PocketKNIFE

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?