favorite knife. In the world. I also personally believe it to be one of the finest production knives ever made.

I actually took all the pictures for this post twice, because I was reviewing all the photography and realized halfway through the shame and dishonor I was bringing to my ancestors by showing it off in the condition of filthiness that it was in. Believe it or not (and most collectors probably won't), this knife was my EDC companion for years before I finally retired it and replaced it with my current CQC-6K. My Morpho went with me everywhere. Work. Camping. Riding. Hell, out of all my probably hundred or so knives this one is the one I wore to my wedding.

So I did what I should have done along time ago, before putting it away in the first place, and dismantled it completely for a thorough cleaning. And then took all the pictures a second time. (And you get not one, not two, but three stacked focus shots in this post as well, by the way.)

Through this we can see, yes, the wear and tear on the scales and liners. But also a few of the things that make the Morpho a special knife even among balisongs. To start with, you can see right out of the gate that this knife breaks down into a prodigious number of components.

It goes without saying that every single part and piece of this knife is precision machined and it all fits together perfectly. Just so. The total bill of materials is nine screws in total both male and female (the main pivot screws are not in this crop) as well as two precision bushings for the latch pivot and its release mechanism, plus all eight scales and liners, four washers, two spacers, three precision pins, and two threaded and shouldered barrels, the latch, the clip, and of course the blade.

I believe, but don't quote me, that the Morpho was released in or around 2004. I bought mine in 2006. It was regarded as Benchmade's first "modern" balisong, along with its larger brother the model 51. It includes a few key innovations which were a big deal at the time, namely a contemporary scale-on-liner construction, the "zen pin" rebound design that does not use or need kicker pins pressed through the blade, and a new style of spring loaded latch release.

That is illustrated thusly, in crunchy gif-o-vision:

The "Morpho" name, by the way, comes from the Morpho butterfly which not only shares an aesthetic with this knife but also achieves it in the same way. Here's a science fact for you turbo-nerds in the audience: Both the anodized titanium handle liners and the butterfly's wings are blue due to refraction of incoming light. Neither are actually pigmented or dyed blue.

The handle liners are jeweled beneath the scales. That's not to say they're studded with diamonds and sapphires, but rather it's a surface finishing process that results in a pattern of faceted concentric embellishments that catch the light from all different angles. The pictures do not do it justice. You have to handle it and see it in motion to get the full effect.

The latch is sprung by way of a pair of these prongs machined into the liners, which are joined with a cross pin. Squeeze the handles together and the latch pops open automatically, but without the need for (and bulk of) the extension spring traditional in Benchmade balisongs. The pin also acts as a both a detent for the latch in the open position, and also serves as a soft endstop to keep it from striking the opposite handle or the blade when the knife is being flipped. That's all thanks to an especially funky and specific shape machined into the heel of the latch.

The Morpho model 32 is the smaller of the pair between it and the model 51. It is actually unusually small for a balisong, and thus a perfect EDC size. It's 7-1/4" long open, and 4-3/8" long closed with a 3-1/4" blade (measured from the forward ends of the handles) with a 3" usable edge. The blade is D2 tool steel, the handle liners are titanium as mentioned, and the scales are carbon fiber. All of these materials were varying degrees of unobtanium in 2004. Getting them all on the same knife was practically unheard of. But that makes the Morpho pleasantly light: 79.1 grams (2.79 ounces) by my scale. And yes, it is provided with a pocket clip which is reversible. Mine is showing its fair portion of wear in that picture above.

The blade is a spear point profile, single edged, and features a prominent choil at the base which is mirrored on the blunt side. That's because this cutout serves double duty as the part that strikes the "zen" pins inside the handles for the blade to rebound from.

That works like so, and makes the heel of the Morpho's blade quite svelte and also completely smooth, with minimal fore and side protrusion and no pins to snag on anything. (And no, I don't know what that divot is for at the 6 o'clock position below the pivot hole. It's obviously there on purpose, because there's one on both sides in precisely the same location.)

The design gives the business end a nice clean look.

The package is rounded off, possibly literally, with "impossible" pivot screws which are smooth on one side. This side also bears the patent number which describes the spring-prongs which in this case drive the latch mechanism. Curiously, this patent does not appear on Benchmade's current patents page.

The reverse features the Benchmade butterfly logo. Look, I took a lot of pictures of this thing just now and I'm going to show off all of them, got it?

If you ask me, the Morpho's fit, finish, and feel are impeccable. The pivots ride on phosphor bronze washers and the action spins freely despite having extremely minimal play in the mechanism.

The wiggle test reveals all, and despite ball bearings being after this knife's time, the Morpho still scores very favorably. It ought to please anyone who is bothered by having a ton of slop in their balisong, because it has about as close to none as you can get with washer pivots.

The Morpho, particularly this mini 32 variant, is both light and short. That's very different from most other balisongs people get used to, which typically have quite long and very heavy handles. The Morpho is practically weightless by comparison and rather than the big, ponderous spins you get from a traditional balisong you can flip this thing lickety-split. If you're good, you can bust the Morpho out extremely quickly. The spring latch helps there, as does the ability to position the clip on whichever side suits your manipulation style so the latch winds up where you want it. Draw, squeeze, windmill, cleave whatever it was in twain, double rebound, latch, pocket. Onlookers won't even have time to pick their jaws up off the floor.

To help you not fling your $350-and-appreciating collector's item across the room, the handle spacers are jimped just like you see here on both sides.

Here it is with two more Benchmades, plus the usual article. As you can see, the Morpho is much more the size of an ordinary EDC pocketknife. The Model 42 on the right dwarfs it.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This knife is Benchmade's version of Sgt. Pepper, their Nevermind, their Mellon Collie. That is to say, despite numerous follow ups and going ever onwards to fame and popularity, it's that one entry in their back catalog that has still yet to be surpassed.

In a McMainsion somewhere, some legislator is being kept awake at nights by the very thought of this knife.

They've done their very best to ban knives that are too big, have to many edges, are spring loaded, or can flip open. In some places they've even banned knives that can lock open or be opened with one hand. But this knife is still out there haunting them.

"Can I get a knife?"

What kind?

"A shiny one."

Okay, what size?

"... Schmol."

If you're an enthusiast in this hobby you are well acquainted with dumb knife laws, and you can bet your bottom dollar the hype your local council member will spin about this one is about how it's "easily concealable." If it's not one goddamn thing, it's another.

This little tacker is only 1-9/16" long. Not the blade; the entire thing, fully opened. It's only 1" long closed, and that doesn't include the little keychain loop on the back, about the durability of which I maintain a quaint, childlike faith. The blade is not surprisingly 9/16" long, but what is surprising is that it's actually got an edge on it albeit not exactly a surgically sharp one. With a real choil. And a "thumb" opening hole for ants. Sharpening it shouldn't be too tough, since it should only take one pass on your stone per side. The usable portion of the edge is barely longer than the width of the flat side of a Spyderco triangle stone.

It only weighs 2.9 grams. One tenth of an ounce.

The construction is all steel, although I'll certainly be damned if I know what kind. This, and others like it, are yours for around $3 from the usual scumbags. There is no brand or model number, but numerous variants are available. On this one, the blade is polished to a mirror finish and the handles are brushed and satiny.

Ant it actually has a genuine little tiny slip joint mechanism, with a prong on the spine that detents the knife in both the open and closed positions.

This knife "ought" to be legal anywhere due to falling, shall we say, well within the bounds of blade length limitations. It is not spring loaded, it doesn't lock, and if you can open it with one hand (without using your teeth) I'll give you a dollar. It hasn't got a single feature from the naughty list.

If a ruffian assails you, be prepared with a few hundred of these. You can throw a handful of them in his face like pocket sand.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Honk honk. Why so serious?

Despite the obvious intent of just being a little novelty trinket, this knife actually is functional insomuch as you could use it to, say, open packages or sharpen a pencil. And for all your friends who have little "urban carry" micro-knives, show them up with this which is just about the most micro of them all.

Do you feel like your knife hasn't got enough of a mechanism in it? Brother, have I got a deal for you.

I have seen these kicking around online for a while now and up until lately I've ignored them. This one, for instance, cost the suspiciously low sum of $8.28 and was billed as, and I quote: "New High-Quality Antler Stiletto Knife Folding Camping Knife Automatic Knife Spring Knife Outdoor Survival Knife."

Antler? False. Stiletto? No. Automatic? Not that either, as we'll see. Spring? Well, there is one in there but it doesn't do what I think they're implying. Already we're off to a rough start.

But. I did perchance to spy in the pictures on its listing this logo, one which we now know very well. So far we've looked at two other Jin Jun Lang knives and been pleasantly surprised. So I bought one a while ago. Will we manage to score a hat trick?

Actually, speaking of tricks. Let's just cut out all that talking and skip right to the money shot. Here's how this knife works. Not all of that skeletonized steampunky nonsense is there just for looks.

You are now thinking to yourself one of two things. You're either thinking, "Wow, that's dumb." This is because you are a normal person. Or, if your immediate thought was, "That's rad," well. Turns out you're one of us.

(Ed: This action actually turns out to be more-or-less lifted from the Kershaw ET, which is now unobtanium. Examples from various other brands by and large using a similar action may, or in fact may not, also exist.)

Never mind all that antler-stiletto-automatic crap. This is, completely unremarked upon by its seller, a Jin Jun Lang model JL-16011A. (There is also a "B" variant, which is black.) The family resemblance to the other JJL knives we've seen is clearly evident.

The JL-16011A is a fairly large 8-1/4" long open, 4-7/8" closed, and has a 3-1/2" long tanto pointed blade (measured from the forward edge of the handle as usual) that's hollow ground. It's made from an upsecified grade of stainless steel (3cr most likely, 5cr maybe, 7cr less so) as is the rest of the knife. This knife is so metal that if it had an album cover it'd feature, like, ten skeletons. Minimum. It weighs 144.4 grams, 5.09 ounces, which is to say it's a lot to be hanging off your pocket.

To assist in this it has a deep carry pocket clip. No, really, it does. The clip wraps all the way around the knife from one side to the other, and rides on the rear half of the articulating mechanism. It is not reversible, though.

The understated styling on the deep carry clip, at least compared to the rest of the knife, means no one will know just what kind of malarkey you've got in your pants.

And because there are so many pivots and clearances inherent in the design, it's very thick. 0.608" without the clip, or 0.722" with it. Yes, going on for three quarters of an inch. The blade is 0.110" thick as usual, which seems to be a common thickness for steel stock.

Right. So all that aside, mechanically this knife is a very odd duck.

It has no lock, at least in the traditional sense. There is a long armature with a pivot through the heel of the blade, offset from the main one. When you deploy the blade this is pushed back, and then pulled forward as the blade goes 'round its arc, like the drive arm on a locomotive. This also causes the block at the rear to tip up and then down. All told there are four pivots in the chain, and at the end of the blade's travel both the armature and the block rest home against the handle with a noticeable click.

After this point it is impossible to rotate the blade back towards the closed position because the pivot between the rear block and the armature has gone over-square, so to speak, and doing so would just push the armature further against the handle. You unlock it by pressing on the rear block, which pushes the armature up out of this position and starts to pivot the blade rearward.

Opening it is a bit of a fiddle because there is a lot of drag caused in all those pivots. Plus, there is a clothespin spring under the rear block which makes it want to naturally spring back into its rest position:

So it takes quite a shove to open this one handed via the usual method, using the (ambidextrous) thumb studs. And just to add a little spice to your life, part of the opening action opens up a big hole between the armature and the nonmoving part of the handle, which tends to deliver a pinch right to your palm when you lock the blade open.

But I know what you're thinking. You could totally open this by just mashing down on the rear block, right?

Right?

Well, about that.

The finesse and timing required definitely takes practice. The penalty for failure is that the clothespin spring will case the blade to snap back shut, and it will bite you. Even so, you still need two hands. But it's rewarding to finally get it right.

That's not to say that it's a practical way to open it by any stretch, though. In fact, I'm not sure there is a practical way to open it, other than with two hands: One on the blade, one on the block.

The JL-10611A is big. Decidedly, obviously, flagrantly large. And it's wide and broad and heavy, too.

Nobody would carry this except for ironic and frivolous purposes. The best purposes.

Now, I'm not going to take it apart. Much of the mechanism is riveted together, so I'm not sure we'd see much other than watching me struggle to put the spring back in. All of the pivots do ride on brass washers, which are just visible if you peer at it from the sides. Except for the main blade pivot, which has what appear to be PFTE washers in it -- not that it matters much.

As we saw on the JJL slingshot knife, this thing bears a Chinese patent which is proudly displayed on the reverse of the blade:

It also bears the Jin Jun Lang logo as we've seen, and its model number. There are no other markings -- not even a perfunctory "Made in China."

The blade grind is okay, but not great. It has what I think could best be described as functional sharpness out of the box.

Disappointingly, the grind is actually noticeably out of true from the factory unlike the last two JJL knives we inspected which is a bit of shame.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I think this is a meant to be a toy for fiddling with, not a tool for using. But that said it's reasonably well built and certainly doesn't cost very much, albeit with a design that's really a hindrance to usability even if it is, on paper at least, clever. So maybe it'll be a fun little lighthearted novelty addition to your collection rather than spending $300 on the next Benchmade. That's not to say it'll be as good as your next Benchmade. It won't, clearly. That's not why it exists.