Yo!
Here's a pen made by a knife maker. I collect knives, I collect pens. I collect balisongs. This is a balisong pen. "Inevitable," I think, is the word that best describes how we got here.
There's also a bit of a problem with it that you may have already noticed. That's not dirt or dust all over it in the pictures above. It's glue. I've had to glue this pen back together several times, and that's because it's designed to break itself if you have the audacity to actually use it as advertised. So I've given up, and now my BaliYo just sits unused on my pen display shelf gently accumulating a fine layer of dust.
If all you wanted to know was whether or not you should spend $14 on one of these without me prattling on about it for another thousand words, you can stop reading right here. No, you shouldn't. Go buy a Parker Jotter instead.
Anyhow.
Even after you take into account its core concept, the BaliYo is really weird. It is, as advertised, a balisong pen. It's got two pivots in the middle and you can flip and spin it around like a balisong knife. On the business end is a pedestrian ballpoint pen tip, which does indeed write but doesn't otherwise offer anything special. It's simple a twist-to-retract mechanism.
You may have noticed that the BaliYo does not include a latch. The handles can't be locked either open or closed. How you're meant to write with it is while it's in the closed position, and the pen point sticks out past the little weighted dealies on the ends of the handles like so. This works, but gives it a really weird writing feel. It's quite a wide load in this configuration, so depending on how you hold a pen you may also find yourself knocking the weights against the paper.
It also looks an awful lot like Dark Helmet's tie, doesn't it? Now that I said it you won't be able to unsee it.
A pair of springy pocket clips are provided -- double the number the nerd in the next cubicle has got -- and when it's riding in your shirt pocket rather a lot of it is left sticking out, so others will be able to see that your schwartz is twice as big as theirs. Since you can't lock the pen closed the dual clips are required to keep it from flopping around in your pocket while you're carrying it.
The whole thing is made of plastic, other than the clips and weights, and the metal collar where the point unscrews. The weights are there to provide enough inertia to actually allow you to flip it satisfactorily, but the big issue here is that the entire thing appears to be made out of basic ABS plastic which isn't very impact resistant, and there's nothing stopping the weights from clacking together.
So rather quickly, you'll find that the thin plastic surrounding them breaks. You can see what we're up against in the picture above.
I can think of quite a few ways Spyderco could have prevented this, all paths that they elected not to take. A pair of self-adhesive rubber bumpers on the outsides of the weighted ends, perhaps. Or a short tang with a basic kicker pin on the heel of the pen part, preventing the handle ends from contacting each other. Or just don't make the friggin' thing out of cheese. I'm pretty sure Spyderco of all people could get their hands on some glass filed nylon or something.
You can, of course, take the BaliYo apart and at this point I think I am contractually obligated to do so.
There's not much unexpected inside except for this pair of plastic bushings that the pivots ride on. They're the only precision component in here, and similar to the Smallfly 2 we looked at the other day, they are sized precisely such that you can completely torque down the pivot screws without A) breaking anything, or B) locking the pivots solid.
The ink cartridge in the BaliYo is proprietary, but replaceable. I think it's unlikely you'd run it out of ink before simply breaking the pen, though. I certainly didn't. Mine still writes even though I bought it close to a decade ago.
The Inevitable Conclusion
Maybe the newer models of this are less fragile, but mine certainly broke quite quickly. So without confirmation of that I'm not exactly in a big rush to buy another one. There's not much use for a fidget toy that you can't fidget with. And otherwise this thing isn't a very good pen, either.
