Here we go again...

For no particular reason I'm trying to work on maxing my Vy'keen milestones and as we all know, one of them requires destroying a lot of sentinel walkers.

Before anyone gets it twisted, this is not a whine about the supposed "difficulty" of fighting the Sentinels. Destroying them is actually trivial. I am a planetary catastrophe on legs; my riced out neutron cannon can destroy most types other than the laser dogs and the walkers with a single shot. Rather, here's what happens:

I can fight through the usual levels one, two, three, and four waves as usual with the typical escalation of units thrown at you. Wave 4 spawns one of the mini-walkers, which I blow up.

What usually happens (or used to happen) is that wave five would spawn a couple of laser dogs/quads, a bunch of various little flyers, and after a short delay one of the big bipedal walkers. You fight this guy, he blows up, and your wanted meter turns blue and the Sentinels are out of your face for 20 minutes or whatever. We all know how it is, right?

Well, now the big walker never spawns. I get one laser dog and one mini-walker instead, and no big walker. But my wanted level enters some kind of bugged state where I am always "Detected!" no matter how far I go and no more Sentinels spawn after I destroy the initial few.

I'm just stuck listening to the stupid wannabe breakcore combat music forever. No Sentinels are visible, there are no red dots indicating their locations on the HUD, but I am being "seen" by someone erroneously no matter how far I go on the planet's surface. The big walker is absolutely not stuck in the ground anywhere or hiding behind a mountain -- Believe me, I've checked. All I can do is cheese with my cloaking module until the wanted level eventually decays down to zero, and then start the whole process over.

This has happened to me literally every time I've tried to escalate a Sentinel fight to maximum since the latest update, on multiple planets of all types and biomes, in at least two different galaxies. High or low Sentinel security level, it doesn't matter.

It's worth noting that if I go to a Sentinel Pillar there is still usually a big walker there, as normal.

What gives? Is anyone else encountering this, or is it just fuck me in particular?

Since my last one gained so much traction...

Here is your thing of the day. I just overheard a phone call between a prospective client and one of our salesgals. This guy insisted that we send him step-by-step directions from his house to our office via postal mail. Why? Because he "doesn't do" computers, the internet, or text messages.

Nor apparently does he simply write anything down that was, just for sake of example, relayed to him over the telephone three whole seconds ago.

Our salesgal, not being terribly familiar with the area, wrote down the address and passed this on to me (i.e., the keeper of the hallowed postage stamps).

...This doofus literally lives in the apartment complex across the street from our office. I'm looking at his balcony from my seat in my office right now. If I had a nice baseball sized rock I could throw it right through his window from here.

Of course I called him back and told him this. I'm not rightly positive if he understands what I'm telling him or not. He still insisted I mail him our address and directions. I can't tell at this point if this is because he is genuinely a moron, or has some legitimate disability or mental foible that necessitates this for him, this some kind of elaborate prank, or if he's just doubling down now in the hopes that it'll help him save face.

I printed out a Google map and drew a (very short) line on it with a highlighter from his door to ours, stuffed it with some of our sales literature, and I'm going to go tape it to his door after work. I'll be damned if I'm wasting a stamp on this.

Here, instead of shilling my own stuff let's shill something somebody else made for a change.

In my last actual column I mentioned in passing, and at the tail end of a very long wall of text, the possibility of a better value for a balisong trainer in today's market than even a Chinese knockoff. While we're at it, we can simultaneously answer a question nobody asked, namely which trainer knife do I actually use?

The answer is this one.

This is the Kershaw Balanza. It's brought to you by the color grey. I think this might be the most monochromatic set of photos I've ever taken that didn't involve black and white film. Not that you'd know by looking.

Note that I didn't say trainer version -- That's because for some twisted reason, no live blade version of this knife seems to exist. Kershaw do make a couple of other balisongs that come in both live and trainer variants, just... not this one. This comes as a trainer only. It's just one of those things, I guess.

The Balanza has list price of $60 with a real world street price of about $42, which means it's slightly cheaper at present than the knockoff I reviewed last week. So for once in history maybe it's a better idea to get this instead of the Ching Chow Special.

Even notwithstanding that, it's got a couple of highly attractive features up is sleeve which I think make it a genuinely good value for what it is. And in the bargain you can also buy it from an actual company you've heard of and might even like, rather than some anonymous shitheads.

Yes, I am well aware of the heat I am about to bring down on myself from the various balisong nerds all over the internet by defending this product. It seems that the Balanza is universally reviled. Everyone hates this knife, apparently. Complaints abound about it being "too heavy," or "handle biased," or allegedly "breaking all the time."

And yet, I like the Balanza. And for once not just for deliberately contrarian hipster purposes, either.

And it's undeniable that the Balanza is ostensibly constructed in much the same way as Kershaw's other balisongs, one example of which I own: That'd be the Moonsault, which I tore a new asshole in one of my very first writeups on here.

So what gives? With its ignominious reputation and our inauspicious start to things, can the Balanza ultimately be redeemed?

Sizing Up

It is inevitable when talking about this sort of thing that the comparison between this and a bunch of other knives will come up. Kershaw's other knives, sure, and my Moonsault in particular. But to use a technical term, there are a shitload of other popular balisong trainer knives out there in the world, all competing to be your entry point into the world's most sedentary extreme sport.

One of my knocks against the Moonsault is that it's too damn large. The Balanza is noticeably smaller, and much more in line with a "traditionally" sized balisong. It is neither comically huge nor uselessly tiny, and therefore doesn't achieve anything interesting in that department at all. I know this is heresy, coming from me.

When closed the Balaza is 5-1/2" long, and it's 9-3/8" or so opened with, once again, a groovy skeletonized blade that's completely symmetrical (almost) and also obviously not sharp. That puts it at "only" 7/8" shorter than the Moonsault, but that fractional reduction in bigness is actually very important for its usability.

It's actually noticeably slightly shorter than the Krake Raken as well, initially to the tune of a very deceptive 1/8" overall when closed. Its blade is almost the same length but the handles are quite a bit shorter, about half an inch, which also has the net effect of moving the pivots back by roughly 3/8".

Similar to most other balisongs, the handles are tapered. At their widest by the tail they're 0.486" across and up at the pivots they're just about 0.414". At rest the knife is noticeably flared in both the open and closed positions, about 15/16" in total at the narrow end and 1-1/4" at the tail, not including the latch. The handles are 0.406" thick, and achieve a very pleasing feel by being subtly rounded over on all the corners, slots, and edges. This means the profile is somewhat flat, but not excessively so. The assembled handles are slightly wider than they are tall (or shorter than they are wide, if you prefer). The entire knife has a satiny stonewashed surface over a finish that looks, at least, as if it's been blued. Kershaw calls this "blackwash," and it's a gunmetal grey that's not only attractive, albeit a bit boring, but so far also appears to actually hold up pretty well. Since as usual mine has left several craters in the Earth as a result of fucking around with and subsequently fumbling it.

All of this is in stark contrast to the aforementioned Moonsault, which feels slightly weird because it lacks the taper (although the inner edges of its handles are wavy instead), is more angular and less roudned, and also has a rougher, snaggier surface that seems to show scuffs rather than hiding them.

There's a lot to recommend about the Balanza's design, or at least it has a couple of features that I like which really ought to amount to the same thing. The biggest headline, of course, it that it's a ball bearing pivot knife. As such it's guaranteed to have consistently effortless and low-drag action, and head and shoulders above its similarly priced competition which is usually bound to have bushings or worse, just plain washer pivots.

Lots of trainer knives promise "no play, no tap" in their descriptions. The Balanza, meanwhile, actually achieves it. The pivots are authoritatively solid with no wiggle. There's only a small amount of flex in the handles themselves.

It has a kickerless mechanism with Zen rebound pins in the handles as well, rather than traditional kicker pins pressed through the blade.

One of these is shown here with the aid of my little Lumintop Tool AA 2.0 flashlight, because otherwise it's awfully dark in there between the handle scales. And while we're at it, just check out the texture on the sheet of paper I use as a background.

While its latch isn't zooty and spring loaded, at least the Balanza has one -- unlike a lot of trainer knives -- which not only keeps it from flapping open in your pocket but also opens up the possibility of using it to practice tricks that rely on the presence of a latch. It's also good practice if you plan to use it as a stand in for a live bladed equivalent that's got a latch, which if you'd like to not irritate the shit out of yourself you might want your actual daily carry knife to have. (I certainly do, anyway.) It's nicely tensioned on my example and easy to kick loose with your pinky without any undue effort, although it rattles around a bit on its pin.

There is no clip, but this is not unexpected given that none of Kershaw's balisong offerings have one, whether they're trainers or not.

Breaking Down

The Krake Raken knockoff we looked at previously is all aluminum, and is one of those flash high speed modern jobbies that weighs very little and is very springy. Which if we're honest, maybe makes it a little too lively.

The Balanza, meanwhile, isn't. It's constructed entirely of steel -- Handles, pins, blade, all of it. That means its heavier at 129.8 grams or 4.58 ounces. (Meanwhile, however, that is around 3/4 the weight of a Moonsault, which is a knife that I think is just about on the far side of being impractically heavy.)

It's a sandwich design, with each handle comprised of two steel slabs separated by some nice diabolo shaped spacers.

It's also a nice palate cleanser after our last disassembly debacle with that Krake Raken clone. The Balanza is gloriously easy to take apart.

It just comes apart with regular Torx screws and without even requiring a heroic amount of effort. No blowtorch, pry bar, or tactical thermonuclear warhead is required. The screws are factory threadlockered, but not excessively so. The body screws are all T6 Torx and the pivot screws are T8. Just watch for which side of the pivots house the male versus the female screws...

...Because the screws do indeed have anti-rotation flats on them and the female sides can't be unscrewed. This is unlike the Moonsault, which has plain round screws.

It's subtle, but the heads are slightly different on each side. The male ones, i.e. the ones you can actually undo, are a tiny bit flatter. If you know this in advance it can help you identify them. If you don't, well. Flip a coin.

The Balanza is extremely simply constructed but it has it where it counts. The kicker pins and the latch pivot pin plus its endstop are shouldered and just drop into holes drilled in the handle slabs. All of the spacer screws and pins are the same as each other, so it's impossible to mix them up.

And the latch does indeed have a built in endstop in the form of an extra pin to prevent it from contacting the blade. It's stopped in its travel in the other direction by bumping up against one of the handle spacers. This system is simple, but it's nice to see that Kershaw actually put some thought into it... unlike a lot of knife makers.

Of course, the ball bearing pivots are what we really want to see. Kershaw is very proud of these, to the extent that they're one of the few manufacturers who bother to even mention when one of their knives has got 'em. In fact, they never seem to shut up about it so they're probably making up for all the other manufacturers who don't.

Note also the subtle difference between the pivot screw holes in the handle slabs. There's a matching D shaped cutout for the anti-rotation flat on the pivot screws only on one of them, but it's also marked with an extra notch to indicate this. The pivot screws can only be put in one way.

The hardware lineup. For a budget toy, the Balanza has a pretty long bill of materials. Eight body screws, four machined spacers, four shouldered pins, the pivots, and four sets of nylon caged ball bearing assemblies. The bearings are steel, not ceramic. Whadaya want for $42?

All the markings are hidden here on the edge of the blade. It's up to you to decide if this edge is the "safe" or the "bite" side, but it's the side that faces the latch handle from the factory so I'm in the latter camp.

Also note all the gumpf and pocket crud stuck to the inside of the cutouts, there. Woof. I should have cleaned this off better prior to photography, but I guess this is what I get for this being my actual working... er, not-knife. It lives in my pocket most of the time.

Hidden like the proverbial rake in the grass is the Balanza's country of origin, laser-etched near the pivots via this near microscropic marking. Despite how I took this picture it's still visible when the knife is assembled, but you have to know where to look.

It's a little disappointing to see that this is one of Kershaw's imported models. I figure it'd be an even better and much more fitting Fuck You to the clone manufacturers if this were made in the US, but it isn't. The rest of Kershaw's balisong lineup is US made if that matters to you, though: Both the Lucha and the Moonsault, in both their trainer and live bladed guises. So search me why this one isn't, although the others (even the trainer versions) are all north of $200. That's probably got something to do with it.

Alas, at the Balanza's price point a US manufacturing origin is probably unrealistic. Oh well.

Flipping Around

If you believe the internet, a lot of people sure hate the Balanza. I'll be damned if I know why.

I mean, I can guess why -- It's a heavy, stolid, unassuming looking, and dare I say highly conservatively designed balisong whereas the current fashion is zany brightly colored lightweight aluminum or titanium thingamabobs apparently all designed mostly to look good in a TikTok.

The Balanza is none of those things. But it makes up for it by being extremely controllable, with a consistent center of gravity and a predictable rebound feel. On our last outing I complained about the aluminum Krake Raken clone bouncing off of its rebound pins like it was on a goddamned trampoline. The Balanza doesn't do this. When it hits its endstop, it stops. If you want it to bounce off, you have to make it bounce off. You've got wrists, don't you? You're in control, all the time.

This sort of thing is all highly subjective, of course. People like what they like and get used to what they've got. When your hobby is largely reliant on muscle memory, switching to anything that behaves differently is sure to honk you off at first, especially if any bystanders watching happen to mistake lack of familiarity for a lack of skill.

I get a lot of noise about the Balanza being "handle biased." This is a pretty rich sauce, considering "Balanza" literally means "balance" in Spanish.

Well, I've got news for you, chief. All balisongs are handle biased, and the very few that aren't wind up being nigh uncontrollable.

"Nuh-uh," comes the chorus from the comments. "My favorite knife isn't!"

Yes it is. But don't just take my word for it.

Here's a smattering of knives I've got lying around my desk. Yes, I am showing off. Quiet from the peanut gallery.

They're all balanced on their centers of gravity on a scrap of wood which is about 3/8" of an inch thick and an maybe 1-1/4" tall (note the shadow). It doesn't take much of a push to tip any of them one way or other, or just a small shake to make the entire ensemble fall over.

I am ashamed to report that this getup doesn't fit in my photo box, so this is taken on a trestle table lined up under my desk lamp in front of my keyboard. If this isn't pure journalism, I don't know just what the fuck is.

Amway, from left to right here is the Kershaw Moonsault, Benchmade Model 42, the Balanza, our Krake Raken clone from the other week, a HOM Chimera (with the latch retracted just because), and a Bradley Kimura. I'd say that's a pretty decent spectrum of both new and oldschool. The Kimura and Moonsault are steelies, just like the Balanza. The Raken and Chimera are aluminum, and the '42 is titanium; all different weights and densities.

Did you know that you can use a $549 professional graphics editing package as a screen ruler? I mean, while we're talking about value for your dollar and everything.

This allowed me to judge with ludicrous precision the proportionate distance from the tip (red) and tail (blue) to the point of balance (green), as well as the offset from the center of the pivots to the balance point (yellow). Note especially the similarity between all those yellow bars.

Here are the results, in my very first Lemmy markdown table ever. Will it render correctly on your app or device? Add a new layer of excitement to your day; spin the wheel and we'll find out:

Knife	Foward of Balance	Rear of Balance	Offset from Pivot
Moonsault	63.3%	36.7%	17.3%
Model 42	64.9%	35.1%	20.3%
Balanza	62.3%	37.7%	16.7%
Krake Raken	62.1%	37.9%	17.7%
Chimera	60.8%	39.2%	16.1%
Kimura II	63.3%	36.7%	18.6%

 

What did we learn, kids?

• Competently designed balisongs have similar ratios of blade to handle mass, to the surprise only of keyboard warriors.
• The Balanza is marginally better balanced than a Model 42, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
• It's also 0.2% less handle biased than the "mathematically tuned" Krake Raken. (Or maybe the Chinese copied mine inaccurately. Who knows.)
• Overall length of a knife has a lot more to do with how far in total distance the point of balance is from the pivots than much of anything else, including what its handles are made out of.

...So pick the knife with the length and total weight you're comfortable with, and don't worry so much, sport.

In real space, the point of balance of the Balanza is 1.588" from the center of the pivots, by my calipers. That's a negligible difference to the Krake, which is 1.518", and I find it is perfectly to my liking. Maybe that's because my actual carry knives are not neon colored and helium-filled fidget spinners with blades, but rather by preference my heavy and dependable BM51 clone or big steel linered Böker, or the Kimura. My other favorites are the dinky and short TGZUO titanium box cutter, or one of my Rockhoppers, or a Benchmade 32 Mini Morpho. All of which are either so damn tiny or strange -- or both -- they have no real analogue anyway, so they're all their own thing. Trying to use any full sized trainer as a stand-in for those is probably a fool's errand, so I don't even try.

One point to mention is that the Krake Raken's handles are overall longer than the Balanza's despite the proportion of mass being about the same. So if you prefer a handle that's just bigger, there you go.

Anyway, you like what you like and more importantly you get used to what you get used to. If you give me a minute to acclimate I can do thumb rolls all day long with my plastic Rockhoppers, with or without a blade installed, despite the fact that they weigh so little that if a stiff breeze comes by you'll never see yours again. And quite notwithstanding the insistence of any internet balisong bro that this is clearly impossible. (Proof. Suck it, physics. Slow-mo here.)

All this to say that the Balanza probably isn't everyone's cup of tea, and that's okay. It's got me written all over it, but your own mileage may vary. Maybe you really wish your knife's point of balance were right on the pivots. Maybe you want it to only weigh a quarter of an ounce. Don't let me tell you what to do.

(And of course, if you're only ever going to use your balisong as a working knife for some reason and never learn or attempt anything more complicated to open it than a double-windmill, you'll probably never even need a trainer knife at all, in which case the whole thing's moot. You've already let me waste your time over it anyway, though, and now it's too late.)

There are things the Balanza hasn't got but it'd be bomber if it did. I guess the only thing I really miss is not having a spring loaded latch. That'd require a rethink of the spacers to make happen, for sure, but there's plenty of room in there so they could have done it if they felt like it.

Oh, and you know. Maybe an edge.

It's got one other major thing going for it as well: It's actually pretty quiet. Certainly not silent by any stretch of the imagination, but the racket it makes at the very least manages to be pleasant. This is again quite unlike its sibling Moonsault, which is a dissonant nightmare of weird resonances, clangs, bongs, and vibrations. The Balanza exhibits none of this, and it's anyone's guess as to why since superficially it's constructed the exact same way. I don't know if it's just a fortunate coincidence that the Balanza is so much acoustically better or a terrible fluke that the much more expensive Moonsault is worse.

There is some jingle from the latch, which is not especially well fitted to its pin. But for the rest, just a single metallic click from each contact with a Zen pin, and nothing more. (Side note: Doing finger rolls is deceptively difficult while you're wearing rubber gloves. But not nearly so much as using the slippery silk liners I usually wear whenever I need to show my hands in frame, speaking of craters.)

If you slap the side of the Balanza while it's latched shut it does produce a tuning fork note. But it's short and subdued, lower pitched, and not nearly as long nor as harsh as the nails-on-blackboard buzz the Moonsault makes if you do the same thing.

Forging Ahead

If you want a decent budget trainer for your money, buy this instead of some random faceless clone.

There, the gauntlet is thrown.

Don't get me wrong, I like a good random faceless clone. I like them even better when they show up and they're not crap, but part of this is because I'm weird and I love the thrill of the chase even more, where you never quite know in advance what you're going to get. Normal people probably don't.

The Balanza is a known quantity from a known manufacturer. Like, with an actual warranty and stuff. Kershaw backs this with their same lifetime warranty as everything else they make, and my singular past experience with Kershaw's warranty is that if you ask them for one replacement screw they'll send you about 60% of the components to build yourself an entire new knife, ship of Theseus style. That's what happened to me when I needed a clip screw for a Brawler back in the day. I still have the extra entire clip, washers, pivots, and extra screws somewhere.

Consider the Balanza if you aren't an aspiring TikTok star, or you don't care what punters on the internet think. Buy it to practice. Buy it to use.

Just don't buy any of Kershaw's other balisongs, because they're five times the price of this and somehow they're worse.

There really needs to be a live blade version of this and I can't fathom why there isn't. That'd be clutch, and I'd happily buy one on the spot. Even in a cheap budget steel like 8Cr or D2.

...Maybe the Chinese will knock one off for us.

I am holding in my hands the printed proof of my -- or possibly our -- new sticker.

This is rather like playing Store when you were a kid. Having feelies available goes a long way towards making your pretend brand seem tangible.

I'll be finding various ways to give these away, I'm sure. At the moment, you can score one through my Patreon. (Yes, this is an ad.)

The other day, I caught the Brain Cell.

I presume most of you are familiar with my Rockhopper 3D printable utility knife balisong thing, and for those of you who aren't I will use this opportunity for yet another shameless plug.

It's fully printable, it's got a spring latch, a reversible deep carry pocket clip, and it's wholesome and easy to make at home.

I designed this by using the screw design from my marginally more popular but considerably less interesting (in my opinion) Adélie Axis locking Wave Opening utility knife jobbie. Those screws were designed with no particular specification in mind other than to be totally 3D printable.

But I realized that due to laziness on my part the thread pitch is precisely 1.0 mm, and the diameter is tantalizingly close to the same as a standard commodity M6x1.0 screw. But not quite.

So why not just make it an M6 screw, you say?

Why not, indeed.

One minor redesign later -- which has been up on Printables for a couple of weeks, actually -- and now there's the option to use either printed screws (for the lazy, purist, or impatient) or 12mm long M6 set screws (for the stylin', swanky, or possibly paranoid).

I will point out that I have never managed to break one of my printed screws once I got the design nailed down. I'm sure it's possible if you try hard enough, but clearly they're not the actual weak point. Even so, I understand that they skeeve some people out on general principle.

Going with metal hardware also makes the final product significantly heavier: 42.8 grams, versus 26.3 with the plastic stuff. That makes the knife feel more substantial and less like a middle schooler's science fair project.

This also enables stronger bushings with a slightly increased thickness, which means a more solid action and increased positivity to the lockup when latched. I made a few other minor design changes as well, like making the pocket clip mounting significantly less of a pain in the ass.

I'm also showing this off with one of several scale pattern variations, in this case my Replicator set. Astute readers may find them reminiscent of a certain knife. Don't you worry about the Chinese; I can make knockoffs of my own, right here in my own basement.

Once again with feeling, here is another example of how we can't have nice things.

Oh, never mind the knife. It's a fine knife, not a thing wrong with it. Well, not much wrong with it, really. It hasn't got an edge, so it isn't even a knife. But that's on purpose.

No. Rather, I only bought this a few short weeks ago and already it's doubled in price since I did. We all know why.

It represented an alright deal, back then, provided you knew what you were getting into. Now, though, it doesn't.

And that's extremely annoying.

In this incarnation at least, this is the "HDD-ZH-005 Generic Butterfly Trainer, Balisong Trainer, Practice Butterfly, Balisong Butterfly Knives NOT Real NOT Sharp Blade, Black Dull Trick Butterfly, Butter Fly Training."

Drink every time these dweebs say "butterfly."

It's a balisong/butterfly knife trainer. Not sharp. Did you get that? The seller wanted to make sure you got that, so they don't get banned.

"Wait just a damn minute," I hear you cry, "That's clearly a knockoff of the Squid Industries Krake Raken!"

Er, well. Yes it is. Here is the object in question, with a picture furtively stolen directly from Squid's website:

The resemblance is undeniable. There's a key difference, though, as you'd expect.

Squid Industries are rather unique in the balisong world in that they manufacture very few actual knives. In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking that they don't -- I did, at first. The majority of their lineups are trainers, edgeless, and specifically for practice and showing off. This is kind of the opposite of most other makers, and their incarnation of the balisong (and they have quite a few) is quite a bit closer to belonging in the the yo-yo or fidget spinner worlds than knives. So fervently do they separate their product lines that they even have different web sites for their live and trainer models; never the two shall mix.

They're also one of the current darlings of the balisong trick-spinning world, and for that the real deal (trainer) Krake Raken is the thick end of $220. In its aluminum incarnation, anyway. They also do a titanium one which starts at $350.

The HDD-ZH-005, meanwhile, is worth $20. Never mind that at the moment it currently sells for around $45; it's worth $20.

I bought one of these for two reasons, broadly related. First is that I would love to own a genuine Krake Raken, because I have no doubt it is a very fine piece of equipment. But I really can't justify it at the moment when $220 will buy you an entire matched set of Böker's tactical balisongs, with change left over for a trainer.

Second is that I keep seeing these bloody everywhere. When you travel in my circles of the internet it seems you can't escape the damn things, so I wanted to pick one up to see if they were any good and finally put the whole affair to bed. There are no end to the places and means by which you can (attempt, at least) to score one of these, depending on which bunch of wretched charlatans you'd like to do business with and/or their level of audacity. (And get a load of some of those product descriptions. "Sea Monster." Nudge nudge, wink wink. Yeah, okay, sure.)

All this to say, don't take what I write as advice. I'm sure somewhere in China there is a factory pumping out a billion of these and they're all the same regardless of who's hawking them. Or then again, maybe they aren't and there are better and worse made examples. It's unlikely that I'll ever know, and even if I figure it out it's tough to tell in advance anyway, what with all the butterfly-edc-training-balisong-trainer-not-sharp-no-edge-trainer-no-edge-trainer, et. cetera.

What You Get

Or what I got, anyway.

I probably shouldn't be proud to say that I've bought a handful of clone balisong knives by now, and therefore I know very well how this is supposed to go. The HDD-ZH-005 follows in the exact same tradition as many others in that its box contains many "value added" items, the actual value of which is in fact rather dubious.

In its little presentation box -- which arrives completely bereft of any markings or brand names -- you get all of the above. As is very common with Chinese clone knives, you get a set of replacement pivot hardware which in this case is enough to replace both sides, two full pivot setups, but no replacement zen pins. There's also a faux velvet drawstring pouch in which no self respecting individual would actually store their knife in a million years, a little L shaped Torx driver ostensibly for tuning or undoing the screws, and a bottle of pivot lube.

Here's the full spread:

It all looks quite comprehensive at fist blush. Just, never you mind that all of these things are completely useless.

I'll start with the bottle of lubricant, which I'm quite positive actually isn't.

Whatever's in there is very thixotropic. I'll point out that I laid the little bottle down on its side for this photo and within the time it took me to fiddle with my tripod and dial in my focus and all the rest of it, the gunk inside had only flowed as far as you see. Here, just look at this:

I can't assess the qualities of the product inside because it's impossible to actually squeeze any of the stuff out of the bottle. No joke. It's too unctuous and there isn't enough of it in there for you to actually get any out of the nozzle no matter how hard you squeeze. And it won't even dribble out of its own accord no matter how long you leave the bottle upside down. Believe me, I tried. So given that, I predict it would not provide you favorable results if you somehow actually managed to apply it to your knife's pivots.

But good luck with that anyway, because the included Torx driver is made of softer steel than the screws. So if you try to attempt use it on your knife it'll just round off instantly.

What It's Like

For $20, the HDD-ZH-005 is great. It only took a thousand words so far to get us here.

It alleges to be a complete and utter clone of the Krake Raken V3 and is therefore identical in size. There's actually a slight cosmetic difference in that the channel milled into the outside faces of the handles was done after the anodizing rather than before so it shows through shiny whereas the current version of the Krake Raken does not. Possibly this follows suit from some prior version -- The Raken is on its fourth incarnation to my knowledge, despite what the V3 on the end would have you think. Apparently, there was a version 2.5 between 2 and 3.

Anyway, that means the HDD-ZH-005 is a full competition sized flipper at pretty much exactly 10" long, open.

Here it is (center) compared to Ye Olde Model 42 (left) and I think what is the biggest balisong I own at the moment, a Kershaw Moonsault (right).

The HDD-ZH-005 -- You know what, can we give this thing an easier to type name?

I'm going to call it "Horven." That seems appropriate.

Horven is 5-3/4" long closed with a "blade" of 4-3/8", which is of course totally unsharpened although the edges are all chamfered.

The blade is some sort of steel, evidenced by a magnet sticking to it. The handles aren't -- they're definitely aluminum of some description although whether they're T7075 like the original is anyone's guess. It is at least competently hard anodized and not painted. The finish on mine has already demonstrated its durability by hitting the floor quite a few times.

All those slots milled into the blade aren't just for decoration, by the way. They're an essential weight reducing component. It's maybe not obvious at first blush, but a real sharpened knife blade has a good deal of material removed as part of its taper, which this hasn't got. If you just had a flat slug of the same steel of a consistent thickness all the way through with the same footprint it'd be much heavier and throw the point of balance way off. So you'll find that pretty much all trainers follow this same methodology of taking huge decorative bites out of the blade. This also presumably alerts anyone who is paying attention that this isn't a "real" knife and is therefore not likely to do anyone any harm.

Still and all, maybe don't take this to an airport or school.

Thus with all the machine work in the blade, Horven's point of balance is right where you'd expect it to be, which is about 1-5/8" behind the pivot point when it's open or just slightly forward of the first hole drilled in the handles. Altogether it weighs 106.8 grams or 3.77 ounces which is pretty in line with the weights of all the high speed/low drag aluminum and titanium tricky buggers the cool kids all seem to be wielding these days.

That weird slightly brown mark on the blade is not an optical illusion, dirt, nor any kind of photographic bug, by the way. It really is there in real life, and on both sides. I don't know what it is, but it won't clean off. Maybe some kind of burn mark from when it was machined, but I have no clue why any of that would have been done after the rest of the surface finishing. Oh well; Maybe that's what you get for saving $200. It's easy to overlook until someone points it out, so I'm not too worried about it.

It's a kicker pin-less or Zen pin design and also latchless, both of which also seem to be the current fashion. The handles are unitary channel milled billets, 0.504" thick, and tapered: 0.525" thick at the tail and 0.424" at the pivots. There's a machined concentric crosshatching pattern on the faces...

...And some decorative channels in the sides, plus some wide jimping down at the ends.

One thing Horven didn't come with was anything to mark the bite side handle versus the safe side, and while it's somewhat academic with a blunt trainer and the handles are otherwise completely symmetrical, the blade isn't. So maybe you'd like to keep track of such a thing, but if so you get to provide your own solution.

You can see that there are bronze pivot washers, and Horven has a bushing pivot system in keeping with its list of trendy bullet points. Or, more prosaically, the original Krake Raken does as well so this has ripped that off wholesale along with everything else.

It's tough to argue with the action, and whoever made this copied Squid's homework closely enough that the "mathematically tuned" balance of the original is probably sufficiently faithfully reproduced.

Horven's pivot action is 100% satisfactory, the next best thing to having ball bearing pivots. However...

...While it's not possible on my example to get the blade to strike the inner surfaces of the handles ("tap") there is still a noticeable amount of lash in the pivots. So it definitely doesn't compare with a ball bearing knife in that way.

Horven is also very loud. It makes not only a ton of racket but has a decidedly weird rebound action which is probably related.

This is getting deep into wine-snob territory, here. But Horven is a lively one -- There is a ridiculous degree of bounce off of the Zen pins, much more than any other knife I own including similarly constructed (and similarly cheap!) all-aluminum channel milled jobbies. I don't know why.

You can see that here, where just plain old gravity is enough to make the free handle bounce like a pinball right off the Zen pin, to the tune of, what, 10 or 15 degrees? If you're not ready for it I found this can actually cause you to miss catching the handle in some situations, which will leave you looking totally uncool to anyone standing around watching you.

There's also some kind of tuning fork resonance going on in the blade, and the thing not only clanks like a bell but continues to sing for some seconds after coming to rest if you listen to it carefully.

I have no idea if the original exhibits any of these quirks, what with not owning one. Give me a raise and I'll buy one, then we can do a side-by-side?

Well, it was worth a shot.

What's Inside

Look, I've been intentionally avoiding this subject for many paragraphs now, but there's no getting around it once we've made it this far.

Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to take your Horven apart. It's damn near impossible.

The blasted thing comes with spare washers and lube and even that little screwdriver all just cheekily implying that you're expected to tune it or be able to dismount the blade. Well, forget it. It's unlikely that mere mortals will succeed at this, because the pivot screws are beyond overtorqued from the factory and they've been glued into place with permanent threadlocker. Thanks a lot, assholes.

Luckily I am a bird of phenomenal skill and talent, not to mention a lot of tools and a penchant for fire. In the spirit of journalistic integrity I gave it the old heave-ho anyway and damn the outcome.

To get this apart I had to blast the screws with a pencil torch for some minutes, and apply my high quality Wiha T8 Torx bits to both sides of the pivot screws simultaneously, and put one of them in a 90 degree driver just to obtain enough torque. I thought for sure I was going to strip the screw heads, but I ultimately persevered.

...Until the next problem.

Note here how I have both pivot screws removed and nothing up my sleeves, nor in my hat. But look, it's like magic -- the fucker still won't come apart, with the blade remaining resolutely locked into the handles as if the screws were still there. (Maybe they've turned invisible.)

Just look how hard I have to yank on this to get the handles off.

The problem is that the Chinese failed to copy one very critical dimension, which is the space between the handles. I imagine this was to compensate -- or more likely overcompensate -- in an attempt to reduce the amount of wiggle in the blade. But if that was their intent they didn't quite succeed.

The play between the blade and pivots is actually down to the clearances between the bushings and both the blade itself and the pivot screws, not the handles. That's evidenced here by the amount of daylight you can see showing through in this arty silhouette shot.

Getting the blade, washers, and bushings assembly out of the handles is difficult enough, but getting them back in would surely stymie anyone who didn't already know exactly what they were doing.

Not only do you have to cram the parts into a gap that's slightly smaller than their assembled dimensions and literally bend the aluminum handles apart slightly to do so, but then you have to get two washers and the bushing near-perfectly lined up with the holes in both sides of the handle with no inbuilt aid. I successfully got mine apart and back together -- twice -- but this necessitated a... small amount of violence.

You can see what we're up against by peering down the channel of one of the handles here. There is a stairstep in it where the pivots are, which is carried over from the Squid original. But the clearances are slightly wrong.

To determine just how wrong, I really went reaching for that Pulitzer and got out my calipers. Here's what I found:

The bushing outer diameter is 6.97mm but the holes in the blade are 7.07mm, so either the bushing is undersized or the holes are oversized by 0.1mm. That doesn't sound so bad, but the bushing inner diameter is 4.83mm and the outer diameter of its matching pivot screw is 4.77mm, so there's another 0.06mm. All told that's 1.6mm of overclearance per pivot, which is obviously noticeable.

But the stack of washers and the bushing, which all together comprise the true thickness that the handles must account for (the blade is irrelevant because it's thinner than the length of the bushings by design) is 4.20mm exactly. And the channel in the handle is only 4.12mm. So this is the only dimension that's undersized, and boy does that make things a faff and a half.

So to get the whole sandwich back in there you'd better be either very mighty or very clever. I know which one I am. You can take your own chances.

While we're in here, this is the usual hardware lineup. You might notice that this is minus the Zen pins, and aren't those Torx screws as well? Yes, they are, but just like the main pivots they have no anti-rotation flats, and they're torqued to hell and back just the same as the big screws. There's no way to even have a hope of undoing them without grabbing them hard with pliers and destroying their surfaces to the point that even if you got them busted loose they probably then wouldn't clear their own holes.

So again in the spirit of journalistic integrity, I bravely gave up.

So What?

Horven is a broadly competent little (maybe not so little) balisong trainer that's perfectly acceptably built provided you never have occasion to take it apart.

And let's be honest, other than showing off for ninja cred and writing long-winded tripe like this, there's really no reason for most people to do so. So don't.

The real headline here is that you might never know what you've got until it's gone.

The genuine Krake Raken is already untenably expensive for what amounts to a fidget toy, at least for most normal people. (Balisong people are not normal people, as I have opined many times before. I mean, hell. Just look at me.) But the way things are going these days it might soon turn out that things like this might become unreasonably expensive as well. And what a pisser that's turning out to be.

For $20 or so this is a fun little toy that'll save you either lopping your fingers off or throwing one of your near-kilobuck collector's items on the floor. Or, if you were a budding little waddler just starting off and with only your allowance money to work with, it could be the perfect cheap entry point into leaning how to do the whole balisong thing. There are, it must be said, certainly far worse values available for the same money (or more!) wherever shonky Chinese goods are sold.

So all that's cool. But for $40 it's already questionable, and if it touches $50 I think that's the point where its cost completely exceeds its worth.

At that rate there are better values for your money in a trainer balisong.

Maybe I'll even show you one of them eventually.

I just had a client call and get Big Mad with me because he got An Email.

"I just got some email from "you all" saying something about my delivery wasn't done, and this is bullshit because I told you all that I wasn't ready for [equipment] delivery yet so nobody was there and it's saying I have 46 hours or else you'll cancel my delivery or some shit and this is fucked up and I'm not standing for it you all keep screwing everything up and if you can't do something about this right now I want my money back and this is unacceptable and -- "

You want to know what the email in question was?

It was this:

This indefatigable moron sent someone else a message from his own personal email account, got the address wrong and received this bounceback, and failed to understand this so hard that immediately concluded that this must have something to do with "us" and his equipment delivery so he should instantly pick up the telephone and screech.

Isn't it nice to be appreciated in the capacity that idiots assume that every single little thing that goes wrong in their lives must somehow be your fault?

I also partially blame Google for putting a stupid little icon of a truck on these things, obviously completely failing to account for the fact that some large percentage of idiots A) won't actually read the words, and B) can't comprehend abstract concepts.

If you try to design something to be foolproof, they'll just go on and invent a better fool.

In my last column we took a long, retrospective look at a little Camillus knife that was a big part of my life. I own a whopping total of two Camillus knives, and this is the other one. It is simultaneously slightly more interesting (mechanically) and quite a bit less interesting (historically) at the same time.

But it'll also allow us to explore how the mighty have fallen, and that sounds like a good time.

For us, that is. Not them.

Camillus Cutlery's story arguably began as far back as 1876, but they became an actual manufacturer of knives, rather than just an importer, in 1902. You can learn this by reading the back of any of their modern packages, because their current owner still harps on it as if they deserve the credit. This despite not having a damn thing to do with any of the original 130 years' worth of operation.

Camillus made a lot of knives for a lot of years in their factory in the town for which the brand was named in New York. They produced knives under their own name as well as several other sub-brands over the years, including the Camco brand of my little jack knife, and were also an OEM manufacturer for some other labels behind the scenes.

But in the early 2000's, Camillus was in trouble. It's the same old sad story we've heard a hundred times before: Pressured on one side by cheap imports undercutting them and boxed in on the other by failing to keep up with the times, Camillus' sales were declining and their financial situation was becoming increasingly untenable. By 2006 they could not afford to pay their workers and there was a strike. The shutdown certainly didn't help matters but it's probable that even without it they wouldn't have fared much better for long. Ultimately their creditors called in all their loans and Camillus ceased operations entirely on February 28th, 2006.

You can read more about the whole sordid affair here, once again thanks to the excellent Collectors of Camillus web site. It's beyond the scope of me recapping in detail here. I'm no historian. I certainly wasn't an expert back then and I'm still not now, and arguably I wasn't even paying attention at the time.

Camillus was definitely a name that was around back in the day when I was getting into knives good and proper. There are now just as much as back then people who were into collecting their knives big time, but I certainly wasn't one of them. They just didn't make anything that interested me, and I'm sure that sentiment -- though not from me personally, mind you, what with my insignificant pocket change -- probably didn't do them many favors towards the end.

You can take a look at this 2005 catalog, to see what I mean, even beyond the little excerpt above.

Modern options were fairly few in Camillus' lineup. But modern was on the up-and-up in the 2000's, and tactical was in. We wanted black knives with fast draws and tanto points and spring assists and trick mechanisms, and Camillus was that company still making solid old stag handled grandpa knives. Their slim selection of modern-ish offerings weren't looking too attractive compared to, say, the Benchmade Skirmish and Osborne, Cold Steel's Ti-Lite and Recon, or hell, even the crusty old SOG Trident -- All of which were their contemporaries. And lots more besides.

Camillus did have a couple of offerings that looked like they ought to at least belong to the 20th century even if not quite the 21st, and I'll bet I handled most of them at least once back in the day. As far as the folders went, anyhow. And my takeaway at the time was that, allegedly fine though they may be, they didn't feel any less plasticy than the Chinese competitors that were allegedly eating their lunch. Meanwhile, Cold Steel knives had ninja cred. Benchmades were bad ass. Our soldiers were kicking ass in the desert with SOGs. So who wanted a boring old Camillus?

After Camillus closed up shop, ultimately the brand was acquired by the Acme United Corporation but what rose from the ashes is not the same Camillus that once was. Not a single blade marked "Camillus" is made in New York anymore -- And ironically, every one of the knives you see branded Camillus today are exactly the kind of largely indistinguishable disposable cost-cut Chinese made crap that helped put them out of business in the first place. Things destined to do nothing more than hang on a peg in Walmart.

The Knife

Which brings us to this.

This is the Camillus Cuda Mini. Or, perhaps, "CUDA," since it's supposed to stand for "Camillus Ultimate Design Advantage." Cuda therefore isn't really a model as such, but a moniker applied to various Camillus knives both now in their zombified brand form and also historically, from the before-times.

I got the Coyote Brown version, because black is boring.

It unavoidably raises the question of whether or not, or perhaps why, any garden variety chump with the better part of $30 burning a hole in his pocket ought to buy this rather than the veritable galaxy of similarly-priced-or-better run of the mill budget Chinese knives.

The answer turns out to be probably no. But that's not going to fill all these inches.

And then, it also demonstrates that there really is nothing new under the sun. Since here we are still asking that same question that was raised -- and ultimately answered -- at the time of Camillus' downfall.

Anyway, I was of course drawn originally to this because it is, yes, slightly weird.

That, and I wanted to see just how bad modern Camillus knives really are, since everyone seems to say so all the time. Well, they do in my circles, anyway. I don't know what you normal people talk about at parties.

The Cuda Mini is a compact folder with quite a few modern design elements. The back of its card lists a G-10 handle (scales), liner lock, "Carbonitride Titanium(R)" stainless steel blade, and the "Quick Launch Bearing System." More on that in a bit. First, the packaging.

Because there are several things to, er, unpack.

First of course is the aforementioned paragraph at the top full of chest-beating over Camillus' history, as if their current owner didn't simply write a check for the name and stuff the corpse into an ill-fitting suit, held up with a broomstick up its butt à la Weekend At Bernie's.

The second thing I would like to draw your attention to is the "Lifetime Warranty," promising to repair or replace your knife -- provided if and only if you return it in its original packaging. So you'd better not throw out that card.

(Yes, eagle eyed readers will note that I slipped the knife back into the card for the photo above. I still have the card, partially because of that stupid warranty clause but mostly because I retain the packaging for almost all of my knives, no matter how silly it is.)

The third thing is the prominent "Designed In USA" next to the flag. This is probably the oldest dirty trick in the book, since designed here obviously doesn't mean made here, even if they're wishing hard you'll think it does. The real answer is the little "Made In China" mark further down. All this combined with the capsule history at the top is obviously meant to bamboozle the uninitiated into forking over their money under false pretenses, believing they're about to do the wholesome thing by purchasing a knife with a little American flag on it -- as if this means anything other than some rat bastard's printed a flag on it.

There's nothing wrong with a Chinese knife, per se. I like a good Chinese knife, as we all know. But at least be honest about it, for fuck's sake.

There's also a stern Proposition 65 warning indicating that this knife may expose you to Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, presumably from the scales, which may kill your sperm or perhaps shrivel your balls. Fuckin' A.

Anyway, you can view a more legible scan of the card back here, if you're so inclined.

You've probably also noticed the Cuda Mini's weird thumb stud thing. Here's the deal with that.

The Cuda Mini is not, surprisingly, a spring assisted knife. It's a plain liner locking folder with a 3" blade length, so it's probably devised with widespread legality in mind.

Instead, it has its oddball little opening system which is yet another entry into our Technically Not Legally A Switchblade series. It seems a bit counterintuitive, but you open it by pushing the stud forward, not up, whereupon it automatically follows its track and snaps the blade open once you've overcome the traditional ball detent in the liner.

Despite at first blush appearing to be laid out a manner that'd make opening it physically impossible, it's actually not that difficult to use, although it's a trifle weird feeling.

This is one of those things like the mechanics of steering a bicycle, where if you asked someone right on the spur of a moment to describe what action they perform to open their knife, what they tell you would probably actually be wrong. You might think you press the thumb stud on your normal knife forward, too, then up and around. But you don't -- You actually push it down, away from the knife's handle, or possibly somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 degrees at most, in order to get the blade to move.

On a normal knife the push-forward strategy would be rather like trying to lift your fat friend on a seesaw by running up to the fulcrum and giving it a right kicking. Yes, a sufficient amount of force is theoretically there, but it's not quite going in the right direction.

This doesn't work like that. Once you figure it out it becomes easy to use.

The long and short of it is that this all works because the stud is actually out in front of the pivot point at all times, and never passes behind it at any point in its travel. This is more akin to a front flipper knife, and unlike a traditional thumb studded one.

The Specs

The Cuda Mini does, at least, manage to live up to its name. It is 6-3/4" long precisely when open, 3-3/4" closed, and you win no points for guessing it has a 3" blade. It's 0.463" thick across the scales, so neither slim nor exceptionally chunky, 0.628" including the opening stud and 0.803" at its thickest including both the stud and the clip. With two full length steel liners it rings in at 78.8 grams or 2.78 ounces.

The blade is hollow ground, 0.108" thick at the spine, drop pointed with a false edge on the back for about half of its length, and is made of AUS-8.

Sorry, "Carbonitride Titanium(R)" AUS-8.

Acme, speaking through Camillus using them like a sock puppet, try very hard to make this sound much more technical than it is. AUS-8 is very nearly identical to 440B and functionally interchangeable with the same, so in our current cyberpunk dystopia where you can score D2 folders for ten bucks it's actually quite a low end steel. It might've cut it back in 1999, but these days our tastes run a little more refined.

The titanium carbonitride coating, aside from having its name reversed so it can be trademarked, is in fact identical in composition and application to what other manufacturers simply term a "PVD" or physical vapor deposition coating. There are various coatings that can be applied this way and they're not all the same, but TiCN is quite common and definitely not unique to this knife or any others like it.

TiCN is more scratch resistant than silkscreened, painted, or epoxy coatings. But it's still nothing special.

The Cuda Mini has a deep carry pocket clip with trendy Bechmade-eqsue side screws flanking it, although it's got one and only one mounting position which is tip down, spine forward for a right handed user. There's only an opener stud present on one side, too, because otherwise it would conflict with the clip. Left handed users are instead encouraged to inflict an airborne indignity on an ambulatory baked confectionery product; whoever designed this clearly wants nothing to do with you.

And despite the gimmick opening setup, the Cuda Mini is otherwise a very plain Jane liner locker underneath. The lock is completely bog standard, although there is a generous cutout in the opposite liner and scale to help you reach it.

There's some jimping set into the liners on the spine, but strangely far back. If you hold the knife in a natural manner, this actually winds up quite a ways behind where your thumb wants to land. There are ostensibly some jimping cuts on the back of the blade as well, but when it's open it actually rests so far sunk in between the liners that these are inaccessible, and therefore pointless. I'm not quite sure what's up with that.

The Parts

It's likely nobody expects you to actually take the Cuda Mini apart. That probably says a lot more about the people expected to buy it rather than whoever designed or manufactured it. I had a hunch the opener stud, which is sunk directly into a hole in the blade itself, would be a bugger to remove. And it is.

Unfortunately, it also holds one of the scales captive. So I left it like you see here.

Inside there's a liberal slathering of grease all over everything. Maybe that's where all the Di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate is.

Here's that "Quick Launch Bearing System" the back of the card was talking about. The Cuda Mini is indeed a ball bearing opener, and this probably goes a long way towards explaining why its goofy layout still results in a folder that's actually possible to use. With it you get all the usual thrust ball bearing benefits like buttery low resistance action, very decent blade centering despite being a cheap liner locker...

...And a near zero amount lash in the pivot when the blade is locked open, which helps the knife superficially feel much more premium than it is.

Here's the back side of the opener stud where it goes through the blade, and it appears to be peened in place after installation. That, or it's possibly glued. Or both. Removing it without marring it in some capacity is absolutely impossible, so I left it alone.

Everything else is a normal Torx screw: T8 for the pivot, T6 for the rest. For maximum cost savings the pivot screw does not have an anti-rotation flat in it, but if you're never expected to take this apart I guess that doesn't matter.

The Catch

Regardless of anything else you can say about it, the Cuda Mini actually has a decent feel in the hand. It has a nice weight, its assembly is very rigid, and anyone who didn't know any better would be led to believe, just via the usual method of hefting and frowning at it, that it must be a nice knife. That's how they get you.

Is it actually, though? To find out, I did a little cut test.

I don't normally go in for this sort of thing in my writeups because I know that the factory sharpness of any given knife is really just an entertaining opening argument to what kind of edge it ultimately could achieve once you've had your little way with it. And if it's a novelty thingamabob, as so many of mine are, you're never going to actually use it for anything anyway. So what's the point?

But I had at it with a Post-It note anyway, just to get the lay of the land. And I immediately ran into a snag. Literally.

Those two cuts were as far as I got before I determined something was wrong. It failed to even complete the second one, as you can see.

Why? Well, for the most part, the Cuda Mini has an edge grind on it that's almost exactly what you'd expect from a budget knife.

The grind is reasonably even down its length, and the point profile is actually pretty good.

But in accordance with the rites of ancient prophecy, it is inescapably out of true. One side of the grind on mine is precisely 40 degrees, and the other is steeper at about 45. That's not the real issue, though.

The issue is that mine arrived right out of the package with a nasty ding in the edge. It's a diabolical one, too: Tough to spot with the naked eye but you can feel it with a fingernail, and right from the factory it prevents you from achieving a clean cut.

Here it is under magnification, where it's much more obvious.

It seems something struck the edge of this before it was packaged, and that means we can make two troubling assumptions. First, this happened somewhere along the line and nobody noticed or cared. Second, this isn't a chip but as you can see the edge has been rolled over, so it's a sure sign the steel at the edge is very soft.

Another clue is the burnishing in the coating behind the edge, the whole way down its length. This is most likely a telltale that the edge has been "burned," i.e. when the edge was ground the metal was allowed to get too hot and thus its lost some of its heat treating -- and its hardness -- as a result.

On a lark I put this on the ol' Spydero sharpener. It sharpened up quite quickly, another sign of soft steel, and after a just couple of quick lashes on the stones it looks like this:

I went just far enough to knock the rolled steel off of the edge where that nick was, which naturally improved its cutting performance dramatically.

But even by the time I was done feathersticking a second Post-It note it was already obvious that the sharpness was diminishing. Make no mistake, paper is definitely an abrasive, and it'll send you back to your stones eventually. But no modern knife should be fazed by a mere single sticky note.

This is an edge retention result so poor I wouldn't even bother to piss on it.

The Inevitable Conclusion

So here we are, right back where we started.

It's kind of fitting, actually, in a twisted sort of way. Camillus started off as an importer, manufacturing nothing. After a long and shining heyday, a rise and a fall, now their husk is back to doing exactly the same thing: Just bringing in and branding any old thing, all made by somebody else.

And, alas, to little fanfare and not much benefit.

It's a shame, really. The Cuda Mini has a neat design. It has cool features. It's a nice size. It has ball bearing pivots.

It's too bad it's crap.

Between the knife and that brick, I'll take the brick, thanks.

It was just after dawn and I was awakened by a thunderstorm.

That by itself was another novelty; at home, back East, storms were solely the purview of the afternoon. If it rained in the morning rather than sundown you knew it was bound to be rain all day. Slow, miserable, grey, and boring.

But not today. There, for just a few minutes on the side porch of my older brother's cabin in the shadow of Jelm Mountain outside of Laramie, I watched the world disappear. The sky shook, the wind blew, and rain lashed against the windows. Mist closed in and drew its veil nearly up to the edge of the house, swallowing up the mountains and sagebrush and the prickly pair cactus, then the barn, then the truck. We floated alone in a roaring grey void.

And then, ten minutes later, it was over. My brother slept through it entirely. Didn't even budge.

The storm passed on, curtaining the town in sheets of rain on the horizon while a blue sky shone in the west and eventually, the sun rose over the tops of the anvil headed clouds and punched through, slicing the sky itself into ribbons of shadow and pillars of light. The mountains and the sky were perfectly reflected upside down in the puddles in the mud outside which quickly become mirror still, and steamed.

I was very nearly ten years old.

Today was an important day.

---

Every summer for five years running, my mother packed me up and shipped me out for no reason I was ever able to comprehend to stay with my brother for a few weeks, until the year he died. I think it was five trips, anyhow. You don't pay attention to that sort of thing when you're seven, because you're a self absorbed little shit and for you every day is a new universe and time may as well be infinite.

Maybe she just wanted me out of her face for a while. Or I suppose she might have thought it would force me to "build character." Well, it did. Whether she wanted it to or not.

Permissivity was the puzzler. I was forbade just about everything at home but my brother, ostensibly the adult in the situation, did not give a single flying fuck what anyone else thought I was or wasn't allowed.

So those summers were years of firsts for me. I ate my first bowl of Captain Crunch (with Crunchberries!) on the tailgate of my brother's dusty old Ford Ranger, in the middle of nowhere, using powdered milk made with ice cold river water. Sugary cereal wasn't allowed at home.

The first river caught trout I ever ate. The first time I drove a car -- my brother's truck, actually. With a manual transmission. My first time able to ride a bicycle completely out of the sight of any adult, all on my own, down the mile long dirt track to the main road and the mailbox and back, bringing a month's worth of mail with me including the very much coveted Cabelas catalog, which we did not have at home. It was my brother's mountain bike which was far too large for me. I had to stand sidesaddle on one of the pedals to even reach the ground with my feet, but I didn't even fall over once.

My first time lighting off a firework. I was barely even allowed to watch my father do that, in the few short years I was cognizant of anything and both of my parents were still living under the same roof.

My first time firing a gun, my brother's little .22 revolver. Guns were very very evil and definitely weren't allowed at home. Not even to be talked about.

It was easy to guess what my mother disapproved of because it was practically everything. If it was fun or any type of activity that was not preordained, it was not allowed. Things I was not allowed included nearly all television and radio (but NPR and PBS were okay, most times); all music that was above the level of about Raffi or, curiously, show tunes; having friends or being around the "wrong" type of people (which was basically everyone); privacy; any type of personal possessions; anything written, drawn, or typed with the expectation that it would not be rifled through and criticized relentlessly. Oh, and certainly knives. Those weren't allowed, either.

Approved activities largely consisted of studying, reading (approved books only), and getting good grades. Preferably where I could be seen doing it and therefore make her look good by association. Any good creative work I produced was shortly no longer mine. It was hers, taken away and to be paraded in front of her friends and associates, never to be seen by me again. And if it wasn't any good by her standards she'd sure let me know it. Frequently, and at great length.

---

On this day my brother was taking me out into the field. This was something we did every year, after a couple of days bumming around town with his friends and packing. After this, it was goodbye to civilization (more or less) for a little over a week. And he was very adamant about one thing, when you ventured forth into the bush: You had to have your knife, your matches, your canteen, your compass, your map, and good boots. Really, he was an early forerunner to the modern EDC mindset.

Calling my brother an outdoorsman would be the understatement of a lifetime. He was a conservationist working for the local university. An actual conservationist, as in the scientific research and protecting trees and prairies and animals sort -- not just paying lip service to "protecting" parts of it so we can shoot at it later.

His work generally seemed to me to involve little more than traipsing out in the wilds all over hell and creation to remote ponds and gullies to take pH readings of the water and count frogs. Frogs were a bellwether species, he told me -- there's a new word -- in that tiny changes to their environment can have huge impacts on their numbers. If there's some new pollutant or subtle change to the climate we ought to know about you'll see it in the frogs first.

He lived in a little cabin out in the middle of nowhere, almost completely out of sight of everything. Just him and his dogs, and his falcon that he housed in the rickety old barn he'd converted into a kind of rookery. But where he was at home was not at home -- it was actually outside. I gather that he mostly thought of his house as a place to keep whatever stuff he did not have on him at the time.

He did not, in fact, teach me how to put together a tent. My dad did that. But this was different: with my brother all those years ago I spent my first night outdoors completely out of not only sight but also hearing of any type of civilization whatsoever. Not at a Good Sam or a KOA with yokels blaring warbly country music on shitty cassette players in the next bay over. No one crunching up the gravel drive a 2:00 AM. No trucks downshifting on the highway half a mile off. Instead, absolute silence.

And he always had his knife on him: the main one being a big fancy Swiss Army knife that I was immensely envious of just about ever since I could walk.

I vividly remember one time when I must have been about five, and my brother was visiting for a family birthday party. We were at Showbiz Pizza -- This was before they became Chuck E. Cheese. Someone picked up a slice of pizza and the cheese streeeeetched. My brother whipped out his Swiss Army knife and, literally, cut the cheese. Not with a knife blade. This motherfucker used the scissors. I still have no idea how he busted them out so fast. He must have been lying in wait.

Our mother gave him A Look. I was sternly told afterwards never to repeat such a thing so long as I lived. So you bet your bottom dollar it became my life's ambition to do so, right at that exact second.

So truth be told, at first the knife aspect of the knife didn't hold much interest for me. It was the sheer variety of things that Swiss Army knife could do that were fascinating. You could have handed it to me without the knife blades on it and I probably wouldn't have cared one whit. It had screwdrivers for taking stuff apart (my brother used it to fix stuff on his rattly old truck all the time), a can opener for preparing dinner at camp, a little magnifying glass for looking at interesting rocks or bugs, tweezers for getting out splinters, a toothpick for looking cool, a corkscrew for... some reason, and one of those leather punch awls with the hole in that nobody ever seemed to use for anything but still it was there and it was one more thing.

But today we were going out into the field, and I already had my compass and my canteen and my matches and my boots. This year my brother decided I was responsible enough, quite contrary to my mother's perpetual insistence, that I could have a knife.

So as a slightly early birthday present, he gave me this. It was just a little old unregarded trifle from the bottom of his tackle box. It was already quite well worn by the time he passed it on to me, and to him it was probably worth practically nothing.

But you could have saved a billion dollars and cancelled NASA right then and there. Just strap a camera to me and I'll take pictures on my way by, because I was headed to the moon.

---

I strutted around that whole summer with that knife in my pocket just as proud as a cat full of sixpences. If anything needed cutting, by gum I cut it. Or pried it, or scratched at it, or carved runes into it, or whittled it into a point. And I took it home with me.

I flew to and from my brother's place every summer, ostensibly on my own but under close supervision of whichever stewardess was unlucky enough to escape being cornered by my mother and browbeaten into taking responsibility for me. They let you do that sort of thing back on those days, just bundle up a 7-to-11 year old and stick him on a plane by himself. The return trip was considerably more liberal, and unsupervised. When in doubt, be a precocious ten year old who knows a lot about planes, or can at least talk a good game about it. They'll let you sit in first class for free, give you a pair of wing pins, and let you see the cockpit. And you'll get all the peanut M&Ms you can stuff into yourself.

But first at the airport I ambled right up to that damn metal detector and stuck my knife in the tray along with my watch and my Gameboy and all my loose change. The security guard picked up my knife and looked me up and down, me in my denim jacket and khahki cargo shorts and ballcap, patches and pins, and a bandana around my neck.

"You in the scouts or something?" He asked me.

"Sure," I lied.

"You be careful with this," he said, and gave it right back to me.

What a time to be alive.

Through that arch I passed on to the rest of my life, forever changed but surely without any clue whatsoever what I might go on to be. Backpacker, adventurer, writer, deliverator, programmer, collector. In that moment, it was all possible.

I hid my knife in my sock before we landed. I had correctly predicted that my mother would snoop through all my luggage and brusquely rummage in all my pockets as soon as she saw me with barely even a hello.

In retrospect, it's a goddamn miracle I managed to hang on to this thing to be able to show it to you today. If she'd found it at any time she'd have thrown it away after first calling me on the carpet over it and probably grounding me for a month, and certainly would have utterly failed to understand its significance. It'd be a half hour screaming telephone call to my brother as well, long distance charges be damned. No hiding place in my room was safe; Ultimately I resorted to tucking it in the rafters of the disused shed on the corner of our property along with all the other stuff I didn't want to lose forever, until I moved out.

---

I knew nothing about this knife, really, except that it was old and it was my brother's and he gave it to me, therefore it was priceless. I didn't get into-into knives until a little later in life, well into teenagerdom and a time where such a lad could charitably pass for legal age to a suitably disinterested store clerk and purchase cutlery of his own.

And I did eventually get my damn Swiss Army Knife, but a little too late.

This is a Camco Model 522. Camco was one of two historical sub-brands of the Camillus Cutlery Company, from back in the good old days before their 2006 bankruptcy and subsequent acquisition by Acme United, the following restructuring, and infamous descent into being a clearinghouse of imported low grade junk for Walmart.

In its heyday Camco was their budget line, opposite the Sword brand which contained their high end offerings. Its origin is displayed via this engraving on the heel of the main blade. Camco, I imagine, is short for "Camillus Company." The brand was introduced in 1948, just in time for post-war prosperity.

The 522 is a fairly traditional jack knife, bearing a pivot on only one end rather than both, and Camillus specifically called this variant a "Pony Jack." It's arguably a swayback design, evidenced by the prominent wiggle in its handle profile. The 522 Pony Jack contains a long clip pointed blade:

And a short sheepsfoot that Camillus called a "coping pen" blade:

The handle is "Nu Pearl," which is a translucent plastic faux-pearl material -- Plastic being a novel material at the time of its introduction, and quite distinct from the stag horn that Camillus used on most of their knives up to that point.

As a side note, the reason small knives like this are still called "penknives" by some regardless of their configuration is because similar small knives were originally intended to shape and trim the point of a quill pen, back when that sort of thing was relevant. Even well after quill pens fell into disuse the name stuck. This is surely where the "pen" part of the description of its smaller blade comes from. A coping blade has a narrower point profile than a traditional sheepsfoot and is supposed to be better suited to finer, more fiddly tasks at the expense of having a more fragile point. And it's certainly possible that Camillus might have expected you to trim a quill point with it, but I'd doubt it -- a pencil is probably more likely.

I don't actually know the date of manufacture of this knife. It's not marked on it anywhere, and the only published reference I can find to this model specifically is in the 1957 Camillus catalog where it appears twice. Page 5 contains as full of a description of this model as it appears we're going to get:

And two pages following you can see it as part of the lineup in their No. 56-12 display case, revealing that this was part of the Camco "Dollar Line." It is therefore definitely a budget model. Perfect for bestowing on a grasshopper who probably wouldn't treat it with much care.

I don't know how long Camillus kept this knife available and in production, and it's certainly likely that it was available beyond 1957. Just as well, because '57 was certainly before my brother was born (I'm not that old, and neither was he), but I can just picture him picking this up from a hardware store in some dusty one horse town somewhere where it may have been lying around for god knows how long. Or it's even possible that it was given to him in turn and then given to me; that raises the tantalizing possibility that I am this knife's third owner but at this rate I'll never know.

I found this catalog and many others like it at the excellent Collectors Of Camillus web site, by the way, which is a veritable treasure trove of info run by people who know way more about this stuff than I do. Without it I certainly would have been scratching my head much longer in figuring out anything about this knife. I found various similar eBay listings for knives like these, for instance, most of which were quite inaccurate.

I've shown off knives here before that were time capsules of their era, but none of them are a patch on the 522. It is a very traditionally designed pocketknife, and when I say that it really means something here. It's a slip joint folder with no locking mechanism. A pair of springy prongs on the spine press against the heels of the blades and allow them to detent into position but they are not locked there in any way.

Its steel alloy is unspecified, but I can tell you for sure it's a carbon steel and not stainless. Nowadays we assume any given knife no matter how cheap is bound to be stainless, and if you want a carbon steel blade you have to deliberately seek one out. None of the knives in the 1957 catalog are specified as being stainless, and when Camillus came out with models in later years that were it was a big enough deal that each and every one had a flashy "stainless" marquee over its listing.

These days we hyperfixate on specific steel alloys and the minutiae of their properties, but back in the day people were much too occupied actually using their knives to worry about that sort of thing.

And my example is definitely well used. The rather pronounced dish in the edge on the main blade is not original, and is a clear indication that somebody got an awful lot done with it at some point in history. Some of that was me, but much of it wasn't.

The 522 is riveted together with steel pins that are functionally nonremovable. A real expert could probably dismount it and put it back together again, but I'm not inclined to try. Mine has suffered much neglect over the years what with being hidden in sheds and down in the bottom of drawers and so forth, and at one point it was underwater for some length of time after my house suffered from a basement flood. As you see it now is after my inexpert attempt at restoration; I gave it a damn good brass wire wheeling before taking these pictures to shine it up and get the rust off of the bolsters and out of the Nu-Pearl scales. I mostly succeeded. The blades have developed a patina and some pitting, particularly on the smaller one, and I decided that by and large I'd leave that as it is. I got all the cancerous red rust off and oiled everything up real good, but I think going around trying to mirror polish the blades would be silly.

Both blades are spaced by a simple brass partition in the gap between. The long blade on mine is actually very slightly bent -- no doubt the result of some youthful misadventure -- and I straightened it out as much as I dare try. It's not perfect, but at least the blades don't clash anymore and I've seen worse even in new production knives if they're cheap enough.

---

The sky was turbulent all that day. Big tall clouds came and went, sweeping across the sky one after the other. We met up with my brother's friend Mark for lunch, out on some rocks on a pine covered hillside somewhere. He prepared tortellini on a little pump up white gas camp stove on the tailgate of the truck, with a can of red sauce he opened with his knife.

We let his dogs out to run in the brush and hunt mice and voles, which was their favorite game aside from rooting out grouse. You'd hear just one bark from the bushes and suddenly there'd be a tiny rodent sailing over the low pines and sage, looking quite surprised and indignant. The dogs never killed them, they'd simply catch them and fling them into the air so you could see that they'd got one. My brother could actually even get them to bring their quarry back alive, and this was how he fed his bird.

The pasta was done. We sat in the shade under the pines and ate as the wind rattled the dry branches. My brother glanced up at the sky.

"Get in the truck," he said suddenly. It seemed quite out of the blue to me.

We got in the truck. Just a minute later, a deluge of marble sized hailstones were bouncing and pinging and shattering all around us. And here came the dogs, rocketing out of the bushes and yelping. They got in the truck, too.

The chaos only lasted a couple of minutes and I did my best to catch a few of the ice balls by tentatively hanging my camp mug out from under the safety of the pickup truck's cap. I only got two or three, and they melted quickly.

To this day I have no idea how he just looked at the sky like that and knew it was going to hail 30 seconds later. That was the kind of thing he did. He was in tune with the land. Anywhere he stood, that was his land. It didn't matter what any signs around it said.

That summer we went everywhere. Hundreds of miles all over the state and beyond. We went to the Four Corners, just for the heck of it. We got lunch in roadside biker bars that a ten year old had no business in. You'd get looks at first, but my brother -- scrawny, liberal educated, and beardless -- could be friends with anyone in any bar in sixty seconds flat. His dogs knew tricks. He'd dazzle the denizens hunched over their beers with trivia, or win small bets along the "bet you a quarter you can't do X with Y" variety, or once he taught me a few he'd let me do it instead. (For instance, he taught me the trick I've recounted here before of uncorking a wine bottle with no tools, just physics.) Anywhere anyone was from, he'd been there and he could prove it. He knew people that you knew there. He knew people everywhere.

And then, we were gone. Probably leaving everyone inside wondering just what the hell just happened.

We camped on mountainsides in the middle of nowhere. Fished in remote streams -- Well, he fished and I watched. On those nights, I saw more stars in the sky than I'd ever seen in my life. And he seemed to know the names of all of them.

---

It's funny, but the Camco 522 is exactly the kind of knife that doesn't interest me now. I own precisely two traditional jackknives, and this is one of them. We all got preoccupied with spring assists and thumb studs, myself included, and I developed my now famous predilection for balisongs as well as the most off-the-wall mechanisms I could get my hands on, but the 522 has none of these. It's also seriously tiny -- It has no tactical appeal at all. All you have to grab the blades for opening are traditional fingernail nicks, and the action is quite stiff. I recall it always was.

It's a mere 2-3/4" long closed, just like the catalog says. The main blade is just 1-13/16" long, probably well within the legal limit anywhere, and the little one is 1-5/16". It's just 23.8 grams or 0.84 of an ounce. All that together means this would probably give any modern urban micro-carry knife a run for its money. The diminutive size is surely why my brother chose this one to give to me. It's tough to get into too much trouble with, but it'll still teach you not to nick your fingers just as good as any other knife.

I was going to try to find a Wyoming quarter for scale since it'd be appropriate, but I pawed through about 40 bucks' worth of quarters I've got lying around here and I'm ashamed to report I didn't find a single one. You get this land conservancy commemorative one instead, as second prize.

---

I visited my brother one more summer after that, a trip during which I turned eleven. On this trip my nephew was sent with me (he's almost exactly my age; my family tree is weird) and we had a grand old time even though I had to leave my little pocketknife at home. We had other toys to play with -- hatchets, now, and my brother let me carry his Buck knife while I was there because he had yet another new knife to replace it. And I had a little half height small headed D-handle shovel I found in the barn and took it in my head to use as a walking stick, prybar, and general purpose snake-fender. Any bears or coyotes or rattlesnakes that messed with us had better watch out because they were going to get a good thrashing. Luckily for them they all kept their distance and remained un-whacked.

---

One night that winter, my mother woke me in the middle of the night so in tears she could barely talk. She told me my brother had just died, having been killed in an avalanche on the side of some mountain someplace. It was one of the few times I ever saw her display anything I could classify as a genuine emotion which wasn't just being angry at me or my dad.

What a thing to lay on an eleven year old in the dead of night. It's the kind of bullshit that happens in dreams; it can't be real. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. I get the impression that this was the wrong answer.

In the morning it was real -- it wasn't a bad dream. I never saw my brother again, and I think it probably took years for that to fully sink in. He may as well have lived on a different planet at that time. The West was disconnected, separate; Life there wasn't the same life as here. You can't see over that horizon no matter how tall of a tree you climb to try.

He did, at least, go out doing exactly what he wanted to do, exactly where he wanted to be. He was in his element. And I can't imagine him ever getting old nor slowing down.

---

I didn't have much to remember him by, and I still don't, at least in a physical sense. I had pictures, taken with a succession of wind-up plastic disposable cameras, all whisked off to somewhere by my mother. Those were her memories now, not mine, to be scrutinized and locked away; at the time they were her way of keeping tabs on me even when I was elsewhere. After all, I was told, she paid to have them developed. I didn't deserve to keep them -- I wouldn't be "responsible" enough anyway. I didn't "understand." Instead she used them to criticize, as usual. I didn't get my brother's face in focus in this one. In that one, I wasn't wearing my coat. I wasted two pictures on that same mountain when I should have only taken one. What was I thinking?

I don't need pictures to remember anyway. I have real memories, and they're better.

The only actual things I had left were this box and the knife.

The box originally held watercolor pencils. These were another extravagance my brother let me keep, and something I didn't get to reacquire at home after I'd used up the originals until much later. When he gave it to me it was plain, just a drop-fit lid and nothing else. The bird printing on it is original. I sealed the wood and added the hinges, the latch, and the corners later, when I was older and after it was clear this was now a memento.

And his knife.

My knife.

I have a lot of knives, now. Some have memories attached, most don't. Many of them have seen more use, and a couple of them have seen none. But none of them will ever be equivalent.

All of them are my knives. Some of them are really my knives; the ones I designed.

I have to imagine he would have been interested in that, too. But this little Camco is Genesis and it always will be.

As people, living in civilization as we are, it seems we're hard wired to ascribe significance to objects. People don't last forever but objects can. Maybe this is why we're always so keen on preserving them.

This is probably why museums are full of things, and they aren't just one old guy in a rocking chair who was actually there, recounting his story in person to anyone who'll listen. Instead we see these old things, often personal effects -- someone's powder horn, someone's pen, someone's pair of spectacles, a monographed snuff tin, whatever it is -- and we think that's what history is because we know they belonged to somebody.

Maybe it's true.

Everyone has a story. Maybe a banal one, not an important one as far as capital-H History is concerned. But everybody still does nonetheless. You never can tell what significance things have to someone, or how they remember the people, the places, the events that are important to them. Why do any of us do what we do? We all have our reasons.

Think about that before the next time you're about to call something stupid. Before you say it's "just" a knife and what's the big deal? Or maybe it's not a knife and it's a baseball card, or an old hoodie, a stuffed tiger, or a page torn out of a book.

I have hundreds of knives by now. Several of them are "worth" tens, even hundreds of what this one is just in base dollars and cents. But not a single one of those is locked in my safe.

This one is.

It is said that people are never truly dead until what they leave behind is gone, and the last mark they've made on the world is forgotten. My brother certainly left his mark on the world, in all sorts of places. And of course he left it on me as well. We can all still live by his words of wisdom: When you venture out into the rocks and pines, keep your canteen full. Know where you're going and know where you've been. Watch out for snakes. Always have your knife.

---

My brother died getting on for 30 years ago, now. I'm slowly turning into an old man, much older now than he was when he died. He'll never grow old, but I'm working on it whether I like it or not. That's how it goes.

Part of what he taught me is what he taught me by his absence. It's the knowledge that you should plan for the future, sure, but always live in the moment a little bit.

Some day we will all do something for the last time. One trip will be your last camping trip. One ride will be your last ride. One knife will be the last knife you buy.

One time you see your brother will be the last time. And you won't know that's what it is.

Well, kids, it finally happened. Old Uncle Knifey ordered some shit from China and got taken for a ride.

I know, right? Say it ain't so.

This, insofar as anyone can identify or describe the thing, is a "Paodin 'Resurgent' 6061 T6 Aluminum Alloy Handle D2 Blade Bushing System Pocket EDC Tool." I bought it off AliExpress from the just fantabulously named "Paodin KnifeSplendy Store."

Paodin is an online clone knife seller, or possibly maker, or both, of at least some repute. This apparently notwithstanding that all of their listings mysteriously disappeared from the internet shortly after I bought this, and then just as inexplicably resurfaced again a while later. And I still have absolutely no idea what the hell "Splendy" is supposed to be.

Anyway, this whole odyssey requires short look at the Alibaba balisong knife buying experience. You see, it's really weird.

I am assuming due to either some asinine contortion of Chinese law and/or Alibaba's policies, it's not that you can't technically sell balisong knives on the platform, it's simply that you just can't depict anything as being a balisong knife. Distributing is okay. Just don't admit it. See? It totally makes sense.

So what you get to work with are hastily edited product pictures that just not-so-artfully have the blades excised from them. By all appearances you're just buying a pair of handles, but the sellers take pains to insinuate, but perhaps not outright state, that their products are in fact "complete." Nod's as good as a wink, say no more. (All of these sellers further also plead that you don't post pictures with your reviews so they don't get busted. Eagle eyed readers will also notice that one of the handles in the picture above is wrong, and has the texture flipped around. Who knows how much of it is actually real...)

Combine this with the usual sterling product descriptions consisting of terse Engrish and containing largely only irrelevant details and it makes it a trifle difficult to ascertain just what, exactly, it is you're buying. And that's before you even get into the ever lurking potential hilarity inherent in direct ordering Chinese junk from fly by night sellers, vis-a-vis the possibility of thing showing up the size of a toothpick. Or the size of a boogie board. Or you might just wind up with a picture of whatever it was supposed to be on a 5x6 postcard.

Sure, these guys all claim that if you email them they'll send you more complete product photos. And sometimes they do. But usually you may as well just stand out at the edge of the sand and shout into the ocean for all the good it'll do you. You'd better like playing the surprise game.

So this thing. I specifically ordered the "black live blade" option. Note that "live" means a sharp blade. You know, like, a knife.

Well, what I got instead was this.

I think it's some kind of Dwemer artifact.

This would be just right at home gently spinning on a loading screen, wouldn't it? I know you can just picture it.

I don't exactly know how to classify the "Resurgent." It's a balisong knife, obviously, but only for suitably small values of "knife." That's because it has no edge on it whatsoever. The listing claims it's made of D2, which it may or may not be, and a fat lot of good it'd do anybody even if it was. It's no sharper than a butter knife with deliberately rounded over edges, and that normally ought to mean that it's a trainer: An unsharpened practice stand-in designed for Gud, the Gitting thereof. Or for showing off balisong tricks you might be too chicken to pull of with a sharpened blade.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure unsharpened was the one thing I was not supposed to get. But AliExpress provide only two options to rectify situations like this, which are to wit: Pay to ship the thing back to China and try again, or go fuck yourself.

Well, for 20 bucks I'm positive I can't be bothered. And what I wound up with is damn interesting all the same, so here we are.

I wasn't planning on getting a trainer knife just now, or at least not this one. But on the topic of that, I don't think there are too many trainer knives out there that can do this.

The Resurgent doesn't have an edge, but it does have a wicked point on it that's every bit as real as, for instance, most of the throwing knives I've ever owned. So it's useless for any cutting task but quite pointy enough to do yourself a mischief if you toss it into the air and it lands point-first on your palm. If you ran someone through with it they'd be bound to notice, as well.

So it's sharp, without being sharp. A trainer blade, except not. Monkey in the middle, just what are you?

This is also one of those things that you'd think is guaranteed to be a clone of something else. But if it is, I'm drawing a blank. I racked my brain for any past or present brand name balisong or trainer this may have knocked off, and pawed through pages upon pages of Google image results trying to find a match with no success. Maybe somebody knows; I sure as hell don't.

You won't get any help from the packaging, since it showed up in a completely unmarked plain white box. This contained no documentation, no leaflet, no packing materials other than the baggie the knife was in (with the latch components rolling around loose inside), and certainly no branding. This knife didn't even come with the obligatory and by now familiar useless Torx screwdriver made of cheese nor customary pair of spare pivot screws.

The Resurgent's party trick is obviously this.

The highly detailed blade is heavily machined with various pockets and sweeps, but it's hard to miss the centerpiece which is the array of quite fine featherlike grooves that follow the contours of the blade. It's possible, I suppose, that the blade is cast or possibly metal injection molded to get these shapes somehow, but I don't think it is. If it's machined then the work is actually pretty good. Whatever the blade is made out of is some kind of steel, since it's magnetic. Possibly D2 like the description says, or 440, or 3Cr, or something. But definitely not zinc or any other potmetal.

It's a damn shame not only that they didn't go as far as putting an edge on the friggin' thing, of course, but also that since the texture is parallel to where the edge would have been it kind of impedes you from trying to sharpen much of its length even if you wanted to. But still, it's neat.

The handles are indeed aluminum, and fairly competently anodized at that. They're machined with radial grooves with a kind of art deco vibe. And it's real anodizing, not paint. I've proven this by fumbling it onto the floor many times already where it's withstood the abuse handily. There's nary a flake or chip in it, and hardly even a scratch.

In lieu of a crossguard or the traditional nubbins you might find on a balisong, you get this pair of hooks. I'm pretty sure these are shaped with the intent of being used as a bottle opener. I'll bet you it'd work, but I don't have anything to test it on at the moment so you'll have to just use your imagination on that one. You'd only be able to hook a bottle cap with the blade deployed, for whatever it's worth, since the cutouts recess into the handle slightly when you have it in the closed position.

The blade's surface is stonewashed and has a nice gunmetal sort of finish on it. I can't tell you how well it'll hold up long term, but my example shows no visible signs of wear in the near term of the few weeks I've been messing around with it.

What drew me to this in the first place was the presence of a latch. This is going to sound stupid, but it's surprisingly difficult to get your hands on any of these kinds of clone knives that've got a latch. Even the ones that are knockoffs of originals that did have a latch near-pathologically omit it for some reason.

I understand some highly technical show-off operators prefer to have no latch on their knives, but I certainly don't. I generally carry my balisongs to use, so it's kind of an essential feature for me.

Probably in deference to those types, though, another quirk of this thing is that it showed up with the latch, but dismounted and rolling around separately in the box. I had to install it myself.

The latch is unusually also a two piece design, with the head threading into a tubular shank. The head and shank (and their pivot screw) all arrived in this disassembled state. Weird.

Either way, the latch is perfectly effective and positively drops into pockets machined on either side of the safe handle.

It's actually little too effective, but not in the way you'd think. Rather, its edges are geometrically square; the thing's been lathed into an almost scissorlike edge. This means it can catch on the inner lip and dig into the softer aluminum of the opposite handle slightly, which makes the knife hang up in that position.

It's not difficult to avoid but it feels like you've just experienced a glitch in the Matrix every time you encounter it unexpectedly. You can see in the picture above how it's chewed a bit of the anodizing off of the very corners of the handle, which is a trivial thing (especially for a trainer you're bound to drop on the floor nine million, three hundred and fifty eight thousand, four hundred and six times), but it's still kind of annoying.

This could be fixed readily, and I plan to do so, by just taking a file or a grinder or something and zipping a little chamfer into the inside edge of the latch head. The outer edge already has a chamfer on it, so I'm not sure why the inner one doesn't. I'm doing all my photography first, though, so you all can experience in all its accurate glory how things are rather than how they ought to be.

The latch is not spring loaded in any way but falls free of its own accord if you squeeze the handles together hard enough. It has no endstops so it can strike both the opposite handle as well as the blade if you're not careful. Since there's no actual edge to ding, though, this is unlikely to actually do any harm.

Oh, and there's no clip either. I'd doubt anyone cares; You're not going to EDC a blunt knife.

Weights and Measures

I think the best way to describe the Resurgent's size is "intermediate." It's not as long as a traditionally sized balisong or a competition flipper, nor is it as short as a compact EDC balisong. This may be of some interest to anyone with small hands who finds the bigger popular options to be too unwieldy, but who's also already discovered that there's kind of a minimum threshold for handle length required in order to pull off certain types of finger and wrist rolls that all of the EDC sized options typically fail to meet.

When closed the Resurgent is precisely 5-1/4" long. It's 9-1/8" open, with an effective/ineffective blade length of 4-1/8" past the forwardmost tips of the handles. The handles themselves are 0.505" thick, basically exactly half an inch, and nearly square in cross section. They are tapered, though, with the tips being wider (0.522") than at the pivots (0.441").

I understand that tapered handles are possibly out of vogue in the trick-spinning balisong world at the moment, and people are probably gearing up their double pivoted siege engines for the holy war that's about to commence on the topic. But I prefer a tapered pair of handles, and this thing has got 'em, so that's nice.

If it matters one whit, and it probably doesn't, the blade itself is 0.149" thick at its meatiest point which is on the flats up around the pivot area. It weighs precisely 120 grams or 4.24 ounces fully assembled, including the latch.

All of this puts the Resurgent right in between, for sake of argument, the ultra-compact Benchmade Model 32 Mini Morpho, and the hyper-traditional Model 42.

It's quite a bit shorter still than a BRS Replicant or a Squid Krake Raken (yes, I am aware mine is a fake, hush), which are probably among the current trendy benchmarks for this sort of thing.

Screws, and The Undoing Thereof

The Resurgent continues my streak of mild surprises, wherein the last several rando Chinese knives I looked at actually came apart without any drama.

Its construction also reveals yet another lie in its product description. Paodin said this has "bushing system" pivots.

Well, it doesn't.

It actually has ball bearings instead, which is better.

The pivots themselves are machined Chicago screws, with anti-rotation flats in their very tips. These follow the tradition of putting useless Torx heads on the female sides of the screws which actually have negative value, because you can crank on that side until the cows come home and you'll never be able to undo them. The male side screws came out fairly easily although they were lightly threadlockered into place. Maybe be gentle with it until you ascertain which side is which, since the heads are indistinguishable from each other.

The Resurgent has single piece channel milled handles which are made of aluminum through and through. In order to prevent this from being a predictable disaster with the hard steel kicker pins bashing into the soft aluminum all the time, there are steel insert plates on the inner faces of the handles around the pivot area.

These not only comprise the surface for the kicker pins to strike, but one each of them on each handle also has the matching D shaped cutout for the anti-rotation flat on its respective screw. Its opposite is round. Thus the pivot screws can only go in one way, and you can decide which way this is if you feel like it by swapping the plates around. This also handily prevents the steel screws from wallering out their holes in the softer aluminum over time.

Rude Mechanicals

The Resurgent of course has a traditional kicker pin design and doesn't have fancy kickerless Zen pins.

The pins are very nice, though. They're a larger diameter than you normally find on a cheap knockoff knife: 0.157" or, more likely, nearly exactly 4mm. They're pressed through very evenly and dead straight, and their ends have even been machined flat.

Thanks to its ball bearing pivot system the Resurgent is rock solid; far more than you'd ever expect at first glance. It has zero blade tap whatsoever and practically no lash in the pivots at all. Owing to their single piece design with fully machined in backspacers, the handles are also very rigid and don't offer much flex at all up and down. Therefore it scores extremely favorably in the old Wiggle Test, above.

The pivot feel is fantastic and as you would hope, very low friction. There's enough mass in the handles to offset the weight of the blade even with the mismatch in materials. The point of balance is just about 1-1/4" behind the pivots which feels pretty good to me and gives it a pleasingly intuitive feel while you're manipulating it.

The one hangup you'll find is possibly a literal one. The bottle opener hooks take up just a tad too much of the knife's length in my opinion, and they're a just a smidge pokey. You're only faced with the points on them in the specific instance of having the blade closed up against the handle you're manipulating, but if you're doing anything that requires choking up on the handles around the pivot point you might find that they graze the web of your hand and tend to unexpectedly push the knife away from you a tad. It's not common, but you have to be cognizant of it in very specific circumstances. If you're the type of person who notices when some rat bastard slips a pea under your mattress, for instance, you may find this a trifle disconcerting. I had to deliberately look for a problem to notice this, though, so it's probably trivial.

If you removed its latch the Resurgent would probably be dead silent. Its pivots make no noise, and even on rebounds the material and shape of the handles plus their utter lack of holes or cutouts means that they don't resonate at all. It doesn't clang, ring, sing, ding, or anything else ending in -ing. If you have people in your vicinity who are hypersensitive to the dulcet tones of your fidgeting with your knife all the time, switch to this. It'll reduce the risk of strangulation in your environs significantly.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I suspect, but can't prove (not without wasting another $20) that if you try to order one of these for yourself you probably won't get what I did.

Or you might. It's anyone's guess.

That makes the Paodin "Resurgent" tough to recommend. Mechanically, objectively, it's great. Well, not if you plan to use it as a knife, that is, in which case it's beyond useless. But as a trainer balisong its humble origins give it no right to be as good as it is. There's a rough edge -- just one, literally, on the latch head -- but other than that it's tough to beat for the price.

And that's what makes the clone balisong space so damn tricky. There are great values to be had here, if you know not only where but how to look, but also if you manage to get lucky.

And that's stupid.

You shouldn't have to get lucky. It shouldn't need to be a guessing game. There's no repeatability with these things because they don't have model numbers or real names, nor will anybody admit who makes the damn things, and their titles are all interchangeable meaningless SEO hodgepodges that tell you nothing. This knife was supposed to have bushing pivots, but it showed up with bearings. One point. But it was supposed to have an edge, and it doesn't. One demerit.

See what I mean? When it's impossible to know what you're getting when you put your money down it's easy to see why any sane person would just declare the hell with it, and not even try. There are many fine points to the Resurgent but one big unavoidable one, which is 't ain't what I friggin' ordered.

You have to be a special kind of nut to put up with this sort of thing, and to be willing to take the good with the bad. Maybe a special kind of nut with a lot of empty slots in his knife drawer still.

I wonder if that reminds us of anyone we know.

TL;DW: A fairly automatic postprocessing script to convert your print's walls to brick layers to attempt to achieve more tensile strength in the Z axis, i.e. against layer separation. Some brief description of the current patent clusterfuck, and an observation that the new patent in question (which is probably void anyway) has not been filed in Europe...

Link to the author's github for this: https://github.com/TengerTechnologies/Bricklayers

It seems from the github issues report that this is not 100% perfect, but it appears to be at least mostly functional for those of us who would like to mess with this and not have to do it manually.

Note, I am not the author of this.

Warning: The following is not financial advice. But you know how it is.

I have waxed at great length in the past about the Böker G-10 balisong "large" model 06EX228 and also the tactical balisong "small" model 06EX227. The latter of which being, in my not-so-humble opinion, one of the best value (and better built) EDC sized balisongs available, bar none.

Well, previously available. Because back with that post we determined via what BladeHQ told me these were discontinued. And it came to pass, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Well, I just discovered that all four of Böker's spring latch balisongs are currently available and marked down on their web site. Heavily.

06EX229 Tactical "Large" (Ball bearing pivots, spring latch, D2), @ $40: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-tactical-big-d2-06ex229

06EX227 Tactical "Small" (Same as above, but EDC size), @ $36: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-tactical-small-d2-06ex227

06EX228 G-10 "Large" (Regular pivots, spring latch, D2), @ $40: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-g10-large-d2-06ex228

06EX226 G-10 "Small" (same as above but EDC size), @ $36: https://www.bokerusa.com/balisong-g10-small-d2-06ex226

As usual (and despite my best efforts) I have no affiliation with Böker whatsoever so I don't gain anything if you buy one of these or if you don't. But if you're into this sort of thing I would consider giving any of the above a serious look. Get them while they exist... I am positive these are still in the midst of phase-out.

The "Tactical" models in particular (the 06EX229 and 227) are an appealing alternative to anyone who's been wishing they could get their hands on a Benchmade model 32 or 51, especially given that they are similar sizes and made of the same steel, have the same kind of spring latch, and have ball bearing pivots.