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 out 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.)

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 the thing could show 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 customary 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.

Сколько лет, сколько зим, Comrades. I am back once more.

Here is an NKVD NKD, with a special credit going to user @[email protected] for bringing this particular knife to my attention.

It may surprise you to learn that I don't reflexively buy an example of every knife that crosses my desk these days. But I did with this one, because it has something that is, if you squint at it in the right light, a pocket hook opening mechanism like the Wave opener on my beloved Kershaw CQC-6K. I am, naturally, all about those. So I got out my $60, and down into the rabbit hole I descended, feet first.

This is the HOKC, or NOCKS or even KNOX as they are sometimes rendered, Finka-C. This is a knife designed by one Alexander Biryukov, who is certainly an individual I wouldn't know from a hole in the ground. HOKC or however they're Romanizing their name at the moment is a Russian knife company who outsources much of their production to China. I understand this sort of thing is out of vogue these days, perhaps doubly so, but nevertheless I found this knife pretty interesting.

Since these knives are made in the PRC, it is a given that they have been ripped off and cloned in great quantity by the Chinese. That was apparently the fate that befell our friend Squiddick, and while I can't prove my knife is the genuine article it sure as shit showed up with a lot of Russian on the box and you can view our subject on the manufacturer's web site here, verbatim, which leads me to believe that mine is probably real.

This is broadly a reimagining of the Soviet NR-40 combat knife used throughout World War II, only with a modern twist and converted to a folder. These were colloquially known as the "scout's knife," or "finka," so no points for guessing where this knife got its name.

This is turning into a big wall of text, so here -- I'll break it up with another photo. Damned if this knife doesn't look cool. It's available in a few finishes but I absolutely had to get the most ostentatious one available. HOKC describe this as "brown" but the highlights on its G-10 scales are in reality very orange.

HOKC of course make a tantalizing array of knives, most of which I predict will be damn difficult to get your hands on in the West. In addition to several variations on the Finka theme, other points of note are additional hook openers, this groovy tanto arrangement, and a Finka balisong rendition that I think just became my primary mission in life to obtain.

The first thing that will probably leap out at you regarding the Finka-C, other than its sheer size (it's 10-1/4" long when open) is the funky integrated crossguard. This has the one forward, one back style that mimics the original combat knife from which it was derived. They're built into the blade so their positions reverse when you open it. The lowermost one becomes an effective finger guard, and the one on the spine of the blade serves as a hook opener so you can, with a bit of practice, snap this off of your pocket hem and have it automatically open when you draw.

This does in fact work, I am pleased to report, which is a damn sight farther than most other presumptive non-Emerson/Kershaw pocket hook openers manage to get. This is because HOKC have basically completely ripped off Emerson's design, with the cheerful knowledge that where they're located there probably isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it.

It's not as nice to draw as an Emerson/Kershaw knife, though, and that's because of this:

The Finka-C positions itself as some kind of fighting knife and therefore has very deep machined channels cut into its scales, presumably for grip while Spetsnaz operators or whoever the hell are using the thing while wearing gloves. But that makes the scales snag on your pocket just a little too much, when the only thing that should be snagging is the hook. The clip is also not nearly as nice as the one on any of the CQC Kershaws, is a trifle too small, the recurve in it is too narrow, and it's too tight. I ameliorated matters somewhat by grabbing the clip and giving it a hearty bend away from the handle, loosening its preload. But really it could stand to maybe have a spacer added beneath where it mounts. Or in the extreme, maybe it just needs the one ridge directly beneath the clip's contact area to be ground off. Kershaw, Emerson, and Zero Tolerance solve this by eschewing the scale altogether on the clip side and just presenting a smooth flat surface. This... doesn't.

It's likely to work better on heavier, stiffer fabrics. But I only wear lightweight hiking pants these days so it's kind of a raw deal for me. The clip is not reversible either, by the way. It's set up suitable for right handed users and that's all you get.

The Finka-C's other trick is having a hold-open for the lock. That's the little switch thingy just forward of the pivot here, with the grip knurling in it.

This is a deeply stupid feature.

The Finka is a regular liner locker at its core, just like the Kershaw and Emerson CQC's. So once again, nobody's managed to pair a novel locking mechanism with a pocket hook opener. But its lock is quite positive, a bit stiff, and nearly completely recessed into the handle. Therefore the chances of it "accidentally" becoming unlocked during use are so close to nil they're probably negative.

By the way, this is very much like unto the one on some variants of the the CRKT M16 (a knife which this in some ways superficially resembles), and other LAWKS safety equipped knives, although it's fully manual so is not equivalent to the AutoLAWKS system. I've always felt that the genuine LAWKS was dumb, too, for what it's worth. Nobody's knife needs two locks.

But nevertheless, there it is. Slide the tiny toggle upwards (if you're holding the knife edge down) and a small hook rises into place blocking the liner lock from moving far enough to disengage with the blade. A near microscopic "on" inscription on the blade just forward of the pivot indicates the locked position.

The lock does not detent in either position and is very easy to move with basically no resistance. Fortunately it's tiny, so it's unlikely you'll engage it by accident, and it thankfully also can't be manipulated at all when the knife is closed so at least you can't lock it shut.

It's also trivially easy to defeat if it annoys you, which it probably will. We'll get to that in a bit.

The Finka-C has HOKC's rather distinctive giant slotted screw on its pivot. The inscription in addition to HOKC's logo and "Series 'T'" is the model designation in Russian, and "Design by A. Biryukov."

It is a flipper and/or pocket hook opener. "But wait," you say. "There is a plainly visible thumb stud right there, you nerd."

That's not a thumb stud. This is something else strange about the Finka. The studs (there's one on either side) are way too close to the handles for you to get any purchase or leverage on them. You can thumb open the knife if you prefer, but only using the hook.

The studs are actually the endstops for the pivot, and rest in two opposing semicircular pockets on either side of the handle, one each for the open and closed positions.

This is once again eerily reminiscent of the CRKT M16. It's a clever idea, regardless of whose it is, because it removes the weak point of the traditional end stop pin which in this case is sure to be repeatedly hammered by a longer (and thus heavier) than average blade with the wielder snapping it open of the pocket all the dang old time.

The Numbers

Somehow, we haven't gotten to these.

The Finka-C is huge.

As stated, it is every bit of 10-1/4" long, opened. It has a massive 4-7/8" long blade made of D2 that HOKC describe as a "Bowie" profile, and it very nearly is. The blade is 0.140" thick at the spine, fullered, and be still my heart, it is even flat ground. It's not the absolute beefiest of boys, but it's still definitely above average and the increased thickness is welcome to add durability against the likewise increased length. The blade's spine is square but its corners are chamfered, so while it's a little more comfortable it will alas be useless for striking your ferro rod. There is a choil at the base of the blade, though, the forward half of which may just be sharp enough to do that job. It also means the entire edge is theoretically usable.

The Finka is of course quite large when closed as well. 5-3/8" by my measure, and a hefty -- not to mention possibly auspicious -- 0.666" thick not including the clip. The crossguard arms are of course the widest point, at 1.916". It is needless to say a very meaty lad, a total of 162.4 grams or 5.76 ounces. Believe it or not this is actually helped along by only having one full length steel liner; the majority of the non-locking side of the knife is just comprised of the G-10 scale. I don't know if this is a weight or cost cutting measure, or both.

Largely because of that, though, I would not rate the Finka as suitable for duty as an actual trench knife. This despite the fact that at its length the Finka-C is probably just about at the minimum I would personally consider truly suitable for a pure "combat" type of knife. That's not polite to say in public anymore, of course, so I'll also point out that it'd make a dandy camp knife if you had a particular desire to make such a thing a folder rather than fixed. The crossguards or finger guards or whatever you want to classify them as do introduce the age old problem of precluding you from bringing all of the edge down on a flat surface, but the blade is long enough and has enough of an upsweep that even so the forwardmost third or possibly a little more can be used for cutting board work. That's an overall usable range of just over 2" by my measure, which to be fair is pretty much the entire edge length of a lot of lesser knives to begin with.

For EDC use, it's probably a shade or three too large for most people. But perversity breeds all kinds; don't let me tell you what to do.

In addition to its clip the Finka-C does have a lanyard hole. Given how finicky it is to draw and deploy via its Wave, finding something to fill this with may actually turn out to be advisable. Some fluorescent orange paracord would be favorite in this case.

Here's the return of an old friend we sure haven't seen in a while: My Kershaw CQC-6K, which has no doubt been sorely missed as the obligatory comparison object in many of my recent writeups. In case in particular it seemed especially fitting to welcome it back.

The Finka absolutely towers over it.

Side by side like this, you can see that the pocket hook on the Finka is significantly larger than on the Kershaw CQC. I guess theoretically this might help it work better on thicker fabric, but I don't have a way to scientifically prove that to you. It sounds good on paper, though, so we'll roll with it.

Devils Lurking In The Details

Or rather, are there any?

Given the famously sterling reputation of Russian manufacturing -- boots that dissolve in the rain, stationary tractors, and cars made from old pants -- I don't blame you if you enter into this with, let's just say, some doubts. To be honest, I did too.

And then being made in China for the Russians? There may never be a more textbook example of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Well, here's the thing. The Finka-C is actually perfectly competently built.

I'm just as astounded as you are, really.

The fit and finish on the components is all just peachy. The blade is nicely centered, too. There's no lash, nothing wiggles, nothing scrapes, nothing rattles, and none of the fasteners arrived stripped. The lockup is positive and appears to have been hand tuned. Yes, I realize that getting excited about this is kind of a low bar, but it is cleared nonetheless.

The edge grind is quite serviceable out of the box, and is sharp enough in my opinion to be put into duty right away. Producing julienne shavings off of a post-it is no problem. I don't see any telltale signs that the edge has been burned, but time will tell if it retains its sharpness as D2 should. The entirety of the blade has a pleasing tumbled finish which is consistent and looks quite nice. It's had a nice finishing pass done on it and doesn't show any machine marks on the faces.

The point profile is good, with the grind carried through consistently all the way to the end on both sides without any weirdness.

The edge is of course mildly out of true, with the left side of it (looking down on the edge from above) observably shallower than the right.

This is to be expected given the origin and price, and not at all unusual even for budget models from the brand name makers. It would be a little nicer if it weren't, of course, but the Finka's simple geometry and refreshing lack of anything in the way of your stones (including thumb studs!) ought to make it as easy as it gets to reprofile to your preferred angle when the time comes.

What's Inside

I'm just chuffed to bits to report that my Finka-C came right apart with no fuss. All of the above adds up to my conclusion that I must have received the genuine article. Fakes of this are quite prevalent, which is how this whole odyssey got started in the first place. At present I think the best indicator of a real one of these versus a fake -- other than the price, of course -- is the presence of the clip. HUAAO and some others are hawking knockoffs of this, which is a pretty damn rich sauce given what this is and its origins, but all the fakes I can identify universally lack the pocket clip. So if you spot one without it, run.

All of the fasteners take a T6 Torx bit, except for the pivot screw. You will want a large slotted driver for that. You can just about undo it with a dime, but the slot is straight and not dished, so a proper screwdriver is probably better.

Inside you get brass pivot washers and a generous helping of what appears to be silicone based lubricant all over absolutely everything. The handle halves are separated by a single piece G-10 backspacer, and it's nice to see that while this comprises part of the lanyard hole, it's also reinforced there with one of the steel liners.

Underneath the right hand scale is this surprise, which is what I alluded to earlier. There's a partial length substructure under here housing the pivot, and it's anchored on the other end by engaging with one of the scale screws. But most of the length of that side of the knife consists only of the G-10 scale and the liner does not extend the full length on that side. The other liner is full length, the scales are very thick, and G-10 is actually fairly stiff stuff, so there are no noticeable rigidity issues. However, the jury is still out on whether or not this will be a weak point if you try to inflict some kind of heavy duty use on this knife.

This is how e.g. the Kershaw Skyline successfully does it, and many others besides. But usually knives that try this trick are much smaller EDC jobbies that are not positioning themselves as the spiritual successor to a Soviet fighting knife. If nothing else, their much shorter blades can't apply nearly as much leverage to their pivots even if they're used unwisely.

Here's how the safety lever works. It's a simple single piece, and just rotates around the main pivot screw. It's trivially easy to defeat by simply not reinstalling it; its thickness is not necessary for the proper reassembly of the knife and the head on the pivot screw is more than wide enough to bridge the gap it sits in without it. If you were truly paranoid you could replace it with a plain washer.

The female side of the pivot screw has an anti-rotation flat, and there is indeed a matching flat on the hole it goes through on the liner side of the knife, so for once it's not just purely decorative. I'll bet you a dollar the fakes don't bother broaching the anti-rotation hole in the liner correctly.

Maybe this serves to better illustrate how the Finka's lockup and endstop not-thumb-stud works.

The hardware. There are two screw lengths: The shorter ones go through the scales directly into the steel liners, and the longer ones go into brass inserts in the G-10 backspacer in between the two halves of the handle.

Unboxing

Since this is a new knife, the box is still on my desk. We'll have a look at it while we're at it.

Knife boxes are generally not terribly exciting, my bona fide milk crate full of the damn things notwithstanding. But the Finka-C is the only knife I've ever bought that showed up in a box -- not on a hang card -- in the open position.

I suppose that's not terribly interesting, but the large block of authentic Russian bumf on the back might be:

The long paragraph at the top repeats the marketing blurb which notably name drops not only the Lawks safety but also the Wave opener, verbatim. Somehow, I'd highly doubt that either of the above have been dutifully licensed from their respective owners.

It also lists the Изготовитель, manufacturer, as "Linear Group LTD., Room 1412, Tian Plaza, No. 49 North Yunnan Road, Nanjing, PRC." So that answers that.

The smaller block down in the lower right corner is the typical set of care instructions and admonitions. Do not use for throwing, do not give to children, that sort of thing. But it also goes out of its way to note (on the top line), "This is not a cold weapon and has no restrictions on circulation (distribution) or carrying."

This "cold weapon" thing is a wrinkle of Russian law that I don't pretend to understand, and the internet tells me the definition is rather complex. What an idiom, though.

Still, how nice to know that this doesn't count as a "weapon." One wonders just what the hell does, then. In my US state the Finka is more than large enough that carrying it concealed in public would require the same permit as a firearm. (Maybe the Ruskies are cooler in at least one respect than I thought.)

The front of the box is considerably less amusing, although the logo and web address are printed in shiny silver foil.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I really like the Finka-C.

I like it so much that I wrote this entire column without making one "In Soviet Russia, X Y's you" joke. You probably didn't even notice, did you?

I don't know if the Finka is the absolute superlative largest Wave opening knife you can buy, but it's definitely got to be getting there. If that's what you want and you'd like it without spending an insane amount of money on a Zero Tolerance or an Emerson, maybe give HOKC a shot. It's a shame about the lock, but it's easy enough to discard. A CRKT M16 would be an easy substitute for this if you'd like something from stateside, but none of those have a Wave on 'em.

And there is no denying that the Finka-C both looks and feels bad ass. Well deserving of the space in the middle. That's got to count for something.

I will fully understand if nobody believes me, but I am doing my level best not to turn things into a Weird Pen Wednesday. Really, I am. I already have one of those to maintain and I need to do another like I need a hole in my pocket.

But somehow, I couldn't resist this.

I don't have a name or a model designation for it, but these are relatively easy to find from your favorite distributor of knockoff Chinese white box goods. This one was labeled "Brass Fountain Pen Kawaii Ink Pen EF/F/Bent Nib Excellent Business Office School Supplies Pens."

It's called a lot of other things elsewhere, in the typical word-salad way of this type of nonsense, usually involving terms like "retro," "vintage," and quite frequently, "kawaii." Yes, truly its design is very human.

But regardless of all of this, in my cursory research I couldn't nail down any original manufacturer by name. Or a model number. Or much of anything else, really.

You can pay any amount of money for one of these since they seem to be listed all over hell and creation with no difference between them other than the chutzpah of whoever's selling it. "EYPKPL," for instance, have the audacity to list this for as much as $36 at the time of writing which is quite absurd. Meanwhile "SHIONEOFI" present a more reasonable $12. If you're hipper still you can pay around $6, and be further assured that "This merchant is committed to only offering products that comply with the General Product Safety Regulation."

And if you really want to throw caution to the wind you can score one for as little as $1.78. You may be old and wizened by the time it shows up, though.

I have, as usual, buried the lede a bit.

The "Kawaii," you see, packs up to be very small. By my measure it is 84.3mm when fully stowed, or just a hair under 3-3/8". When deployed it's precisely 150mm long, or at least my example is. I'll bet you there's a little bit of variation from one piece to another, which we'll get to in a bit.

So it's not just another potentially awful anonymous Chinese pen. It's one of those that's really, really small. So that's something.

It is also very, thoroughly, extremely crosshatched on the outside. There is a very pronounced pattern texturing the entirety of the outer barrel completely from stem to stern. Somebody somewhere has a half nut drive on their lathe and they're very proud to show it off.

For grinsies, here is a quick comparison with a variety of shorties of an ostensibly similar vein. From left to right is our subject, then an Ohto Tasche, a much beleaguered Pilot Petit, and the obligatory Fisher Bullet that just appears whenever one of these comparisons comes up whether you wanted it to or not. It is damn strange how that always happens, come to think of it.

The Kawaii Desu Elegant Retro Vintage Stationery Excellent Ink Writing Pen High End Elegant is shorter than all of them.

This isn't a slider mechanism, a clicker, or even a twister. To get it writing ready, you unscrew the front half of the pen which stows inside the other half of the body, flip it around, and screw it back in where it came from a bit like assembling a pool cue. (You could also eschew this entirely if you really wanted to and just write with the stub of the front half, which is naturally fully functional all by itself.)

It's thus got two diameter measurements. The outer body which becomes the tail is 11.02mm not including its protruding buttony thing, again more on which later. The inner body which then becomes the grip section is a pleasingly slim 9.03mm. Altogether it weighs 26.4 grams -- or 0.93 ounces in the old money.

This is because its body is entirely brass. And it genuinely is brass, not "brass" as we've occasionally seen before, where some turkey applied a brassy finish coating over something else and lied about it. I can happily report that a magnet does not stick to it, so it certainly isn't steel. Okay, so it might be zinc or some other potmetal. But it looks like brass, feels like brass, and with some initial trepidation I can tell you it tastes like brass, too. So it probably is.

Oh, yes. And the plug that isn't the writing end also unscrews and looks identical before you remove it. So you'd better remember which end is which. The two ends are totally interchangeable so you can screw either end into the body as you see fit.

There isn't a clip, but in its place is this brass button thing. It is theoretically removable in that you can plainly see it's threaded and screwed into the pen body if you look at it from the inside. But it's threadlockered or glued somehow, and undoing it would surely require grabbing it with pliers which would mar the finish. So I left mine where it was. For now, anyway.

The button does serve to keep the pen from rolling away but it doesn't do anything else. You can't press it and it doesn't move in any way, so it's no good as a fiddle aid. There is a gap between it and the pen body but the disk that comprises it really isn't enough to allow it to serve as an effective clip. I think it would have been better if it were a clip, honestly, and as it stands now there's really no elegant way to carry this thing. It's just begging to have its endcap drilled out and a keyring or similar installed in it. Or something -- anything. But be careful with that, because the point does rest inside the tailcap some ways when the pen is in its stowed configuration, and the cap is hollow.

Maybe someone suitably motivated could muscle the button out to determine what thread it has (surely it's a standard M3 or M4 pitch given that the factory must have been too cheap to develop anything bespoke) and replace it with something else.

Oh well, I guess for two bucks you could afford to experiment. I'm going to get all my photography done before I go around breaking mine, though.

Bits and Pieces

The grip section of the pen further unscrews roughly in the middle of itself, and that's where the cartridge gets installed.

Actually, let's talk about the cartridge because there's more weirdness afoot, here. And while we're at it we'll sidetrack ourselves into a lot of other things, too, because that's how we roll.

My Kawaii Desu didn't come in any kind of packaging at all, really. Just a clear plastic baggie; no box, no card. That means it also came with no documentation. Not even a cursory "QC Pass" sticker. Luckily it did come with a cartridge, because otherwise it has nothing whatsoever to describe what kind of cartridge it takes.

The majority of nameless Chinese pens these days all take similar cartridges to each other, which have a 3.4mm inner neck diameter and are about 50mm long. I can't find any official name for these things but they're the closest you can get a Chinese standard if you can consider such a thing without bursting out laughing.

Well, this pen doesn't take those. Its cartridge is on the far left, above. There's a Chinese Standard (snerk) right next to it, in this case one of the ones that came with my Oaso. It's most similar to the standard international short cartridge, which is the next one in line. And it certainly isn't whatever tomfoolery came with my Writech. We have another mystery on our hands.

I measured the inner neck diameter at 2.6mm, and the cartridge is 39.15mm in overall length. We'll call it 39. So that's very close to the international short, but not quite.

This is apparently a size that exists, though, but I've never handled one in detail before so I don't know what it's called, either. If it's even called anything. You can buy spares e.g. here, so this appears to be perhaps yet another chimera dreamed up by the Chinese.

I tried and you can indeed wrestle an international short onto this and it works, despite the neck of the international cartridge being 0.2mm smaller.

Anyway.

I noticed the nib on mine was sitting on the feed crooked. It didn't take much doing to figure out that the nib, feed, and section on these are very easily to separate. It's not unusual to be able to dismantle a pen like this given that many of them appear to be made out of commodity parts, but usually it requires at least some manner of tools or maybe the application of a little heat to break any glue that might be in there.

Not with this. You can just slip the nib out with your fingers. It goes back in just as easily, too, and the problem with mine was it wasn't pushed in straight when I got it. The further it's pulled out the more wiggle is possible in it, but you can have the nib pulled out about an extra 2-3mm before it knocks into the endplug when you put the pen together, and even in that state it'll still write. Hence my asterisk about the overall length of the pen back at the beginning of this.

The feed indexes in via a slot on it that engages with a little fin on the section. It's thus impossible to get wrong; you can only insert it one way.

The nib is really nothing special. It's steel, 0.40mm thick, and quite inflexible. It's plated with something gold... colored, and has some scrollwork embellishments on it that do nothing.

Given its dimensions I strongly suspect this is interchangeable with the garden variety #5 (i.e. 5mm) nibs which are only slightly less ubiquitous as their #6 counterparts. This raises the possibility that a suitably enthusiastic ~~nut~~ owner could swap it out with something a little more refined. A quality nib will probably run somewhere between 5 and 10 times the worth of this entire pen, so the financial wisdom of this endeavor is left as an exercise for the reader.

It says "iridium point" on it which is almost certainly a lie, and also "Germany" which definitely is.

Flipping it over reveals that the markings are stamped into it and not engraved, which is not surprising given its cheapness but may just at the outside impact its performance, since the stampings carry clear through to the underside and will serve to separate it from the feed minutely.

The body is a straight through tube with the same thread profile machined into both ends. You could thus assemble the pen backwards if you really wanted to. This also raises the possibility of spending $4 to get two of these, and you could assemble yourself a double header. Or install two tailcaps, an activity which would truly be -- ah ha ha -- pointless.

Writing With It

The Kawaii Desu writes like myriad other hyper budget Chinese pens. It's not bad. It's not special.

Of course, it will feel special -- or at the very least quite different -- to anyone who's never handled a fountain pen before. Which these days is a surprising number of people. It seems in modern times the unordained automatically consider any fountain pen to be "fancy," even when it decidedly isn't.

Mine had a minor hard starting problem until I got the nib situated correctly on the feed. Now it works just fine. The seal of its end plug is only really okay, though. Mine will dry out noticeably if left unused for more than about three days, and thus far restarting it hasn't been too hard but that might get annoying for someone who will use it only very occasionally. There's nowhere to fit an O-ring or gasket in there, though, and all the contact surfaces are metal-on-metal. So maybe that's to be expected.

Available nib options are fine, extra fine, and a "bent" (fude) option is also available. Super fine nibs kind of annoy me so I ordered the regular fine, though I suspect I was sent an extra fine anyway. That's because the EF is rated at 0.38mm which is exactly the line with mine puts down, and the F is supposed to be 0.5. So I guess I got slightly ripped off. Oh well.

And the nib width is not marked anywhere on the thing, of course.

The extra fine nib is not as scratchy as you would expect and I actually rank it above such hyperbudget offerings as the Oaso K016. Not much line width variation is possible since the nib is stiff as a board, but with significant pressure you can achieve as much a 0.42mm. A whopping 10% difference! No one but the most maniacal of pen nerds would even notice.

I will use the customary writing example to illustrate the one big point about this that hasn't been addressed:

The Inevitable Conclusion

I have no damn idea why this pen is so frequently marketed as "kawaii."

Because it isn't.

Yes, it's very small. But I would have been quicker to label it steampunk instead. (Which, yes, is about 80% of why I bought it. How did you know?)

Anyway, it's amazing just how much pen you can get these days for less than what it would cost you to buy a 20 ounce soda at 7-11. This is a perfectly functional and reasonably well built fountain pen with quirky looks and a neat little form factor that's so cheap you could truly treat it as disposable. And it's not even made out of crappy plastic. That's remarkable, right there.

It would be a bit better if getting it out weren't such a faff. Unscrewing and re-screwing the halves together is probably fine if you're going to be holding it for an extended period, but for duty as, say, a quick jotting short note taker I predict that's going to wear out its welcome in a hurry.

The only other issue is that as ever there is no such thing as repeatability with these brandless products. It'd be one thing altogether if it had a model number, even a completely unmemorable and obtuse one. Even Jinhao pens have model numbers, but this doesn't even manage that. I can't in good conscience really recommend anywhere for you to get one nor what to ask for. You'll just have to roll the dice and see what comes up.

I've been at it again.

I've been using the hell out of these drawer thingies, what with you fill with Gridfinity bins and store ~~pocketknives~~ various things in.

Well, I screwed myself over and it turns out I need a stack of drawers one cell narrower than stock. The original author posted sources in Onshape but I will be buggered if I'm signing up for Yet Another Account just for that.

So I reconstructed the entire thing -- my way -- in FreeCAD. Because obviously that's the less insane option. (I guess this also allowed me to excise the magnet ears from the drawers, which is a worthless increase in print time and small waste of material for me since I don't use magnets with my Gridfinity bins)

Anyway, here it is.

This is my dinky 2x2 test print. Which is very nearly but not quite completely useless. (For instance, it fits Nite-Ize cable ties very well, as you can see.) If it makes you feel any better, the generator absolutely will make you a 1x1, 1u tall drawer assembly if you ask it to which truly will be fully useless...

I Ate'nt Dead.

Here's the UPKnife UPD-D4, the "Eclipse Ring2," which is a entry in their lengthy and baffling spread of near identical almost-knives from their (D)efense series. It is, verily, weird.

This D4 variant is the most knifelike thing in their lineup, so that's what I got. This version is steel through-and-through, 440A on the blade and an unknown alloy for the handle. Every other part is steel of some description, too, by way of a magnet readily sticking to all of them.

Made of steel? That sounds like a stupid thing to say about a knife, doesn't it?

Well, that's because all those extra words and letters on the model name designate what this is and what it's made out of. You can get these in a dizzying array of materials, shapes, and construction types depending on what you plan to do with it and how much you want to spend.

Half of UPKnife's D-Series is their "Pocket Sai," which is exactly what it sounds like. You can get this and indeed those in polymer, titanium, aluminum, steel, and various combinations thereof. Most of them are unsharpened, save for the steel versions where you're offered the choice, but you can also get them with carbide steel cutting tips just at the point. UPKnife obviously expect most of these to be real-deal self defense martial arts weapony things, which I suppose is interesting, but I have to say I haven't found myself beset by rogue samurai, cutlass wielding pirates, or any other swordsmen in years, personally, so stuff like that is probably of limited utility for me.

So I got this one, which encompasses: A ring on the end, full length, made entirely of steel, a perfunctory crossguard rather than sai prongs, and fully edged. In the sliver finish, not black. 'Cuz it's shiny, duh.

Actually, more on the "fully edged" in a moment.

The UPK-D4 is a slider opener, if you hadn't figured that out based on the picture of it partially deployed above. UPKnife call it "self sheathing," and when it's at rest the blade sits flat against the handle with a generous 3/16" or so all the way around the perimeter to keep it from acting like a parmesan cheese shaver against your fingers. To deploy it, you press the wide oval shaped button on it to unlock it, and...

...It extends with a snap of the wrist into this 12-3/8" long dagger with a snick that would even make James Howlett flinch. The blade is every bit of 0.185" thick at the root, double edged, and every little thing about the UPK-D4 broadcasts to the world that it is absolutely not fucking around. The whole thing not including the clip is 0.425" thick.

There are a few shorter compact versions of these, but this isn't one of them. I went with the whole enchilada, because why the fuck not? Even when closed it's a full 8" long. It's 183.5 grams or 6.48 ounces, and I would not be surprised if anyone told me my steel version is the heaviest of the bunch. All those polymer and titanium and whatever-else jobbies have got to be lighter than this.

There is a clip on the back side and be still my heart, but it's even a deep carry one. Even so the ring sticks up above the hem of your pocket, I suppose providing an easy draw while it's at it. And you need very deep pockets to trouser this.

It is still, however, possible. All of the edges on it except for the one on the blade are it are chamfered and rounded over, so it is snag free and actually draws quite cleanly and easily. There are some gripping greebles on the handle and it's got a nice bead blasted satin finish all over.

The ring on the back is very generously sized and anyone should be able to fit a thumb through it. Its presence and proportions ought to bring a smile to the face of any ninja anywhere. There's a little glass breaker point on the very tail end of it which is probably superfluous; I'll bet if you whacked a piece of glass with just about any part of this knife you'd break it easily. The glass, that is. Not the knife.

The UPD-D4's mechanism, and indeed everything else in its series, consists of this sliding track arrangement. When you press the button it pushes the head of this locking lug up and out of the pockets on either end of the track, allowing the blade to slide freely until it hits the other end.

From here the blade goes snicker-snack into your choice of overhand...

...Or underhand grip positions.

The blade's kept straight at all times by not only the locking lug, but also these two beefy screws that act as guide pins. Overtravel is prevented by both the lug and the guide pins, and the blade hits home on both of these simultaneously at both ends of its travel.

You might think at first blush this setup is both suspect and a little flimsy. Everyone else probably thinks you will, too, because the internet is just rife with videos of people bashing, prying, twisting, and jumping on these to try to get the mechanism to break. Especially with this all steel version, suffice it to say that this seems extremely unlikely. The bolts are all seriously skookum for what you'd normally find on a knife. The heads on them are no mere T6, T8, or even T15. They're T20, all of them, and the shanks on them terminate in an M4 thread. Even a dinky class 4.8 M4 bolt has a minimum tensile strength rating of something like 840 pounds-force, and you'd probably bend the blade before you got to that point.

And UPKnife have this to say about the alloy:

Optimized for throwing and melee impact, made in 440A high carbon martensitic stainless steel with a hardness of HRC: 45 makes a tough resilient stainless. It can take extreme abuse and offer a point of bending where harder alloys will break, making this ideal for throwing when the worst abuse takes place.

Optimized for throwing, huh? Well, don't mind if I do.

The point of balance is somehow precisely in the middle of this, too, aligned right where the button is.

And yes, 45 HRC is ridiculously soft for blade steel, even for 440A. For optimum edge retention you'd expect it to be at 55 or so. The UPK-D4 is more like a leaf spring than a knife in that regard, and in light of that you'd expect its edge retention to be pretty poor.

And it probably is. And that's probably why its edge angle is what it is, too.

The UPK-D4's blade is chisel ground which in this case I think is excusable since it needs to sit against its handle when retracted. The back of it is dead flat.

Its taper is about 45 degrees, which is ridiculously steep. It follows that its actual edge angle must be steeper still, and it sure is.

We like superlatives around here: Whatever's the biggest, the thickest, the lightest, the heaviest, the sharpest. Well, the UPK-D4's sure got one -- I don't know if it has the most obtuse edge angle of any knife in history ever, but it's certainly the steepest out of anything I own. 60 full and glorious degrees, by my reckoning. I think that means it just barely even qualifies as a knife.

Make no mistake that you can cut things with this, but in some cases it's really a matter of interpretation. It makes a dandy letter opener, for sure, but to successfully slice most other things you have to come at it with the blade tilted at kind of a reverse angle.

This is not a knife made for shaving, whittling, carving, or slicing tomatoes wafer thin. It is a designed for blocking strikes and stabbing fools. And while there are very few knives on the market where it's truly wise to use them as a prybar, this is probably also one of them.

The Obligatory Disassembly

The UPK-D4 is refreshingly easy to take apart. Just three screws, or five if you include the ones for the clip.

Mind you, all three of the big ones are threadlockered and I found they were also quite thoroughly torqued. The dinky driver handle in your precision bit kit probably won't do it -- you'll want something with a right angle on it, like a Torx socket on a ratchet handle.

The hardware. The mechanism is quite simple, too, with the lock button supported by these two springs and simply raising and lowering in its hole. The locking surface itself is the interface between the head of the locking lug (which is also a screw) and the two pockets it falls into on either end of the track. That's all there is to it.

Here's the lock button's pocket, with its two little locator nubs for the springs.

The Inevitable Conclusion

A lot of pocket knives from the various big name manufacturers, especially those marketed towards the police-fire-rescue types, bill themselves as Specialty Purpose Combat Tools.

Well, they're not. This is.

The UPK-D4 is probably also along the lines of the many folding knives that try to masquerade as fixed blades, a task at which typically fail. And again, this doesn't.

It's precisely what it sets out to be: A dagger that needs no sheath, a fighting tool that actually can cash the checks its looks -- not to mention its product blurb -- try to write. And when we say "dagger" we don't mean "dinky knife that's got double edges so now it's illegal in California." No, we mean it's genuinely suitable for holding in your off hand alongside your rapier if you wanted to.

The only question is, as ever, why? Certainly most people don't actually have a real use for such a thing. But that's never the point.

It is humongous, ostentatious, and unapologetically disregards any notion of practicality or general purpose utility.

That's bold. So for that, I love it.

VSO.

So we got one of these rather silly sponge holder ducks.

The only problem is that Mr. Quacks here doesn't quite weigh enough. With a sponge his beak -- especially one that's laden with water -- he's prone to falling over into the sink. The sponge is held quite a ways outboard, and altogether the entire duck only weighs 65.4 grams.

I tried one other gimcrack solution before this, which was to glue a suction cup to his butt. That didn't work very well.

Instead, I opted to fill him up with some ballast. These will do nicely.

Yes, all of these pictures were just taken on my grubby stovetop. No, I am not going to pull out all the stops to perform my usual level of photography on, let's not put too fine a point on it, a butt plug for a rubber duck. I used a very short (less than a meter) scrap of left over TPU I had lying around to make a... cork... so I could fill the duck with ballast and then keep it all inside.

I am also given to understand that I should have perhaps made such at thing corkscrew shaped, but I am very sorry to inform you that I didn't do this, either.

I didn't count how many BB's I used. Two fillings of that speed loader that came with my Crosman M4, is what it was. I'll let you do the math: Now he weighs a much more suitable 265.7 grams, a little over four times the original weight, and acts rather like a weeble-wobble. With this you can tip him over so far the sponge falls out before he topples over himself. And can also shake him like a maraca, if you're really bored.

That's right, I'm back on my bullshit. Now with this:

In my apparently evergreen quest to own every single production retractable fountain pen in the world, here is the "Writech" W-784. In keeping with tradition for this sort of thing, I have no idea if Writech is the actual manufacturer of this, or if it's a yum-cha OEM product that is likely to appear under a variety of baffling and inscrutable nonbrands depending on where you buy it.

But never mind all that, and check out this cool plastic capsule case thing it comes in.

The lid on the capsule is a clutch fit and is not hinged, but the little pedestal mounts that hold the pen for retail display are clearly designed to be removable and the lid does stay on securely enough that you could, if you really wanted to, use the capsule as a general purpose pen-and-pencil case.

But the packaging is not even the weirdest part about this pen.

This is, of course, yet another retractable fountain pen. It is capless, and operates via a clicky plunger on the end that is familiar to anyone who has handled a retractable ballpoint pen. So, everyone. Since I have enough black and silver pens, and I learned my lesson after our last little... incident... I got this variant in a rather pleasing sky blue color.

Herewith it bears the warning sticker that I peeled off immediately after taking this photo, never for it to be seen again and instantly ruining my collector's value. Yeah, I cut all the tags off of my Beanie Babies back in the day, too. Sue me. (Actually, I stuck it to the inside of the capsule.)

Obviously as a real live fountain pen this needs some kind of sealing mechanism to keep the ink from drying out when it's not in use. The various retractables on the market therefore employ a variety of tricks with trap doors and little ball valves with varying degrees of elegance.

This... Not so much. The diagram on the sticker kind of gives away the punchline.

In again, out again, Finnegan.

The Writech employs this gimcrack setup, which I can only describe as a submarine hatch trap door. It pushes out a short distance and then swings away to the right side. It is exceedingly bonkers.

The Writech is entirely made out of plastic, and when they made that decision they really meant it. Even all the flexible and what should at least be superficially spring loaded parts in the trap door are also made out of plastic. The only metal parts in it near as I can figure are the nib itself, the clip, and the spring that drives the plunger. Since I've only owned this for about a week, the wisdom of this methodology is something I really can't comment on.

At first blush there's no visible gasket, either, but closer inspection reveals that the ring the trap door's inner face seats into is made out of some kind of squishy silicone-like material. That probably goes some way towards keeping the interior sealed when the point is retracted. I've had mine inked up since the moment I got it and it still hasn't dried out, so it must work.

The Writech is nearly completely cylindrical in cross section, 12mm in diameter. There are two shallow scallops in the grip end which serve to indicate which side is up, and provide a little more secure grip. It's really not much, but it's something.

Even so, it feels decidedly strange to use because you are always cognizant of the trap door which is just there the entire time you're writing with it. It really feels as if it ought to knock against the paper all the time when you're writing, but somehow it doesn't. But it's still likely to fill you with trepidation all the same. With any luck that'll go away eventually. Maybe not.

In the capsule you also get a little cardboard box containing five of what are as far as I can tell completely proprietary ink cartridges.

The pen unscrews in a normal fashion and there's an empty cartridge inside it, I suppose perfect if you prefer to fill it with your own ink via syringe. There is no inkwell converter, nor is one available that I can find. Just as well, probably, since the nib lacks the traditional inlet hole at the top of the split. So it'd probably be a bugger to vacuum any ink up into it even if you had a way to try.

Even the cartridges are weird. They're very short and fat, very flasklike. That's the Writech one on the right there, and I'm pretty surprised this thing doesn't take regular old international shorts (left), nor even the old China Knockoff Standard cartridge (3rd from the left) or any of their near-twins like the Zebra V-301's. Any of the above would certainly have been an easier -- not to mention cheaper -- way to do it. Maybe there are other brands of pen that take these but I've never seen one in my life. I find it hard to believe that anybody bothered to make a bespoke cartridge for this, but maybe they did.

The nib is all steel and very plain Jane. The split between the tines is seriously tiny, nearly invisible to the naked eye. That doesn't seem to affect its performance any, though, and this "fine nib" per the manufacturer lays down a line width of about 0.43mm with not a lot of variation (measured via my highly scientific method of randomly scribbling on a Post-It and peering through a loupe at my calipers on it, and averaging the results). Unusually for a fine nibbed cheapola Chinese pen, the Writech is actually a pretty wet writer and puts down a lot of ink.

The nib is folded over the feed, with what would have been its wings rolled over so far that it's nearly cylindrical. That probably explains a large part of its stiffness, plus as usual most of its length is supported by the feed as well.

This is one of those jobbies you could probably reliably use on multipart write-through forms if you had to.

The nib is quite sharp and rather scratchy. If we're feeling charitable we'd call it "controllable." It puts me a lot in mind of the nib on the Oaso K016, although it's much wetter, bolder, less sensitive to position, and quite a bit less awful.

It's actually pretty okay if you don't mind the scratchiness. But it is neither elegant, nor refined, nor expressive. If you're one of the types who likes to have an inch long 14k gold tuning fork on the end of your pen, it will surely annoy you mightily.

The action certainly isn't very refined, either. The click is not very clicky, and is in fact rather vague and mushy. This is made up for somewhat by the fact that every deployment should probably be accompanied by, rather than a click, blaring klaxons appropriate for preceding the firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Awooga! Awooga! Open the hatch and prepare for launch!

The clip is okayish. It's aluminum and has a nice bead blasted finish with a Euro chic vibe going on. It holds well and releases easily, but the end of it isn't chamfered or sloped much so you have to employ some fingernail to spread it away from the pen body enough to get it onto your shirt. It'll do.

It hasn't got anything sticking out in the way of itself, and there's a pretty sizable gap left between the clip and the body of the pen so thick fabrics should be no issue.

The only other note I've got about it is that the clip is on the plunger end of the pen rather than the end with the point, which is the reverse of most of the premium retractables. This has the side effect of leaving all of the rather long plunger sticking up past the clip, which isn't a dealbreaker but is mildly annoying if you clip your pen to a t-shirt collar rather than a breast pocket since it'll be prone to poking you in the neck.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you can get over the inherent wartiness of the trap door design, I think the Writech is the least expensive retractable fountain pen you can get that's not objectively awful. Yes, the K016 is cheaper, but it's also a lot worse.

The Writech costs about $27 in the US and comes in a couple of pastelly colors if that's your jam. It frequently goes on sale whereupon you can get it for even less. And it comes with a "free" pencil case, I guess.

The only problem with all this is that it's really not far off from the cost of a Majohn A2 Press which is even better, not to mention quite a bit less doofy. So as usual, my recommendation is still that the Majohn A2 (or the A1, but definitely not the A3) is still the best value for a retractable these days.

Unless you absolutely must be a hipster or otherwise generally contrarian. Because the Writech sure is damn weird.

This might be a strange one.

I build a new PC. Yea and verily, it is like unto a tiny god. Especially compared to my old PC, which as I have opined around here before I built in 2012 (!) and was still sporting a Sandy Bridge i7 2600K.

Is. Is sporting. It still works. I will undoubtedly replace my living room media center machine with it.

My new machine is very fast and very swanky, and through my component selection I also inadvertently wound up making it very quiet, as well, which it turns out I kind of like. Part of this is no doubt contributed to by the fact that it hasn't got any hard drives in it -- just two SSD's. Currently its four SATA sockets sit forlorn and empty.

Part of my old machine's raison d'être was that it had a big old RAID array in it. Four whole terabytes across a RAID 5 array consisting of 4 disks. Hey, cut me a break. That was a lot of ones and zeroes, over a decade ago. Of course, the contents of that entire RAID can fit snugly (very snugly...) on my 4TB boot drive now. But I kind of want some additional bulk storage. I have work to do; All that media out there ain't gonna pirate itself.

This raises an interesting concern, since this thing lives on (not under, at least as of yet) my desk full time about 24" away from where I sit. And this is a metric that's remarkably difficult to search or filter for:

What is a good quiet hard drive option?

Not fast, not inexpensive, not even especially capacious -- I'll be stringing 4 disks together as a RAID 5 array again. 10 or 12 TB units will probably do. So I don't care about any of those things.

These days it seems that big spitting platter drives are all marketed towards either NAS applications with all the jet-turbine trappings that entails, or "screaming" gaming performance, which is deeply silly since all of my OS, programs, and games will reside on an SSD.

Any ideas?

(And no, I am not interested in building a NAS and tucking it in a closet someplace.)

This is a broadly substance free post. But I assume most VR headset owners have at this point at least tried Half Life: Alyx.

It therefore follows that most of you are familiar with this dumb popup you get the first time you run it:

Fair enough, on my old PC I only had a Sandy Bridge i7 2600K and a GTX1080Ti. Maybe I was below the recommended requirement even though I played through the entire campaign just fine.

Well, I just built a new PC containing a Ryzen 9 9900X, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 24 gigs of VRAM, and 64 gigs of system RAM.

And I still get that dumb "low memory" popup.

This game came out four years ago, Valve. What the hell did you expect people to play it on? A Cray EX254?

Circumnavigate the wax tadpole. Tremulous! Indeed, the tuning fork does a raw blink on Hari-Kiri Rock. The deft jackdaw revolves in conclusion.

While we are on the topic of counterfeits, here's this. The oddity of this knife is a double-whammy because it is not only mechanically interesting, but it positions itself explicitly as a knockoff.

And there's a twist there, because I'm almost completely certain that this knife is an AI hallucination. Or the real world equivalent, anyway; a physical artifact you can hold in your hands that's a clone of an original that doesn't exist.

Let me back up and start at the beginning.

This is the "AKC Coltsock II," which is of course endlessly resold under a variety of guises, often including the words "Mafia" or "Stilletto" in the description somewhere. And the distinct "Leverletto by Bill DeShivs" inscription on the blade is pretty hard to miss.

Bill DeShivs is a very real knife designer who is the originator of the Leverletto design and trademark. This has of course been knocked off wholesale and many times over by various Chinese counterfeiters, a point about which Bill himself has become a bit acerbic, and deservedly so. His genuine knives are quite collectible and command a high price, which certainly hasn't gone unnoticed by those wacky Chinamen who are happy to horn in on that particular market with oodles and oodles of cheap fake knives.

Here's the thing.

This "Coltsock" knife has a fake DeShivs trademark on it, and even bills itself as a "Leverletto" (even though the mechanism is actually different from a genuine Leverletto) but near as I can figure it doesn't resemble any original DeShivs design at all. And despite also saying "AKC" on it, nor does it look like anything I can find that AKC -- who is also a real knife manufacturer, and for whom DeShivs has legitimately designed knives -- has ever sold.

Maybe my internet sleuthing skills fail me, and maybe I'm wrong. But to the nearest decimal place I can't find any reference to this thing that isn't clearly yet another knockoff. And it is cheerfully described as such, but a knockoff of what? I can't even find any evidence of any other knife design that's been copied and had DeShivs name simply transferred to it. The best I can do is that apparently one was sold in this auction, featuring no details other than a picture of a knife that looks damn similar to mine, up to and including the slightly sketchy markings, and raises the hilarious possibility that some poor bastard got monumentally ripped off.

So there, the trail goes cold. There's not even anything that even looks remotely like this in Bill's quite extensive online museum, nor his catalog of previous designs.

But if this is a bespoke design, why attach someone else's name to it? This whole thing makes no sense.

What drew me to this knife in the first place was of course it's wacky double-mechanism design. This is a side opening automatic, fired off by means of the large square button on the left side. But it's covered in other toggles and controls, like a toddler's busybox, and you know damn well that sort of thing is right up my alley.

The sliding thingy on the back is a safety, what for to prevent you from setting this off in your pocket.

This is superficially a stiletto design, and has an "Italian style" lockup that works by way of a pin machined into the back of the blade falling into a hole in the flexible spring loaded bar in the spine of the handle.

How it unlocks, though, has nothing to do with the button, unlike most side opening autos. Instead it's with this lever on the side. When you press this down it pushes the locking bar upwards just a smidge by with the help of a little folded-over prong, releasing the blade and allowing you to close it up.

One other random thing of note is that despite snapping open with vicious alacrity...

...The spring only engages with the blade for the first little bit of its travel. Let's say 20 degrees or so. For the rest, it just flaps around freely. So again unusually compared to a lot of automatic side openers, it also allows you to half close the knife for a gratuitous glamor shot.

Like this.

The Numbers

The Coltsock, or whatever it actually is, stands at 7-3/4" long when open and 4-3/8" when closed. It has very modern injection molded scales which various ~~sources~~ sellers sometimes describe as "FRN," i.e. glass filled Nylon, and that seems plausible. The liners, lock bar, and so forth are all steel and there are no wonder-materials to be found anywhere in it, all adding up to a net weight of 92.5 grams or 3.26 ounces.

It has a 3-1/4" long blade as measured from the forwardmost point of the handle which is incessantly described as a "stiletto" profile, although in reality it's basically just a drop point that's got a narrow footprint. It's hollow ground and not to an especially fine degree. The final product is bead blasted and satiny, but still has a visible pattern of machine marks in it. It's the usual 0.110" at it's thickest point, so you probably won't be using this for your next bushcraft knife even with the best will in the world.

All added up, the Coltsock is a pretty chunky number for its proportions and despite its wafer thin blade. A total of 0.634" across its handles, not including any of the bits of its user interface sticking out. If you include the unlocking lever, which is its widest point, it's 0.857". There is neither a clip nor a lanyard hole, so you're on your own figuring out how you want to carry it.

Oh, and as you can see the blade in my example isn't quite centered.

The steel itself is pretty straight and there isn't much lash in the pivot, but it just sits in there a hair cockeyed. And while it doesn't wiggle at the pivot noticeably, the blade is thin enough -- especially on its forwardmost half -- that it's quite easy to make it flex noticeably.

I did not take this apart because it is undoubtedly full of small fiddly springs. At least you can see from the outside that it has brass, not bronze, washers around the pivot .

Messing With It

The Coltsock is certainly a mechanical oddity. It's a damn sight easier to bust out than put away, for whatever that's worth. And I'm not super sold on the inclusion of the safety, honestly. The button takes a pretty concerted push to set off the mechanism, but on the bright side it also takes a deliberate effort to set and unset the safety, too. So it's unlikely to get accidentally activated, either way.

Fortunately, at least, the safety has no effect whatsoever on the unlocking lever. You can also fold the blade up even with the safety engaged, so it appears to work by blocking off the fire button only and not by jamming up the entire mechanism solid. So that's nice, and not a dumb as it could have been.

The Coltsock is a pretty good cutter for light duty tasks, despite itself. That's probably down to the thin hollow ground blade geometry. That's also true of lots of other small, thin hollow ground knives as well for the same reason, of course. And I'll bet you most of those won't also be illegal to carry in 99% of the world, and you might even be able to prove who actually made a lot of them.

Here's the edge. The factory grind certainly isn't spectacular. It has this weird compound angle thing going on, which is going to have to be ground out if you want to properly sharpen it. If we're feeling charitable we might theorize the manufacturer did this on purpose, rather than through ineptitude, to preserve what sharpness the edge does manage to have knowing full well the strengths and limitations of the steel they used.

But do you know, I'll bet you they didn't.

And you'll be grinding away anyway, because as expected the edge is quite out of true. It's actually not bad towards the middle of its length, but it gets progressively worse towards the tip until it culminates in what you see here.

It's not as awful further up.

As a "fighting" knife, the Coltsock probably leaves a lot to be desired. All the marketing hyping up its stilettotude, plus the pseudo-tactical black injection molded scales with their high tech slots and runnels in them, are obviously trying to tell a story to the mall ninjas and whackers in the audience. As a fast opening auto with very easy to locate controls, it'd certainly be better than nothing for self defense. But it also hasn't got any kind of cross or fingerguard on it, not even the perfunctory one usually found on an Italian style stiletto, so you'd better hope your opponent is unarmed and you probably also ought not to stab him too hard lest your hand slide right up and off the handle.

On the bright side, not having a guard on it means you can almost kinda-sorta bring most of the cutting edge to bear on a flat surface. So it wouldn't be completely hopeless for cutting up your peppers and onions at camp.

Of course, your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell this is made of. There's nothing marked on it to say -- nobody's even thought to engrave a creative lie on it. It's probably 440C. That should be fine for what it is provided it's heat treated correctly. But if I were you, I wouldn't go around grinding too shallow an angle on the edge.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I'm still as baffled as you are.

If this is a knockoff, I still don't know what it's a knockoff of. And if there is no original, is it still actually a knockoff? Philosophers might argue over this until the end of our days.