The CobraTec Quick Strike is exactly the kind of thing I would have been all over when I was a lad, just starting out with my knife collecting career. Here we have a tactical folder with a stiletto point profile that makes a sly insinuation along the lines of its Ninja Special Operator status. But, importantly, without yet another goddamned tanto point on it. It's got a pocket clip and injection molded reinforced nylon handles with rubber grip inserts that would have been state of the art... 25 years ago. And you can tell this is a tactical knife because it's all black, see?

With a pair of ambidextrous thumb studs and plain pivot action, the Quick Strike is nevertheless a 50 state legal liner locker.

...

Oh, of course it isn't. If it were, I wouldn't be showing it to you like this.

Surprise, motherfucker.

The Quick Strike is actually another entry in CobraTec's "Hidden Release" lineup. But this one is definitely an oddball, because it's both a normal side opening manual folder (that's not even spring assisted!) and also a side-firing automatic. You can open it the boring way, for instance if you're doing so in front of the normals. But if you're in good company or just by yourself where no one can see, you can let your freak flag fly and use it as a switchblade, too.

The release button is right here, on the side:

What, you can't see it? That's because it's concealed underneath the rubber grip insert on that side. There's no visual indicator as to where it is, or even that it's there at all, and it's actually quite a bit further down the handle than you'd expect.

That means the Quick Strike is something that's sure to make any right minded individual grin: A switchblade that's probably actually very likely to go unnoticed as such, even if the individual prepared to frown upon both it and you heavily -- your boss, a parent, a policeman, whoever -- is given an opportunity to handle it. You'd have to already know what it is or be extremely curious to make the rather obsessive effort at fiddling with it that'd be required to find out. Somebody just groping around on the handle isn't going to set it off.

And it carries within itself the constant, ineffable sense of getting away with something.

(Although of course now that I've spilled the beans everyone and their grandmother will know the secret.)

Stats

The Quick Strike is 7-11/16" long when open with a 3-3/16" long blade that's technically a drop point, I guess, with a spine that's nearly but not quite straight and a point that winds up just a smidge above the centerline. You can bicker amongst yourselves in the comments whether or not this truly counts as a "stiletto" or if it's just an emaciated drop point. Anyway, there's 2-7/8" of usable blade length and the rest of it forms a square ricasso at the base of the edge, which is actually mechanically important. More on that later. I would be remiss, as well, if I didn't mention that it is also available with a tanto point if you're really into that sort of thing.

It's nearly exactly 4-1/2" long when closed and it's not especially broad, only about 1-1/4" to the peak above the thumb stud when it's closed. But it's pretty thick, thanks to its injection molded scales: 0.675" not including the clip, or 0.810" with it. As a consequence of its narrow profile but thick handles, it feels pretty fat in your hand and almost totally round in cross section, even though it mathematically isn't.

It does have full length steel liners but despite this it's still pretty light for its displacement: about 3.8 ounces (107.72 grams), the majority of which seems to be the blade.

There's another point of contention with the specs, wherein CobraTec themselves claim the handles are made of "G-10." I'm quite certain they're not. They look, feel, sound, and taste exactly like reinforced Nylon. They're also quite clearly injection molded, which is something that G-10 isn't. So there's a mystery.

You absolutely could not use this as your Tactical Special Operator's knife if it didn't have a clip, so it does. It's single sided, not reversible, and not deep carry, either. It's held on with one long screw that sinks into the backspacer, and it's also inset into a little pocket so it can't wiggle around.... much. There's no lanyard hole, though, so you'll have to find somewhere else to mount your paracord lanyard with custom solid anodized titanium skull face pace counting challenge beads, or whatever.

I have a bone to pick with the clip, actually, because it's entirely too tight. And matters are made worse because it pinches whatever you clip it to against the absurdly grippy rubber insert on the scale beneath. The net effect of this is that it's damn near impossible to get the Quick Strike to let go of your pants, which really rather defeats the purpose if you ask me. I remedied this somewhat by taking the clip off and bending the shit out of it in a padded vise so that it's less grabby and thus a little more tolerable. Without this, or perhaps adhering some manner of smoother material to the scale where the clip touches it, the Quick Strike's chief contribution to proceedings would just be destroying the hem on the top of the pockets of all of your pants while you give yourself a wedgie. Perish the thought of getting it out in a hurry; without some kind of modification that's a total non-starter.

The blade is 440C, which is probably not too exciting to most people these days. But it's an excellent throwback to that early 2000's era that makes dumbasses like me go all nostalgic, so I guess that's cool. So far its edge retention performance is unknown to me, but it doesn't show any telltale signs of the edge having been burned when it was manufactured so it'll probably be perfectly acceptable. My all black example has a nice etched and stonewashed finish on the blade that seems reasonably durable. You can get this with a green, red, or tan handle if you prefer but all four color variants have the same black blade. CobraTec's viper logo is laser etched there, too, even though cobras still aren't vipers. Has anyone told them?

Should we tell them?

CobraTec is an American company and many of their models are indeed made in the US. Nothing on the packaging nor the blurb for the Quick Strike, though, goes as far as admitting where it's made. So it's certainly possible this is an imported knife, a notion backed up by its lower than average price compared to most of CobraTec's other models. At least for any shortcomings it may or may not have it's cheap: Only $49, which is peanuts for any decently competent automatic these days.

Regardless of where it's made, the Quick Strike is reasonably well put together. Despite being a liner locker the blade centering is nearly perfect. The blade lockup is precise and positive, with no rattle or wiggle. There is blemish on mine down at the tail, where there's a smudge of melted handle scale material left over from when it was shaped at the factory. This leads me to believe that the handles and liners are ground to shape in their final assembled positions, like smoothing the backstrap on a 1911, so there will be no gaps and everything winds up flush fitting. I could foresee someone being bothered about this, but I'm not too worried about it, personally. I may be motivated enough to grind it off later, or maybe I won't bother.

The blade grind is not terrible for a factory job on a budget knife, but it could be better. There's a secondary apex on it past the bulk of the main grind, or perhaps a micro-bevel if we're being all modern and hipster about it, which is decently fine and good enough to chop a Post-It in half without any effort. I gave it a quick once over on my dinkum homebrew strop, which is just a scrap of leather glued to a block of wood fuzzy side up, and doped with some Flitz metal polish (yes, really), and after about ten strokes on each side the factory grind became sharp enough to readily shave my arm hairs off. I call that success, I don't know about you.

The edge grind out to the tip is excellent, which is good because the tip angle is very shallow and the Quick Strike is extremely pointy.

The secondary apex is pretty true but the main grind behind it isn't even close. This will require fixing if you're the type of nut who gets bothered by this. Otherwise you can just sharpen to the angle of the secondary grind and find other things in life to worry about instead.

~~Night~~ Operations

The Quick Strike is deeply satisfying to set off on its automatic mode, but actually accomplishing that is a lot more of a faff than it ought to be. That's a disappointment, really. I like the bolster sliding mechanism on CobraTec's other knives better, which feels more natural and is a damn sight easier to use. But the tradeoff there is that those can't be opened manually at all.

The fire button is hidden nearly exactly 1-3/4" back from the forwardmost point on the knife and is decidedly difficult to find. You can feel it beneath the rubber insert on the left hand side of the knife if you know approximately where to look, but you can also feel what seems to be a fairly long and very pronounced hollow in front of it. You have to mash the concealed button very hard, and you have to do so accurately in order to get it to do anything. Mushing around in the open space in front of it doesn't produce any result. Moreover, missing the button and mashing the void, then trying to roll your thumb back into the correct location from there also usually doesn't work. You're then left holding the knife probably much further down the handle than you'd like to, especially if your next move was going to be sticking it in the enemy. As a self-defense tool, then, the Quick Strike is actually a bit of a miss.

It has to be said, it's actually less of a hassle most times to just open this normally. It doesn't make you feel nearly as badass, of course, but it's significantly more practical. That relegates the switchblade mode mostly to fidget toy duty, and also baffling and amusing your friends. Bummer.

Its lockup puts me in mind of the CRKT M16, with how it eschews the usual endstop pin and uses the thumb studs crashing into the liners as its travel endstop instead.

The engagement of the liner lock is positive, accurate, and solid. It's not terribly noisy, either, although it does make a distinctive hollow sounding noise probably caused by echoing around inside those injection molded scales. There's a typical ball detent in the liner which is actually perfect. It's not too tough to overcome but neatly keeps the blade from falling open in your pocket.

Of course this thing can't work the way a normal side opener does, which is self-evident because you can open it as if it were a normal folder without having to fight against the spring in the process.

Instead of the usual torsion spring around the pivot, the Quick Strike's automatic component is powered by a leaf spring which is restrained by a little triangular wedge block that's hooked up to the fire button. At rest it's pressed against the inside surface of the backspacer that separates the two handle halves. You can see the wedge peeking out in this picture, and the spring behind it. The fire button slides the wedge out of the way, which allows the leaf spring to pop up and smack the ricasso on the heel of the blade, flinging it open.

Thus the blade's only under spring power for a short part of its travel and inertia does the rest. You can partially close the knife to this point right here after the spring's been triggered, at which point closing it further also takes up the spring and reloads the mechanism.

Of course you can also set off the spring when the knife is already open if you feel like it. No harm is done (I think, anyway) although it makes an ear splitting snapping noise. The mechanism will be reset the same as usual the next time you close the knife even if you do this.

Parts

I'm zero for two with CobraTec knives so far, vis-a-vis being stymied trying to take them apart. It's pretty clear CobraTec don't want you dissembling these, and maybe we should take it as read that you ought not to.

There's a T8 Torx head on the male side of the pivot screw but as you can see here, the other side is smooth and doesn't have anywhere to stick a driver. That'd be fine if there were an anti-rotation flat in the screw and a matching D shaped hole broached into the liners, but there isn't.

You can twiddle the screw all day long and the assembly will just spin in its socket forever, bringing you no closer to getting the stupid thing apart.

This annoys me on pure ideological grounds, of course, so I carefully if not quite accurately cut a slot in the head of the pivot screw on mine, what for to engage with a screwdriver. With this, you can at least get the blade out.

(You can also cheat these types of things by putting two blocks of wood in your vise and clamping the top spine of the blade very firmly down into the handle. The expectation there is that the force of the pivot hole in the blade being smashed into the barrel of the female half screw will bind it in place enough to get the male side out. The wood is to prevent marring the finish on your knife. This often works, but I'll be buggered if I'm ever doing that in the field, so I used my slot cutting method instead.)

The result of this was only marginally ugly, but it worked.

CobraTec claim that their knives carry a lifetime warranty, but I have a hunch that they will not extend this generosity as far as giving you a new set of screws if your break your knife trying to get it apart.

From here we run into another problem, which is that there's no non-destructive way to dismount the scales.

If I'd known this in advance, of course, or if I could have managed to work up the foresight to check for this sort of thing first, I wouldn't have bothered with the main screw.

There are two screws driven through the scales and into the liners which also poke out in order to restrain the leaf spring inside, and the only way to access the heads on these is to rip off the rubber inserts in the scales, which are glued in place. Or I guess note their positions and then extremely accurately lance a hole in the rubber directly over them.

Whatever the inserts are glued down with appears to be some kind of epoxy. This is evidenced by the tiny droplets of it you can see that were squeezed out from under the rubber before it cured. It's hard as nails, and doesn't respond to heat. Any solvent that would break it would surely also eat the scales themselves, and it seems unlikely that you'd be able to pry the inserts out without destroying them utterly.

I considered this for some time, and then concluded that I just couldn't be arsed.

It's self evident that the Quick Strike has nylon pivot washers, which can be seen even without taking it apart. If you can muscle the pivot screw out these could at least be cleaned if necessary, or relubricated. Despite the unglamorous hardware, the blade still doesn't wiggle any even when it's deployed.

Having the pivot screw out also presents the opportunity to find out what happens if you press the button when the blade's not held in with anything. In fact, I can think of no more irresistible pursuit in the universe right now.

What happens is, it makes an extremely amusing "ping!" noise, not unlike a Garand that's just run out of ammo. And the blade goes flying. (Here it is with sound.)

With the blade out we can also get a good look at the leaf spring inside. Here it is in its triggered state.

Looking at it from the end you can see how far it swings out. The spring is curved like a bow, and just the very tip of it engages with the heel of the blade. It's much more stout than you'd think, and having to pull its trigger wedge across the surface against all that spring force probably goes a long way towards explaining why the button is so hard to press. On the bright side, that obviates the need for a safety, the presence of which would be a giveaway of what this knife is. You can rest easy -- or walk, jump, climb, or roll around on the ground as much as you like -- knowing that there's no way you could set this off in your pocket.

The Inevitable Conclusion

It's easy to admonish the Quick Strike as a gimmick. And fair dues where they're owed, that's exactly what it is.

But it's also a rare breed, one wherein its gimmick can be completely ignored if it annoys you, and it still works just fine. You don't see that every day. Usually when some jackass comes down with a case of vision trumping practicality, the end result winds up being something that expects you to suffer for someone else's art.

But the Quick Strike isn't artistic. It's damn well cheeky. And it's not sorry about it, either.

And I love that.

All aboard! This train bound for another episode of Sino-silliness, Chinese chicanery, Oriental oddity, and points Eastward.

Insomuch as it has a name, this is the "Originality Pendulum," third of three by our friends from YESISOK. But that, of course, is only the first tidbit of its name, which makes it sound like it ought to be a Lancrastian resident. As usual its full name is longer and rather less melodious: It's the "Originality Pendulum Folding Knife Mini Sharp Stainless Steel Fruit Knife Carry Key Chain Pendant Portable Open Express Knife." If you expect to actually use this for fruit, I'll just say there is a definite upperbound limit of fruit to which it'll be applicable.

Rarely can we judge a book so readily from its cover. The Originality Pendulum is a breath of fresh air in that respect, since it's easy to see precisely what it has to offer.

Originality is right. Yes, this is a small slip joint folder that's long on the joint but a bit short on the slip. This is because it has what can only be described as a real live and functional locomotive drive arm on it. The arm is spring loaded and is what serves as a detent to keep the blade positively, albeit gently, held in its open or closed positions. For this its maker consistently refers to it by using the word "pendulum." I don't think that quite means what they think it means. I would have said "piston," personally, but what do I know? We'll roll with it anyway.

That's because this is pretty rad, it must be said. I'm just chuffed to bits over it.

The Originality Pendulum is definitely angling for the keychain knife or possibly urban micro-EDC category. It's quite small, but not unusably so: 4-3/16" long when open with a pseudo-sheepsfoot 1-1/2" blade. It's 2-11/16" long when closed and just 0.280" thick across the flat of its handles. The piston mechanism actually sits proud of the handle slightly and bulks the whole thing out to about 0.322". The blade has a section of sharpened edge just a hair under 1-5/16" with a genuine choil behind it, so that all of the short length is at least usable. Of course, exactly what that blade is made out of is a bit of a mystery, per usual. The specifications claim it's 7cr which is certainly within the realm of plausibility but it's likely we'll never know for sure. Still, for a novelty miniature knife that's likely to be used only for non-demanding tasks, that's probably fine.

It's 42 grams precisely or 1.48 ounces, being made entirely of steel of one description or another, except for the piston which is prominently made of brass. So it's small and arguably light enough that you genuinely could dangle it alongside your keys. Or, perhaps, from your pocketwatch chain. Here it is with a quarter for scale.

There's no thumb stud or anything but there is what amounts to a fingernail nick on the form of a triangular hole through the spine of the blade. You might think this is for use as a thumb hole like a Spyderco knife, but not much of it is left exposed sticking out of the handle and it's really too small to access with your thumb. A fingernail really is the best way to get at it. There are some ridges around the spine and a small heel on the back of the blade, though, so you can just barely and with a fair bit of practice open this as if it were a rear flipper. It's not easy, though, because the piston is indeed spring loaded and it will want to snap the blade back shut if you don't manage to rotate it far enough. Fair dues, though, once you get it tipped past the halfway point it'll snap the blade open for you instead.

If you're used to a traditional small slip joint folder the Originality Pendulum is actually a bit easier and, if you ask me, a lot nicer to use. It's not as tightly sprung, and its spring action is longer and more progressive. It feels like it's working with you rather than against you. It feels more modern and refined, despite basically just being the same thing arrived at via a silly avenue.

There's no clip or anything but there is a hole on the tail you can use for a lanyard or keyring. And this time you actually can use it, without interfering with the function of the knife... The maker (or possibly seller) demonstrates such in this picture, which I've gleefully stolen because it means I don't need to bother to put forth the effort to find a keyring and then take my own. Hey, this must be efficiency. (While we're at it, get a load of those fake keys!)

Surprisingly, the Originality Pendulum's product photos are 100% accurate, which for fly-by-night Chinese cutlery may actually be a first. For instance, no polishing job whatsoever has been done on the taper grind on the blade. It's left with machining ridges on it so pronounced they'll stop your fingernail if you rake it across. But that's exactly as it's depicted in all of its photos, so you can't say you've been misled. Also, that grind may in fact actually be flat. Or if it's not, it's a hollow grind that's so subtle it's impossible to detect as such. The flats, meanwhile, are very shiny. Nearly mirror polished. The net effect is kind of attractive, but if you know what you're looking at it does broadcast "cheap."

What's carefully not depicted is the back side of the knife, probably because it's boring and just flat:

It's got a satin bead blasted finish which doesn't look too bad, though. I would have liked to maybe see a small clip here as well, but given that this retails for $10.27 at the moment -- tariffs and all -- at that price you probably can't have everything. It didn't come with its own keyring, either. Nor a box; it just shows up in a plastic baggie.

Obviously I was drawn to this purely for its mechanism and I was far less concerned about the rest of its qualities. It's a bonus, then, that this thing manages not to be complete crap in the bargain.

The Originality Pendulum is definitely built on a budget, but it's still surprisingly competently put together. Mine, for instance, barely had any lash in the pivot.

The cost saving features include making all three of its assembly screws identical: The two at the tail and the one through the pivot are the same. The pivot is spaced out with some small brass washers, which is a damn sight better than what I was expecting, which was nothing. That explains the solidity of the blade on its pivot, and its lack of rubbing against the handle plates.

Here's the piston, which we all know is what we really came here to see. It's two pieces, a hollow tube that comprises the rear half and a rod that goes to the front. There's a tiny coil spring inside which provides the, well, springiness. This is what keeps the blade held in either of its two positions. There is also a fantastically tiny spacer that goes between the end of the piston arm (which is threaded!) and the blade, keeping the former from rubbing against the latter. If you ever one of these apart, do not drop that part on the carpet lest you never see it again.

The end of the piston attaches to this screw, which is sunk into a machined pocket on the back face of the blade. The screw spins freely in its hole here and machining this pocket into the blade must have contributed a nontrivial amount to this thing's production cost.

The hardware. None of the screws have anti-rotation flats on them and they are threadlocked from the factory, so you will need a T6 driver in each side to disengage these, should the urge ever strike you. The pin there is the endstop for the blade which lands in the choil when it's closed and the heel of it rests against when it's open.

The edge grind is not exceptionally fine, but mine arrived sharp enough to be serviceable for light package-openeing duty, at least.

It appears that a slight secondary apex has been put on the edge which is presumably what actually manages to make it sharp, or at least as sharp as it is. At the angle the primary edge is ground at, the two sides wouldn't have actually met at the apex.

The tip is not especially pokey because it's been rounded off slightly in this process, as you can see. I imagine the final sharpening was probably done by hand. (The backdrop here is a random piece of mail I had on my desk, which the microscope reveals to actually be printed on security paper. Hence the rather festive 1990s confetti pattern, there. They say you'll discover a whole new world under a microscope, and it turns out they were right.)

You can see here how different the edge angle is on either side. In all honesty I've seen worse in terms of factory trueness even on much more expensive cutlery, and 7cr isn't exactly a difficult steel to sharpen. Given this knife's short edge length to begin with, fixing this up if it annoys you should easy for anyone equipped with pretty much any stone, and a modicum more care and skill than was possessed by whoever-it-was at the factory. I don't think either of those will be an especially tough bar to clear. So making this little tacker unwisely sharp should be the work a mere moment.

The Inevitable Conclusion

There's just something about the way the Originality Pendulum works that inherently makes any man or boy grin. It's probably the locomotive-adjacency to its mechanism. It ought to come with its own miniature conductor.

It's steampunkishness is there, for sure, but it's restrained. More subtle. Refined.

Less in your face. It's much more New Atlantis than New Atlanta. A gentleman's (or woman's) knife, then.

If this were sold by The Sharper Image I'll bet it would cost sixty bucks. But it's not, so you can have one for not much more than a single Hamilton. You could absolutely use this in polite company and if you did, the comments you'll receive would probably all be positive.

In case you couldn't tell, I really like the Originality Pendulum. Even despite its cheapness and its stupid name. Every once in a while that happens, with what you thought for sure was going to be a piece of junk worth it only for the memes turning out to be a genuine diamond in the rough.

The problem is, that'll embolden you, tempting you to buy the next one. And then... Well. You know how it usually goes.

Pure, unadulterated cool. The cat's pajamas. That je ne sais quoi, distilled.

Style, folks.

Everyone wants it. This knife's got it.

This is the CobraTec Gideon, in its silver and abalone incarnation. Which is, of course, not only absolute swankiest but also the shiniest version. Hey, if you're going to ride into battle against the Midianites you may as well do it while looking fabulous.

CobtraTec is an American knife company based in Texas, but for most of you they're probably not one of the household names. But based on some internet sleuthing, I have a pretty good hunch that they're actually the force behind the Böker balisong knives we like so much. That drew them to my attention initially, but their catalog of fairly samey out-the-front switchblades thoroughly fails to captivate me.

But then, there's this.

The Gideon is a side opener. But you'll note the utter lack of thumb stud, button, switch, toggle, latch, or plunger. It's profile is svelte and nearly completely smooth.

You'll never guess how it opens. Go on, just try.

This is part of CobraTec's "Hidden Release" series. And not even, you'll be surprised to learn, the weirdest of the bunch.

This is its opener.

To set it off you slide the diamond textured bolster to the side. Its spring action is quite firm, and you need sharp eyes to notice the hairline gap between this and the handle which'd clue you in that it is in fact a moving component. It's pretty damn unlikely that anyone would figure out how to open this if you didn't tell them or they didn't already know.

The Gideon is precisely 7-1/2" long when open, with a 3-3/8" long drop pointed blade made of 154CM. CobraTec call the blade "3 inches." To be fair, that's roughly the length of the usable portion of the edge. It's subtly hollow ground with a thin, stiletto-like profile. It's 4-1/8" long closed, and 0.481" thick across its sleek aluminum body not including the clip. It has a pleasing density at 76.4 grams or 2.68 ounces, but thanks again to its aluminum handle it's not especially heavy overall.

All of this makes it uniquely suited to EDC duty for sufficiently stylin' people. With no crossguard, protrusions, or other greebles on its surface it rides superbly in or on your pocket. (What? All of the sudden my CQC 6K is silver again? No, silly, I have two of them.)

It's got a traditional pocket clip with a single position only, tip up carry for right handed people. The clip is not very tightly sprung and since the Gideon's abalone handle insert is completely smooth this means it draws supremely easily. There's just enough retention that it won't fall off of its own accord if it's dangled upside down while clipped to normal-ish fabric (i.e. my shirttails, which I just tested this with) but if you're the sort to be habitually rolling around in the mud upside down while Solid Snaking it in the bush, I think it goes without saying that the Gideon is just maybe not the knife for you.

There is a lanyard hole on the tail of the knife which is left exposed even when the knife is clipped.

There are indeed ambidextrous knives in the world, with thoughtfully symmetrical controls suitable for both righties and lefties.

The Gideon is absolutely not one of them.

Never mind the irreversible clip. The opening mechanism is accessible from one side, and one side only. This one, shown here with its textured bolster. Left handed users will probably find this uniquely difficult to use. CobraTec invite you instead to go whistle. That, or buy one of their myriad of out-the-front models with a spine mounted switch instead.

You've all watched me spend a lot more on pure nonsense, but at a list price of $130 the Gideon is still not exactly cheap. To make up for it, it's packing a deceptively intense amount of precision machine work. It starts with this snake's head embossed in the bolster opposite the one you use to open it.

Come to think of it, CobraTec's logo looks distinctly viperid. I wonder if anyone ought to tell them that, uh, cobras aren't vipers.

You get it again on the blade, along with the Gideon's steel descriptor. There are no other markings.

It's also assembled very, very competently. Every part of it feels incredibly solid. There is no wiggle in the blade, and it doesn't touch either side of the handle despite the minuscule clearances around it in its channel.

It's also got a fully concealed pivot. When CobraTec were constructing this monument to elegance they absolutely weren't fucking around. The Gideon reveals none of its secrets about how it's constructed from the outside. The only visible screws are the three holding on the clip, and a single lone one in the tail immediately behind these.

Undoing this doesn't lead to much, either. The Gideon's pivot must be press fit; the two halves of the handle can be separated minutely with the tail screw out but the pivot remains resolutely locked together regardless of any amount of wiggling, twisting, or trying to slide a spudger up the gap. Beyond this I'm disinclined to fool with it -- It's a side opening automatic which means that the blade is under spring tension all the time, which means even if I did get it apart it'd go "sproing," and then be annoying to reassemble.

CobraTec backs this with a lifetime warranty. But I'll bet you that won't cover breaking it trying to get it apart.

From the outside we can see that the Gideon is actually a lockback mechanism. The sliding bolster is attached to a hook on the backstrap, and this seesaws on a cross pin in the usual way with spring motive provided by a leaf spring underneath. This is separate from the one for the blade itself, which is presumably a torsion spring. Unusually for a lockback, of course, the lock engages in both the open and closed positions so that the thing won't spring open in your pocket. You can't open the blade manually, despite appearances.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This may be sacrilege, but despite its show-off looks and price tag I actually bought my Gideon to be a knife to use -- not just for looking at.

Sure, at $130 it's not cheap in an objective sense. But that's only before you start comparing it with other American made automatics. The Covetousness Tax ensures that switchblades remain expensive these days, but if you ask me you can spend a whole lot more on one than this and get rather less for your money.

The Gideon's got a lot going for it in that respect. Its textured anodized handle does a great job at hiding fingerprints, it's extremely solid, and 154CM is still a quite competent alloy. All in all, this may just be the ultimate gentleman's knife.

And for fuck's sake, it's still $50 cheaper than a Benchmade Bugout. Come on. You can't tell me this isn't at least 300% cooler than a Bugout.

I just picked up a couple of "flamed titanium" pocket clips, and I love the look of them. I've always been attracted to the blue-on-black color combo for most things I own, and I love the way the color pops on my Vision FG!

I've noticed, however, that even the slightest touch from my fingers will dull the shine and really mutes the color. It comes right back with a simple wipe on the clip with any dry cloth, but it's a little annoying just how well this finish attracts skin oils.

I was thinking about picking up some flamed ti scales to go with this, but after seeing how quickly the color fades after being touched, I'm not sure how I'd feel about an entire handle with that finish.

I am not a Spyderco guy, which is an notion I've opined several times before.

This goes a long way towards explaining why I have five of the damn things. But to be fair, one of them is a pen, one of them is a balisong, and one of them is made out of freakin' wood. The fourth one is boring, and we won't talk about it here. Yet.

I will at least say one thing about Spyderco, which is that they're darn consistent. It's got to be a hard day's work over there making all those models that are the same damn knife. Triangular blade, flat grind, big hole instead of a thumb stud. It's like the bagpipe song. Sometimes they play it fast and sometimes they play it slow, and sometimes they play it backwards. But you can't fool me, guys. You can call it whatever you want but it's still always the same song.

It's no wonder, then, that every once in a blue moon one of their designers probably goes a little stir-crazy and gives us something like this.

This knife probably holds the crown for shortest time between my learning about how it worked and there being one on the way to me in the mail. This kind of thing isn't a fetish, I tell you, it's a romantic abnormality.

Anyway, this is the Spyderco JaniSong. Designed by Michael Janich, hence the name, Spyderco's marketing department goes on to describe it as, "a one-of-a-kind folding knife that elevates the spirit of the traditional Filipino balisong to a practical yet dramatic modern cutting tool."

Although it very clearly isn't a balisong knife, you say.

Except it is. But it isn't. Except it kind of is.

The What?

Look, this is going to take some explaining.

The JaniSong takes the idea found in the last two stupid knives we looked at and carries it all the way through to its logical conclusion. This is thus another one of them there balisongs-with-one-pivot arrangements. With the key distinction of, this one's not dollhouse sized and it actually works.

It's much, much larger: About 8-1/4" long, 4-15/16" closed, with a 3-1/4" flat ground S30V blade in a drop pointed profile with, yes, a hole in it.

Here it is with a short list of, if not its peers exactly, at least a couple of knives in its EDC size class. You genuinely could carry this around and use it for stuff.

Its core conceit is that it has an inner handle inside its outer handle, and the blade inside of that. All of this shares one pivot.

And rather than a traditional tail latch, it sports this sliding switch that locks everything in either the open or closed position.

The inner handle/blade carrier thing swings out freely along with the blade itself, the latter of which hits an endstop at the 180 degree mark while the inner handle can swing all the way around to a full 360. Then you can flip the inner handle freely back and forth, ultimately slotting it back into the outer handle but leaving the blade out. It has its own separate 180 degree interface with the blade so grasping it along with the main outer handle keeps the blade solidly deployed. Or if you prefer, you can slide the switch back up and totally lock everything solid.

The jury's still out on just how practical and/or dramatic this may be.

The How

Thus the JaniSong is trapped somewhere in the space between a traditional pocketknife, a gravity knife, and a balisong.

It can be opened via a subset -- but certainly not the entire litany -- of balisong-esque maneuvers.

Partly that's down to being short an entire pivot point, but mostly it's down to the unequal distribution of weight between all of its parts.

With its steel liners and G-10 scales, the JaniSong weighs a not inconsiderable 153.3 grams or 5.41 ounces altogether. But while its inner handle is made of steel plates the same thickness as the outer liners, it's lightened with speed holes and has neither the scales nor the lock attached to it, so it weighs noticeably less than the outer handles. The blade is likely somewhere in between, and that puts the point of balance just about a half of an inch rearward of the pivot screw... when both the blade and the inner handle are fully swung out. The inner handles on their lonesome thus carry considerably less inertia without the blade than with it. Just a smidge too little inertia, in fact, if you ask me. This means an unequal and much more concerted flick of the wrist is needed to bring the inner handle back than it was to send the combo of inner and blade away.

Spyderco claim in their literature than the JaniSong is "safer" than a traditional balisong because the only handle you can grasp is the safe handle. That's so, but consider that a fair few of the more advanced opening tricks require starting with the bite handle, in particular the various finger rolls e.g. the Y2K, precisely because doing the inverse would put the edge in contact with your fingers. So maybe don't try to pull any of those with the JaniSong unless you're either very brave or your knife is very dull.

The ol' reliable double windmill works well enough, though.

The JaniSong has two more wrinkles related to its action. The first is that where and how hard you grab its main outer handle has a slight but noticeable impact on how free the pivot action is. And the second is that it exhibits a distinctive and pronounced bounce off of its endstops, which you can see in this slow-mo:

The latter is only something to get used to, but the former requires constant care and attention lest you set yourself up for looking like a bit of a berk.

The Details

Considering that the JaniSong has an MSRP of $314 and retails for the thick end of $235, it goes without saying that Spyderco put an awful lot into it. And let's face facts, even with the best will in the world nobody is going to be picking this up from a hang card at their local sporting goods store.

It's a sandwich consisting of no less than seven layers, including all four liners, the blade, and both G-10 scales. It's very square with no protrusions to snag, but it's still a chunky number at 0.605" across its scales and 0.762" thick including the clip. That's over three quarters of an inch, which is a lot.

The blade is ostensibly a drop point but has a pronounced belly, with a distinct out-and-back recurve to it. It's nearly symmetrical, so you can decide whether not this is enough to count as a leaf point or a spear point.

The clip is indeed a deep carry design, and it's picked out with the Spyderco logo laser etched into it. In typical Spyderco fashion it is reversible and repositionable with a total of four locations for both tip up and tip down carry, or in this case whatever you prefer to actually be able to bust this thing out. You'd better remember how you set up the clip and which side is which afterwards, because otherwise the JaniSong has absolutely no tactile indication whatsoever as to which side the blade comes out of, and from the outside it appears 100% symmetrical.

You'd think this jimping would help you identify which side is which, but it doesn't. That'd be too easy, you see. It's exactly the same on both sides.

One side of this particular mushroom bears the Spyderco logo again and steel descriptor.

The other has the Michael Janich designer's mark rune, and manufacturing origin listed as Taichung, Taiwan. Neither side indicates which makes you larger or smaller.

I don't have a little .gif of me wiggling the blade around on this like the last two, because the blade doesn't wiggle. Some how, some way, Spyderco has managed to make this rock solid. It doesn't rattle either around its axis or laterally, which I guess is what you get for $235 rather than $3.

The Parts

Needless to say, I absolutely had to see how this thing works on the inside. But that said I really don't recommend you try to take your JaniSong part unless you absolutely have to. Content yourselves with these pictures, secure in the knowledge that I am a highly trained moron; this knife is designed by nerds, for nerds, and is absolutely stuffed full of pitfalls and booby traps vis-a-vis tiny easily lost parts that absolutely will fall out and disappear the moment you crack the sucker open.

For instance:

Here's what's underneath one of the scales. It seems simple enough, with the lock bar extending down the sides and its little toggle switch that rests on top.

...Which is detented with a tiny ball bearing that is just in there loose, completely unrestrained in any way.

Ripe to just fall out, and it absolutely will unless you're ready for it. Preferably with a small but powerful magnet. There's also a minuscule spring inside each of the lock switches which is very nearly but not quite captive, and prone to falling out precisely at the most inopportune moment.

Each half of the lock bar also includes a drop-fit guide pin which can leap out and roll away.

Here you can see that it bears phosphor bronze pivot washers. I would have liked to see ball bearings which surely would have cured the inconsistent pivot feel problem but also probably made it even thicker. Oh well. Also in evidence is the semicircular track for the end stop pin which is pressed into the blade. There's one each on the inner handle and outer liner plates and, yes, it is absolutely possible to install the former backwards because of course it is. Greasy fingerprint and stray hair optional -- I was too lazy to edit these out.

And I will be stuffed if I'm taking this whole damn thing apart again just to retake that one photo.

Because the JaniSong otherwise breaks down into a frankly absurd number of components, as befits and justifies its status as an enthusiast's knife. This includes a bevy of no less than six diabolo spacers, four of them threaded and two of them not; a scad of screws, 12 in all; two springs, two ball bearings, two guide pins, all easily lost; four phosphor bronze washers and their attendant pivots; four plates, comprising both the inner and outer layers; one blade, two scales. And the lock bar. And a partridge. And a pear tree.

And reassembling it is quite tricky.

Here are two thirds of the spacers, as they ride in the tail of the inner handle. The bite you see taken out of it is for the lock, which slides to the rear when disengaged:

And slides forward into that notch when engaged, holding everything in place:

You can also click it into its locked position while the inner handle is swung out in between someplace, which accomplishes nothing but can allow it to bash into the lock's barrel spacer, probably dinging both it and the edges of the inner handle plates depending how much gusto with which you go about it, and detracting from your collector's value in the process. So maybe resist the urge to do that.

Here's most of the hardware. Note that the main pivot screw has an anti-rotation flat, and be mindful of this before you start reefing on either screw head. This lineup is also short two screws from the scales, because I forgot I left them in their holes which you can see in the main disassembly photo above, and didn't realize it until it was too late. Look, I'm just chuffed that I was able to get all of this lined up without anything rolling away, all right?

The Why

That's the big question, isn't it?

Well, why not? We climb the mountain because it's there. We collect the weird knives because they're weird. I think that's really the JaniSong's real purpose for being, despite any post-hoc mumbling Spyderco may do about making a balisong design that's "safer," or whatever. Because not only is that the definition of a fool's errand, but we wouldn't have it any other way, would we?

So it's weird. And I know that's what you all paid your tickets to see. So there you go. Nobody can say you didn't get your money's worth.

You know, I like to think of what I do here as a public service sometimes. I am honored to make it my duty to find these inevitable types of blogspam EDC gadgets and be the one to belly up to that checkout page and say, yes, I will take one for the team and put down my $7.46 to determine once and for all of said item is utter crap. Because someone has to. For science. For the betterment of mankind.

Here is the "D2 Blade Titanium Alloy MINI" from -- which I did not twig to at the time -- our good friends YESISOK. Its full moniker is the "D2 Blade Titanium Alloy MINI Gear Folding Knife Multifunctional Outdoor EDC Self-defens Tool Outdoor Portable Utility Keychain." (The E fell off, presumably in some manner of industrial accident. Perhaps similar to last time. An alternative theory also presents itself.)

It's another one of those twin handle/single pivot jobs. Except this one's got fuckin' magnets.

This knife makes a fabulous fidget toy because of its retention mechanism, which is solely comprised of four small neodymium button magnets flush mounted in the tips of the handles. That's basically it's entire deal. The magnets are oriented so that the handles elegantly snick into their open and closed positions with basically zero effort, and no other mechanical consideration required. Which is just as well, really, because as we determined last time such mechanical bits are at this price point very likely to go slightly wrong.

Rather like unto a balisong knife and quite a bit unlike most other pocketknives (those not appearing in this column, anyway) the D2 Mini's two handle halves swing in opposite directions meeting up with each other again at the 180 degree mark, leaving the blade exposed. And since the retention is magnetic you can even with a bit of practice do this with one hand. If you just manage to shove the handles vaguely near enough to either of their home positions the magnets take over and snap them home for you.

You can also of course just fidget with it incessantly by sliding the magnets across each other, without actually deploying the blade. It's even unlikely anyone watching would notice that the thing is even a knife, unless you were dumb enough fully deploy it in their presence. Rather, it's not unreasonable to assume that it's akin to one of those magnetic sliding playing card fidget thingies, which is not too far off the mark in any case.

But rather than a playing card motif, the D2 Mini is very minimalist chic, just a rectangular lozenge with twin faceted handle plates and otherwise eschewing any other decoration. It still excels for this kind of use case since it can be actuated reasonably quietly (and with practice, can be done in near silence), doesn't require any open space around it so it can be manipulated in a hoodie pocket or under your desk where nobody can see, and if you ask me it provides a very satisfactory tactile experience.

Somewhat disappointingly the spec chart for this one is a little bit less amusing than last time...

...But it's probably close to accurate. The handle slabs claim to be made out of titanium and it's possible that they genuinely are. A magnet does not stick to them, and they're once again in that category of too dense to be aluminum and too light to be zinc. The blade might even genuinely be D2 as well. Damned if I can tell, but for the price it's unlikely to matter. If you're expecting an exhaustive edge retention testing regimen on this, well, prepare to walk away disappointed.

There are really only two problems with this, if you even want to call the first one a problem. Like its predecessor, they don't have "MINI" in the name all in caps for nothing. This is quite small: Just 2-13/32" long when closed and 3-3/8" long open, with a titchy little 1-7/16" long drop pointed blade. The blade is 0.98" thick, so far from robust, but with its stubby shortness this is unlikely to be an issue. The handles are dead rectangular with rounded corners and edges, 0.688" across, and the entire ensemble is 0.380" thick from peak to peak across its handle slabs. It weighs 39.2 grams or 1.38 ounces, another clue that a large portion of it may indeed be genuine titanium.

Look how weensy. Isn't it cute.

Edginess

I did not initially expect to write anything about the D2 Mini's cutting capability. It's a $7 fidget toy from China, and it'd take three of them just to comfortably fill out the Zippo pocket on your jeans. You're not really expecting anything groundbreaking, are you?

Hawk-eyed readers of course noticed the chip in the edge in the blade photo above, however, which is precisely as it was delivered from the factory. If you missed it, here it is under high magnification:

This isn't the end of the world but beats me how it happened, because the D2 Mini has absolutely no spacer pins, pegs, screws, or indeed anything at all that the edge could have contacted in any part of its operation.

The blade rests neatly in a machined pocket in one half of the handle, and its travel is restrained by a pin that rides in a little semicircular groove cut into one of the slabs. It can't be caused to contact any of the metalwork in the handle in any way, no matter how hard you try. Don't worry, you'll see more of that groove later.

All that aside, I was floored to discover that its blade geometry is precisely 20° per side, or a 40° combined edge angle. It's both true and consistent for once. So dressing that chip out of the blade took all of about four seconds on my Spyderco sharpener at one of its stock blade angles, and with no effort.

The grind is also true, even, and consistent all the way to the point which is a rare breath of fresh air with cheapies like this. All in it could have been a lot worse, and while I could have done without the chip in it right off of the starting block, at least it was trivially easy to make it possibly unwisely sharp. I can't tell if this is some indicator of quality, or just sheer dumb luck in the case of my particular example.

Gubbins

The D2 mini is only held together with one screw. It's only lightly threadlockered and required no gymnastics to remove other than sticking a plain T8 Torx driver in either side.

Contrary to all logic, reason, or expectation it's got ceramic ball bearing pivots. At its current price point it may be literally cheaper to buy one of these, throw 95% of it away, and just keep the bearings to stick in your next custom knife. At the moment a pair of 6mm inner bore ceramic thrust bearings retails for about $10, bought in non-bulk quantities.

This is all the hardware you get. Or need, for that matter. This is industrial design simplification taken all the way to its maximum extent.

The handle slabs are pocketed to accept the bearing races and here you can also see the track for the endstop pin to ride in. The machine work is impeccable. Say what you like about the Chinese, but they have this sort of thing down.

Well, except for one thing.

The endstop pin isn't 100% accurate in its track so there is a bit of rotational rattle in the blade. If you're holding the handles it's not going anywhere beyond that, mind you -- having it fold up on your knuckle is out of the question. There's no lateral play, either, thanks to the bearings. And when it's in the closed position you can't rattle the blade by shaking the knife, either, probably due in no small part to it being restrained magnetically due to its proximity to the magnets.

That's not the annoying part, though.

The Annoying Part

This is billed as a "keychain" knife. There's a hole all the way through the tail end of it, perfect for installation of said keyring. In fact, my example even came with one in the package.

Except.

You've figured it out already, haven't you?

The keyring hole has to separate when you pivot the handles. With a ring installed you can't open the knife.

That really renders the entire exercise pointless. They may as well just not have drilled that damn hole in it, for all the good it does you.

The little zipper-tab knife we looked at previously solved this by relegating its loop to only one of the handle halves. Whoever designed this was altogether too clever by half, but not quite clever enough.

The Inevitable Conclusion

In that race to have one more bullet point on the spec sheet, sometimes it's possible to go one step too far.

So it is with the D2 Mini, which would be tough to call anything but perfect -- especially considering that it's so cheap that it's near as well free -- except that some dipstick somewhere decided that it must have one more feature, and absolutely insisted that somebody drill that fucking keyring hole in it. This simple inclusion moves the D2 Mini's slider quite firmly from "neat" and sets it to "dumb." Because everyone's going to be annoyed by that, and that stench of ineptitude will follow it around forever. Now it's a joke. Can you believe these morons? R&D doesn't talk to the guys in product testing, am I right? With those kind of skills, these guys ought to be designing cars. Har-de-har, et cetera.

What a drag.

IS OK? YES?

IS ARE SURE?

Yes, today is more faceless made-in-China garbage. Straight from Aliexpress again this time. This one drew my eye because it explicitly bills itself as "mechanical" in its product description which is, in full: "Stainless Steel Mechanical Folding Knife EDC Mini Paring Knife Keychain Portable Emergency Self-Defense Knife Express Cutter Too." (Presumably the L fell off, unless in Lionel Hutz tradition it's actually, "Cutter, too!")

"Um, actually, surely all folding knives are inherently mechanical, by their very definition," comes the inevitable comment from some clever individual. Yes, Melvin, we are aware. But plugging that into your search query is often an shortcut to finding the weird stuff.

And the other reason I clicked on this is because its "brand," insofar as any of these types of things may actually have one, is listed as "YESISOK." Perhaps ironically.

I am not making this up.

Behold such tremendous features as:

• Sharp Blade: Yes
• Blade Material: Stainless Steel Trowel
• is_customized: No

Truly, we are living in the future.

The Yesisok is also fantastically small. If you had a bit of creativity you could probably just about employ it as the tab on a zipper pull on your bag or jacket, and you'd probably get away with it unnoticed in a number of places.

Maybe forget I said that last part.

It's just 2-3/8" long when closed and the slightest hair under 3-5/8" long open with a teensy little 1-3/8" blade. That's 6.0325, 9.2075, and 3.4925 centimeters en metrique, so at least we can say one thing on the spec sheet is actually accurate.

In its blurb it claims to be made of 4Cr13 steel which is feasible, given that this alloy is both very cheap and very Chinese. It's straight backed with an upswept tip, and at 0.079" thick but only 0.288" across it must be said that its bevel is very steep.

Steep enough that if you are habitual jig sharpener it may actually give you some trouble, since the primary bevel is close to 35 degrees. The actual apex is even steeper still, as close as I can figure to a full 40 degrees per side, coming out to a combined 80 which is very nearly square.

So this will never be a chopper or surgical slicer, but despite all expectations it does come out of the box reasonably sharp enough to serve as a dinky little package opener, envelope cutter, and fingernail picker. The little blighter only weighs 0.6 ounces or 17 grams precisely (also accurate on its spec sheet) so you could just stash it around your desk or just about anywhere else, really.

Of course I wouldn't have been drawn to the Yesisok at all if its mechanism weren't weird.

There's actually a whole litany of these types of little knives on the Chinese wholesale market, all with the same action which could basically be described as, "Like a balisong, but with only one pivot."

I also have to imagine having only the one significantly reduces the cost.

Both halves of the Yesiok's handle swing out 180 degrees, in opposite directions, and come back around to meet up on the other end leaving the knife open in the process.

There is no latch, but there is a detent ball on the little spacer on the tail end which clicks in both the open and closed positions. There is no mechanism other than this; The sheer flexibility in the presumably laser or waterjet cut handle plates plus the inherent lash in the pivot is the only thing that allows the detent ball to clear its pocket at all.

The pivot is plain, equipped only with a brass washer beneath and even then, curiously only on one side. This is the side with it. You can see the opposite side further up the page, there, which reveals the conspicuous absence of its twin. I have no idea if it's supposed to be this way, or what. Maybe it's to provide more spacing for the detent ball to clear, who knows. Omitting one washer likely removed a whole two or three cents from the total bill of materials cost.

Two pins are pressed through holes in the blade opposite each other, and these are what serve as the endstops for the mechanism's travel.

As you would expect these are none too precise nor is the track they ride in, so the blade can rock and roll noticeably even when it's ostensibly locked open.

The whole process works like this:

It's also worth mentioning that you can only open the knife one way, so if you try to shove from the wrong side not much will happen. There's just enough imprecision in everything that you can push one of the handles a couple of degrees past the closed position, but that's it. Of course there's no tactile indication of which way you ought to try to push, though, so you'd better just get used to how the thing works. From closed, the handle without the spacer screwed to it swings away from the edge, i.e. push it towards you if you're looking at the spine of the blade. It can also be assembled such that the opposite is true, and given that there is no mechanical impetus to choose one versus the other I would not be at all surprised to learn that half of these left the factory with the blade facing in one direction and the other half facing the other.

All this adds up to making the Yesisok maddeningly fiddly to use. Part of its description implies "self defense" as one of its applications, but needless to say you can forget that. Opening it is tricky and ideally requires both hands, is tough to do quickly, and even once done the end result is unlikely to impress ruffians of any stripe.

It's well and truly comically tiny. But not, it must be said, the smallest folding knife I currently own.

It's got a loop on the tail that's built into the spacer which you can use to turn this into a keyring knife, or possibly attempt the aforementioned zipper pull strategy. You're on your own figuring out how, though. For nearly five bucks, the manufacturer didn't even bother to include a dinky split keyring. Nor even a box. Mine just came in a plastic baggie with a sticker on it, the truly traditional harbinger of top flight Chinese cutlery.

There's not much inside to look at. Note, however, the lonely and singular brass washer. The spacer screw is a T6 head and I think the pivot screws are meant to be T8, but I found a T9 driver actually fit better. You'll need a driver in each side if you care enough to disassemble this, because...

...While the pivot screw does indeed have an anti-rotation flat on it...

...The holes in both handle plates are just round.

This makes me wonder if all the pieces of hardware in this are commodity parts.

The tail spacer is the most interesting part of the entire knife, if you ask me. It's got the detent ball mounted there, and is also prevented from rotating by having yet another pin pressed into it. Based on the texture around the edges plus the lack of telltale machine marks, I think it's actually a casting. It is steel though. The entire knife is, actually, sans the washer. A magnet sticks to all of its components.

I took a picture of the blade separately, but I already said most of what needs to be said about it so I'm not sure what's to illustrate. I'm going to show it to you anyway, though, because I went through the effort to take the snap and process it, so you're going to look at it at least once.

Unsurprisingly it's had no polish or finishing work done to it at all after grinding, but the flat is pretty smooth and shiny. I imagine that's because the raw bar stock it was made out of was pre-polished.

The Inevitable Conclusion

There's very nearly something resembling a valid use case for the Yesisok and others of its ilk, but only barely. If you're in an environment where a big traditional and dare I say "real" pocket knife clipped to your pants is frowned upon, this could stand in as a very cheap and at least reasonably serviceable substitute. Moreso if you are in a locale with insane blade length requirements, or one of those places where one handed opening knives are forbidden. Since you'd have to be a damn wizard to get this thing open with one hand.

But otherwise its main appeal is as a fidget toy, since its mechanical design is deeply silly.

 

It's OK.

I guess.

All aboard, and Welcome to the Wondrous Weird Knife Wednesday Weaboo Wagon.

I am fully aware it's Thursday in most time zones. Never mind that. Get a load of this thing.

For anyone in your life with a custom body pillowcase, a hatchback covered with ahegao stickers, and an imposing DVD collection, here's the perfect accessory.

This is the "New Animation Game Genshin Impact Butterfly Knife Toy Unsharped Metal Weapon Wolf's Last Road Stick Cyno Weapon Model Gift," which I received for a whole 99 US cents from Aliexpress as an "introductory offer" item. Yeah, it's one of those kinds of things. I am positive that even though I knew exactly what I was getting into when I ordered it I still got ripped off. But the grist mill of Content hungers evermore; I've got to feed something into the damn thing or else I won't have anything to write about. And hey, it was still only a buck.

This is... Look, we have to go down a whole damn rabbit hole for me to explain it to you. Obviously the moniker tipped you off that this is ostensibly a piece of cynical tie-in merchandise for the exasperatingly popular video game, Genshin Impact. There were a whole range of these things apparently replicating a variety of "signature weapons" from the game, but for some inexplicable reason they're all balisong shaped which is of course right in my tree. But also hard to make much heads or tails of, since they're all without exception described with inscrutable titles in transliterated Chinese.

I picked the absolute silliest looking one of the bunch, which is named "Tian Kon."

The fact that its frilly and overwrought decorative trappings have a distinctly Zelda-eque vibe probably also contributed.

I have to admit I don't know a whole heck of a lot about Genshin nor do I really care to, although that's not to say I have no experience with it. I did try it out very briefly back in its early days, when the consensus about it on the internet was still in its initial phase of howling about how it was superficially a Breath of the Wild ripoff, just to see what all the hubbub was about. I concluded that while it had a veneer of this, it was overlaid on a bedrock core of Gacha Waifu Slot Machine Harem Simulator For Whales, a genre in which I have no interest.

I slept on this writeup for a few weeks longer than I should have, as well, since this specific product and all of the others in its range have vanished from the face of the Internet entirely in the meantime. It's useless for me to link you to the item anymore even if you did want one of these yourself for whatever reason. It's just gone, although the Chinese knockoff sphere is still absolutely packed to the gills with junk in a broadly similar vein. The top search result if I try to look for what I've got verbatim is now this, which I'm pretty sure is made in the same factory that used to be making the thing I've got. (In case interested future historians click on this eight, maybe nine minutes into the future when this page has likewise inevitably disappeared, I also saved a screenshot.) This contains such hits as "Fo Nu Huo Lang," and "Mo Dao Zhu Shi," and "Qi Sha." So you see what I mean.

I think my "Tian Kon" is supposed to be a hack representation of Genshin's Skyward Pride. (Not the Skyward Blade, which was my initial thought based on the translation.) "Tian Kon" is likely actually a bastardization of "Tiānkōng", which is broadly speaking "sky." No points for guessing (or looking it up on the wiki) that the Skyward Pride's Chinese name is Tiānkōng zhī Ào. (And the Blade, Tiānkōng zhī Rèn.)

Case closed. That was entirely more research into this 99 cent piece of junk than should be undertaken by anyone, and now if you'll excuse me I think I'm going to go wash my hands.

One thing I sure didn't expect was for this to show up on a full color hang card. I was predicting the usual nondescript plastic baggie in a bubble mailer with a smudged and barely legible sticker on it printed in Chinese. If you found this hanging on a peg in FYE or Hot Topic it'd probably run you twenty bucks.

Let it not be said that I've completely slandered Genshin Impact by calling it a mere Waifu simulator. To its credit, it contains a couple of token himbos as well. The bloke depicted here is Diluc, a fire elemental guy who you can obtain fairly early on. He has absolutely nothing to do with the Skyward Pride, so it beats me why he's on the packaging. Maybe he's on the packaging for all of these. Maybe he's not, and it's random. I'll probably never know.

In case anyone cares, the back of the card is thus. I am particularly fond of "wyth," and "under 12 vrars old." Not that I'm any better at Chinese, mind you. I butcher their language, they butcher mine. That's how the cultural exchange works around here.

The Chinese on the rear at least reveals that this is (allegedly) manufactured by Jinjiang Animation Hardware Factory, of Fujian Province. So now we know who to blame.

Because this is crap.

No, I did not put 99 cents down on this with high expectations. But as usual for Chinese knockoff goods, much effort has been spent meticulously touching up the photos of the product in its online listing to make it look more attractive than it actually is, and very little on the actual manufacture of the thing itself.

Obviously this isn't a "real" knife in that it's not sharp. But calling it a balisong trainer is really a bit of a stretch. It's entirely made of cast zinc, sans the screws, at least if the packaging is to be believed. That seems plausible to me since zinc (or its myriad alloys) is cheap and braindead simple to cast in a die. A magnet doesn't stick to any of it, it's clearly not aluminum, nor dense enough to be lead.

The finish is airbrushed on.

And, it must be said, not very well. The base color is some kind of metal flake enamel in a color that is precisely that of the Oldsmobile Allero your great aunt bought in 2002. The blue details are sprayed overtop presumably with the aid of some kind of mask, but as you can see on the blade especially the factory, er... missed.

It's also all a façade anyway because it's only finished and fully detailed on one side. The reverse side of the handles are flat with none of the bass relief and no spraypaint job. Here you can see the commodity Phillips (or possibly knockoff JIS) screws holding it together. Don't cry that you've been misled -- You got exactly what was offered, since the product photos religiously depict the knife from only one side. Remember: 能骗就骗.

Mine also showed up slightly bent. It was worse right out of the package, to the extent that the inner face of one of the handles would rub on the blade. I suspect it got crushed in transit somehow, and since it's only made of potmetal in any case it's not especially rigid. No big deal, though. I just took it apart and bent it back before I took my pictures.

The blade has a hole in it and also a split, running all the way down to its tip, which puts one in mind of a fountain pen nib. This makes it look cool, though once again it's probably a good thing that this can't hold an edge. You could try dipping it in ink and writing with it, but I'll bet you that wouldn't work too well, either.

It's not tough to take apart, which is especially beneficial if you find yourself having to smash any of its parts back into being flat. Just to throw a pure hypothetical out there.

The "blade" itself is quite a detailed casting, and it is so on both sides unlike the handles. I have no doubt that the majority of the pennies that were spent on producing this were spent here. What I don't have any idea of is what the runes down the fuller are supposed to mean. Initially I thought they may have been an outright fabrication, or possibly lifted (or mutated) from some other script, but apparently they do indeed appear on the original digital blade if you peer closely enough. So there's dedication to detail. If you're the type of turbo-nerd who can read Genshin runes, do let us know.

No doubt as part of its ruthlessly cost-cut industrial design, the Tian Kon's pivots are cast into the back sides of the handles. There are no female screws at all, just these escutcheons which have a hole drilled and tapped into them. On the bright side that means there are no screw heads on the decorative side of the knife.

Conversely, though, this means that the pivot clearances are hilariously awful. There's probably a full millimeter of rattle in the pivots, and they are by necessity tapered. Otherwise the part wouldn't come out of its mold, but that probably doesn't help matters from a precision standpoint.

So don't expect any of that and you won't be disappointed. The Wiggle Test with the handles in the closed position reveals the Tian Kon's continued proud tradition of cheating, looking better than it is at first blush only because the raised portions of the blade hit the inner surfaces of the handles down around the pivot area where it's tough to see and prevent the handles from wiggling further.

With the handles in the open position you can see just how dire matters really are. The Tian Kon wins the coveted Ching Chow Award, being one of two (2) balisongs I now own that are so awful that you can cause the latch to miss the opposite handle entirely. It's fabulously awful.

In spite of all expectations, the Tian Kon is actually functional. For suitably small values of "functional," anyway. The pivots work, and you can swing the handles and blade around.

But because all of the contact surfaces are zinc-on-zinc, it squeaks incessantly while in operation. Because of this it is in at least one sense also now the loudest balisong I own. I'm not sure that's a compliment, exactly, but it is damned hilarious. It's also guaranteed to annoy the hell out of anyone else in the room with you.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This is still probably cheaper in a real world sense than a round of gacha pulls and at the end of the day, probably leaves you holding exactly as much value.

That's got to count for something, but I'll be damned if I know what.

I picked up this hinderer eklipse about a week ago. I wasn’t a big fan of the light green color so I dyed it dark purple. What do you guys think? I was also thinking yellow but I figured if I dyed it yellow it would look like a weird banana…

Either way, I’m loving this bad boy :D

I've seen things, I've seen them with my eyes. I've seen things, they're often in disguise. Like:

• Carrots
• Ninjas
• Cheese
• Mermaids
• Russians
• Slingshots
• Spinners
• Choppers
• Sine Waves
• Antiques
• Chinese Knockoffs
• Monsters
• Warlocks
• Chinese Knockoffs

I realize that lately I've let this column get a little too long winded and boring and, dare I say, practical. Sorry about that.

Let's get this crazy train back on the tracks.

This snaggletoothed monstrosity is the Model CH0107 Tanto Blade Tactical Folding Pocket Knife W/ Belt Clip, sold by -- and I promise I am not making this up -- "CozyLiving Furniture Store." It is yours for really not much money at all from China. They have this to say about it:

Made from 440 stainless steel with a black anodized finish, this Killer is a much needed companion on your next hunt. Sporting a partially serrated tanto style sawback blade and a thumb stud to assist with opening, the knife has an extremely strong reinforced point that is very good for piercing and stabbing. The handle is made of a heavy duty green ABS that is textured for a firm grip and has a lock back release on top. Included on the handle is a belt clip so you can take your Tanto Blade Killer Pocket Knife with you when you are on the go.

"Killer?"

Oh, yeah. It says this on the other side of the blade:

I, meanwhile, have this to say about it: You think your knife is serrated? Your knife isn't even barely serrated. My knife is serrated.

This knife is so serrated, it passes beyond mere serration and emerges out the other side, into the brightly sunlit valley of pure cold insanity where the air is clear and still, so silent there isn't even birdsong.

The CH0107 is ostensibly a fairly normal lockback folder with a single piece injection molded plastic handle, and just so happens to have a blade profile with a rather... particular... aesthetic design. Perfectly normal in a maintaining-unwavering-eye-contact-through-its-greasy-forelocks sort of way, anyhow.

It is also very, extremely, flagrantly, unquestionably, eye-searingly green.

And covered in Chinese axle grease, so much so that every time you open and close it more gets on the blade and you have to vainly try to wipe it off before taking another picture.

It's 7-13/16" long when open and 4-1/2" long with a 3-1/4" long tanto pointed blade that is, yes, serrated. And has a bunch of holes in, just because. The description also calls it "sawbacked" but this is not so, or at least not in the functional sense. While the spine of the blade does indeed have quite a mohawk on it, the points are not sharp enough to actually be useful for anything. Which is really just as well, because otherwise the main thing they'd be useful for is shredding your pants fabric if you actually carried this anyplace. If anybody cares it's 84.8 grams or 2.99 ounces. The blade alleges to be made of 440 series stainless, but which flavor is left unspecified.

Its entire construction is also a retro throwback, in case you needed a nostalgia trip back to those good old days of low-budget Chinese cutlery, only without the good and just rather long on the old. Revel in how good we have it with cheap knives now, because trust me -- it used to be a whole lot worse. There was a time when they were all like this.

Like how? Well, for one it's not screwed but rather riveted together, which makes taking it apart completely impossible. As to be expected there's a large amount of wiggle in the blade when it's locked open, and thanks to this low tech construction strategy there's precisely fuck all you can do about it.

The action is otherwise begrudgingly serviceable and it pivots open without much fuss, although as a cheap lockback you have to fight the rather stiff lock spring the entire time. You're aided in this with a thumb stud, but curiously only on one side. Left handed users get to dodge a bullet, here.

You may have also spotted that it has a pocket clip.

It does, for sure, and this is the only thing that's actually screwed together on the entire knife. Even so it's noticeably wiggly, and no amount of messing with the tension on all three (!) of the wood screws chunked into the plastic through it has any effect on that. Otherwise it's reasonably serviceable and quite springy, although mounted a bit far from the tail of the knife.

It's also extremely dull.

I've opined before that I don't care much about the factory sharpness on a knife provided the final grind is reasonably even, because any owner worth their salt is going to have to sharpen the thing eventually and thus the degree of sharpness out of the box is really only a temporary concern to begin with. But this thing is in a special category all on its own, because from new it is outright blunt.

Here's what its point looks like. This isn't a case of damage from packaging or shipping. The grind doesn't even go all the way out to the tip.

The tanto point portion is quite literally butter knife grade. It's physically impossible to cut anything with it, because the factory didn't actually manage to grind it far enough to create an edge. Here's what that looks like:

Its entire length is flat-spotted. The left side and the right side, nary in the middle do they meet.

The rest of it is not much better, but the primary edge could at least charitably hack through something as high grade as cardboard if, and only if, you sawed at it diligently enough.

The serrations aren't left out of this, either. Although surprisingly, they're not chisel ground; the edge (such as it is) is double sided for its entire length. But the points are rounded off and while they come closer to reaching sharpness than the portion near the tip does, they still don't actually manage to actually achieve it.

From the tail you can see that this is a one piece injection molding. Producing these in bulk for the manufacturer has got to be nearly free.

I'm not providing the usual disassembly photo because this would require drilling out the pivots, and I'm not doing that for no other reason than I can't be bothered.

The Inevitable Conclusion

There's really not much to conclude, here. Never mind zombies, the CH0107 is barely capable of opening your mail.

A knife like this really only has two functions: Looking mean, and getting confiscated from teenagers by the cops for the same reason. While we're at it, I'm sure the marquee on the side will look great on you in court.

Oh, and it has a third function, too: Appearing here, giving us a sterling opportunity to speculate just what, exactly, its designers were smoking.

Once you reach a certain age, you find yourself prone to dreaming about all the could-have-beens you've had between then and now. What would have happened if you moved to the other town instead? What if you went to the other school, married the other girl, bought the other car, took the other job? All those decisions, compromises made in the name of circumstances or convenience or, more usually, your finances.

In these long nights of quiet retrospection: Did you miss out? Did you make the right choice? Or did you just settle? Just what, exactly, did you compromise?

This is an easy trap to fall into in our hobby. Part of the reason knife nerds have so many knives is because we're forever trying to find whatever the perfect knife is, and that always engenders some kind of compromise. Price is the usual one, of course. Even if you do it in nickels and dimes, which is the way most of us try, you can spend any amount of money chasing the damn unicorn and still never catch it.

And then, if you're a balisong dork it's even worse. All the household names are extremely collectible, and they're without exception limited production items that start off shockingly expensive and only get ludicrously more so over time. The venerable Benchmade Model 42. The BRS Replicant. The HOM Basilisk. The Flytanium Zenith. And if you want anyone to take you seriously in this gig, if you want to have the right experience, you just have to get your hands on one of those, don't you? Because otherwise you're going to have to compromise.

Well.

What if I said you don't?

This is the Böker Tactical 06EX229. We can excuse the completely unmemorable name plus the fact that yet again Böker has forced me to remember how to type an umlaut over the O, for one simple reason, which is this:

The 06EX229 is at present hands down one of the best values in a balisong knife at the moment. It may just be the best value, period.

Unicorn: Slain.

You may recall that I kinda-sorta reviewed this knife already, in the form of its smaller sibling the 06EX227. That is the "tactical small" variant of Böker's design, in a more pocket friendly size that's rather akin to the rather spectacular (in my opinion) but now very collectible Benchmade Mini-Morpho Model 32. This, however, is the "tactical big" version. Exactly as you would expect, it's... bigger. Precisely like Benchmade's Morpho Model 51 is unto the 32.

There is of course a critical difference, since we were talking about compromises just a few paragraphs ago: The Model 51, just like the 32, is now purest unobtanium. It's discontinued, no longer available anywhere, a valuable antique, and even when it was new it last listed for damn near $400. Nowadays you are unlikely to get your hands on one for less than $500.

I already posted a deal alert on the various Böker balisongs a few weeks ago, and imagine my surprise when I just clicked and learned that these are still (at the time of writing) on sale for $40. This despite several weeks of procrastination and staring at my proverbial typewriter with no output. All that's still relevant.

Not $400 -- $40. Drop that zero right off the end.

Yes, you can certainly buy a clone of the Model 51 (although curiously not the 32, at least so far as I can find) for a lot less dough than the real thing, and I am and have been keen on that sort of thing in the past as well.

One of those can be a competent poor man's stand-in for a Benchmade, sure. But the Böker tacticals share the distinction of actually being better in at least one critical aspect than not only the clones, but the genuine Benchmade models you may be tempted to substitute with them.

Which is astounding.

Physicals

The 06EX229 is a full sized balisong knife constructed of steel and G-10, similar in proportion to the Benchmade Model 51 and quite a few other traditionally sized flippers ostensibly in its class.

It's the spitting image of its smaller sibling, as you can see here. It sports the same type of harpoon profiled blade made of D2, understated black G-10 scales with the same double-X embellishment carved into them...

...And the tail end shows off precisely the same type of spring loaded squeeze-to-release latch, which is of a similar design and intent to the latch found on the Benchmade Morphos.

The incessant comparison to the aforementioned Benchmades is impossible to escape. I'll be bringing it up a lot because there are incredible design similarities between those and this. Not only the spring latch and the very way in which it works, but also the big knife/little knife dichotomies in both brands' lineups. The blade steel is the same across both brands as well, D2 on each, and they're all kickerless designs with concealed Zen pins in the handles for the rebound instead.

It's easy to see that the smaller 06EX227 is roughly Mini-Morpho sized and this 06EX229 is the proportional twin to the full sized Morpho 51. I don't actually own one of those, but I do have the TheOne clone of it, because I'm poor. So that's what I'm showing off above all the way on the right, there.

The 06EX229 is 9-3/8" long from tip to tail when opened, with a 4-1/4" blade, 0.119" thick, which has a roughly 3-3/4" usable edge. And indeed, a usable edge is what it has, exhibiting ruthless sharpness right out of the box which for most people won't require any going over before being put into service.

It's clear that putting this knife into service is precisely what Böker expect you to do with it, since it also includes a reversible steel pocket clip. I can respect this even if, as usual, it comes out of the box on the wrong side of the handle which is where it appears in most of these photos. I fixed that when I took the knife all apart for my usual disassembly photo, which we'll get to later.

The presence of the clip, oft omitted on collectors' or competition balisongs, plus the immensely satisfying spring loaded latch put the 06EX229 once again in the same camp as the Benchmade Morpho, or at least the camp the latter was in 15 years ago: Namely that of an EDC capable balisong that's designed to be carried and actually used rather than just locked in a cabinet and gazed at wistfully, lest you scuff its collectors value.

One critical difference is the weight, since due to its all steel construction rather than the titanium of the Morpho it is heavier: 149.6 grams or 5.28 ounces. That's 1.98 ounces more, or about 37.5%. Weight is one of those things that balisong nerds get super hot and bothered about, so that's sure to ruffle somebody's feathers somewhere. Since the 06EX229's liners are steel for their entire length and are completely solid, not ventilated in any way whatsoever, that makes it a slightly slower spinner than lighter knives and also moves the point of balance a touch further towards the tips of the handles. Latched shut, that point is 1.693" by my measure which is 3/8" or so further back versus just for sake of example my BM51 clone, since the blades are roughly the same density as each other. Probably by no accident, this is directly on the crosshatched portion of the handles.

But enough about the Morpho. Where the 06EX229 shines is all the differences, all the places it's allowed to stand on its own.

For instance, it has concealed pivot screws that live underneath the scales, and make it appear to function by magic.

And rather than plain utilitarian round cutouts for the Zen pins, it has elongated stylized ones that form and merge with the choil, making the entire length of the edge usable.

The pins themselves are visible peeking through the handles.

Ephemerals

It should be obvious to anyone that the 06EX229 must be a budget knife even at its full list price of $126, at least compared to its contemporaries.

So how much play has it got in the pivots, and how much blade tap against the inside of the handles?

Would you believe none?

Like its sister 06EX227 but completely unlike the vast majority of balisongs not only in its class but even considerably above, the 06EX229 is a ball bearing equipped knife. Both pivots ride on a pair of thrust bearing assemblies each, which ensure not only impeccable low resistance action but also a completely wiggle-free pivot assembly. The key is that traditional balisongs are highly sensitive to pivot screw tension and the tighter you make them the less they wiggle, but also the more resistance you encounter up until the point that they won't pivot freely at all. Bushing equipped knives typically aren't, but they have an inbuilt amount of lash that can't be adjusted out, because their bushings are always a hair longer than the blades are thick by deliberate design, which ensures a free action but a guaranteed minimum amount of rattle.

Bearing knives are constrained by none of the above. You can crank the ever living fuck out of the pivot screws to the point that any lash whatsoever is not only squeezed out of the mechanism but also driven by horsewhip clear into the next country, but the handles will still pivot freely.

Achieving no play and no tap is the holy grail of balisong knife design and it's always the sort of thing manufacturers try to put at the top of their bullet point lists, even if they have not in fact actually technically managed it. An excess of either is the first thing that makes a knife feel cheap, and this one doesn't have any.

And thanks to, rather than despite, its full length steel liners and especially the thick G-10 scales, the handles are incredibly rigid and resist flexing to a large degree. This even though it is a sandwich construction, consisting of two separate steel liners and scales per handle, rather than each handle being channel milled out of a single slab of material.

The 06EX229 is pure functionality. Unlike most of its peers its styling is very understated, with just these two lacelike crosses milled into its scales.

It has few other embellishments. It has no speed holes or channels, nothing on it is anodized, nor engraved. Nothing's neon or holographic or glows. But it doesn't need any of that. Other knives may be a flamboyant Ferarri Daytona, but the Böker is a BMW M3.

The balance and heft of any particular balisong knife is highly subjective, of course. People have preferences -- lighter, longer, shorter, whatever -- So it's certain that someone out there will be displeased by the 06EX229's action for some reason or another.

But in some ineffable way, the action feels right. I find the 06EX229 to be extremely controllable, moreso even than knives which the hive mind of the internet assures us to be perfect. I don't know why this is. Maybe it's the bearings. Or the weight distribution. Maybe I'm just predisposed to like it.

All of its attributes taken together make this preeminently qualified for use as an EDC knife, despite the typical drawbacks inherent in being a balisong. The clip is small, but in this case small enough to be unobtrusive -- It's quite similar to the one on the smaller 06EX227, but with the longer handles on this it's much less in your way when manipulating the knife -- it draws cleanly and easily, and the spring latch allows you to put the knife into action right away. The ability to reposition the clip to either side of the handle also ensures you can draw your knife with it in your preferred orientation which is a big help.

The only oddity is the 06EX229's only concession to flamboyance, as it happens, which is that weird harpoon profile on the blade. The horn of the back of it is fairly pronounced and is just pointy enough to be distinctly uncomfortable if you windmill it right into your finger. Typically it's far enough away that you don't, but for specific types of finger roll tricks it's possible to get hung up on the hook. If you're really going to be Captain TikTok Flipper Showoff Bro, you might want to grab your grinder and round the point off on it slightly.

The Bits

The 06EX229 is dead easy to take apart.

This is good news for habitual balisong twiddlers, which I suspect is a neat cross-section of basically all balisong owners to begin with. There's no recalcitrance nor screws that refuse to come undone. Nor do you have to employ any tricks. This puts the 06EX229 head and shoulders above quite a few Chinese clones, while still cheekily occupying the same price bracket.

Every screw head on the knife takes the same T6 Torx driver, even the pivot screws.

The pivot screw heads as well as the Zen pin holes are hidden beneath the scales. The heads recess into pockets on the back side of the scales. The only knock against this is that you need to remove the scales to tune your pivot tension, but conversely since this is a ball bearing knife you realistically should never have to do that anyway, provided you remember to re-threadlock the screws if you ever have occasion to take it apart.

You only need to dismount one side anyway, because the female sides of the pivot screws don't have any driver heads.

You'll find those on the other side. Note also the ball bearing assemblies, two each on each pivot. The pivot screws have anti-rotation flats so undoing them is no trouble, even without screw heads on the other side. The Zen pins also live here and are captive, with shoulders preventing them from falling out.

The spring latch assembly is dead simple, and Böker lifted this directly from the Benchmade Morpho. (I did, too, with my Rockhopper printable knife.) The pin here isn't captive and can fall out when you dismount either of the scales on that side, so watch out.

The cammed heel on the latch pushes on that pin, which is sprung by the natural tension in the steel liner. Note that this would be absolutely impossible with a one piece channel milled handle design. But due to this, not only can you easily kick the latch out by simply squeezing the handles together, but it's also handily stopped from hitting the blade and, by and large, even from contacting either handle when you're swinging the thing around. Unlike its Morpho inspiration you can spring the latch out when the knife is in its open position as well as closed, although the spring action is a little weaker in that orientation.

Treachery

As part of Böker's "Plus" line, this is not actually technically manufactured by Böker themselves and is rather actually subcontracted to any of a potential number of outfits worldwide.

I can't quite come up with a definitive origin for this knife. At least one source claims it's made by CobraTec which, if true, adds another interesting layer to things. At the very least there is a prominent "Made In USA" legend printed on the label on the end of its box, which lends some credence to this theory. Score one more, then, against the Chinese knockoff brigade.

The rub is that this is heavily discounted and seems to be so everywhere, by and large. Not just on Böker's site but with other retailers as well. When I see that sort of thing on a particular model or another that indicates to me that it's poised to get the chop, which in this case is highly disappointing. Some day soon this too will go away, and the world will be left slightly worse off because of it.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Because you see, the Böker 06EX229 is exactly the knife the world needs. A competent and highly usable, US made, well built, and extremely featureful balisong that can wrest or hopefully at least steer the whole damn hobby away from insanity, even if just by a little bit.

Because the balisong market is famously insane, and probably many of its participants no less so.

As it is, it's also a spectacular entry point for non-insane people looking to get into the swing of things. To get more people included, rather than excluded. Included, moreover, without resorting to shelling out for a cynical knockoff or ghastly non-brand piece of junk. And don't get me wrong, I like a good non-brand piece of junk sometimes. But there's a lot of room for something in between limited edition collector's pieces that are never meant to be used, and flea market card table crap.

The 06EX229 is the unicorn after all. Just, nobody noticed because it wasn't shaped like one in silhouette.

So maybe you never bought that Ferrari. But the insurance on the Subaru is a whole lot less, it's taken you way more places over all those years, and you don't have to have a heart attack if it gets bird shit on it.

Maybe you didn't marry a supermodel. But the girl next door's been here the whole time, and she's a hell of a lot more fun to be around. And she's down for a whole lot more.

Don't get caught up in being sold a dream, and don't get wrapped around the axle if you think you've missed out, or you can't afford it. In the end, all of that's just marketing. It turns out you really can have it all, even without getting lucky -- provided you're looking at it the right way.

You're lying in your tent in the dark. In the unfamiliar woods outside, a nocturnal cacophony. There's just one thin scrap of Nylon between you and whatever's out there.

So you have everything you think you'll need carefully arranged right next to your sleeping bag so you can reach it, all in order, just so. Your watch, your flashlight, your bear spray, your knife. Maybe your gun, if you're a wimp.

Before going to sleep you've practiced grabbing your knife in the dark. Don't try to tell me you haven't at least once. I know you have.

Well, Glow Rhino think they've got another solution for you with this, their Fermi.

I'm sorry, The Fermi. They consistently render it with the definite article attached.

This knife was kindly lent to me by a reader, which is such an astonishing turn of events I can still hardly believe it. I'm just chuffed to pieces. I won't name names, but the guilty know who they are. So thank you.

The Fermi is named after Enrico Fermi, the physicist who's famous for developing the world's first nuclear reactor. That, plus the Glow Rhino name and the fact that I wouldn't be showing this off to you if it didn't have some kind of trick might clue you in to what's going on here.

You see, this knife is radioactive.

The Fermi is an unassuming and somewhat compact liner locking folder that happens to have not one, not two, but three radioactive tritium glow inserts embedded in it: One each in both of the handle scales, and another titchy little one in the thumb stud. Note that the green ring in the stud is not the glowy part, that's just neon plastic which you can even order in a variety of colors. The tiny dot in the middle is the part that illuminates.

And yes, this puppy is nuclear. Tritium is a weak beta particle emitter, decaying into helium in the process, and this is what powers the Fermi's glow. Or rather, just like Doc Brown's DeLorean, this puppy is ultimately electrical. Beta particles are fast electrons, after all, and these are what excite a phosphor coating on the inside surfaces of the glass tritium capsules, which captures this energy and re-emits it as visible light. The phosphor stuff is apparently zinc sulfide based, but nobody seems willing to admit its exact formulation in any easy to find place online.

So the glow inserts produce a very small amount of wan green illumination, but unlike your typical glow-in-the-dark stuff they glow of their own accord, constantly, without the need to be charged up via external light. This also means they'll glow all night without your intervention.

That's not to say they'll glow forever, though. Tritium has a half life of about 12.3 years, meaning that in that time frame the emitted radiation and thus the brightness of these will be reduced by half. In 24.4 years it'll be a quarter of what it was when new, and so on down the line.

All that may sound like a long time but bear in mind I've shown you plenty of knives in this feature that are already twenty-plus years old. So it's up to you if you think this is worth it for a $100 piece of kit, versus just getting a normal folder of similar construction and, most likely, a significantly smaller price tag.

There is an evergreen temptation for sleazier manufacturers of these types of things to claim that they're "permanent" illumination but as we've just observed this is obviously not the case. For their part, Glow Rhino only claim a lifetime of 12 years, matching the half life of the tritium itself, but whereupon in reality the inserts should still be emitting some type of visible output. The output of the glow vials will constantly diminish more or less linearly until they reach whatever point the owner decides they're dim enough to be considered spent, but where you draw that line is up to you. The waters will be further muddied by the fact that while the raw falloff of the light output may be broadly linear, human perception of it is not.

Interestingly, when I received this in the mail it had clearly been opened and tampered with, then resealed by the post office. At first I thought this might be because we'd tripped some radiation detector somewhere along the line, no doubt installed in a bout of post-9/11 hysteria in some godforsaken sorting facility someplace.

But now that I've read up on it I think this might not be the case. Because while beta radiation is indeed a type of ionizing radiation, i.e. the bad kind, tritium is an incredibly weak emitter of it. It's throwing out beta particles -- electrons -- with comparatively a very low energy per particle. So much so, in fact, the beta radiation from this stuff is quite difficult to detect and has a range of only about 1/6 of an inch (just a hair over 4mm) in open air. And then, that light emitting phosphor layer should theoretically capture pretty much all of it anyway. In fact, the stuff is so weak that trying to use a Geiger counter to detect tritium emissions is generally considered to be futile. So it's more likely that they opened this to ensure, ye gods forbid, that it wasn't a switchblade, which for some unfathomable reason you're not allowed to send through the post.

This also dovetails neatly with the inevitable comment this thing is sure to garner, vis-a-vis, "You expect us to take this radioactive motherfucker and clip it to the inside of our pants?"

Well, the energy of the beta particle emissions of tritium is slightly less than, say, the electron emissions of a garden variety cathode ray tube as found in a television. Tritium throws particles with an energy of 0.019 MeV or if you prefer 19 KeV, compared to the typical emission energy of a typical boob tube at 20 to 35 KeV. You spent your entire youth staring at one of those and while the content on it may have rotted your brain, the particle emissions certainly did not lase your lobes. (In fact, basically none of it escapes the front glass, just like how vanishingly little-to-none of what these tritium capsules emit escapes their glass, either.)

So yeah. This type of thing is really fantastically unlikely to do anyone any harm. Even if you busted one of the capsules, I think the little shards of broken glass would be a bigger risk than the tiny quantity of tritium itself. The only real exposure risk with tritium is ingestion, which I think would be quite difficult to achieve not least of which because the amount of the stuff inside is really very small, but also because at the end of the day it's fancy hydrogen, which is far lighter than air and would surely go "paff" off into the atmosphere before you got a chance to have much of a whiff.

The Glow

The light that the Fermi's inserts emit is extremely dim. This is on par with various tritium powered thingies, both those made by Glow Rhino and others. You may be familiar with these via various glowing keyfobs, gun night sights, and other gadgets. Your gizmo having a tritium glower in it is sort of the peak of EDC nerd appeal, in some circles at least, so the Fermi certainly scores there. The only way it could do better would be to have superfluous titanium components and or maybe some fidget magnets in it somewhere.

If you've never played with one of these tritium emitters in person before, note that the light is completely invisible in even moderately illuminated ambient conditions. And forget about using the glow emitted to read anything or even find something other than itself in the dark. It's just about perfect for marking its own position, and really nothing else.

It's also remarkably difficult to photograph properly. I used a two second exposure for these.

Given the green shade of light emitted by the phosphor and how similar it looks to the classic glow-in-the-dark green, I had a hunch that whatever the material is might also be fluorescent, and glow under ultraviolet light.

And I was right. Boy howdy.

But even after shining a strong UV light on it the phosphor doesn't remain glowing any brighter than it started once the light is removed. (In this case the source in question is my little 1xAAA 365nm jobbie which is, yes, the same model Big Clive was showing off.) It can't be "charged" like a traditional glow-in-the-dark material.

But while we're on the topic of traditional glow-in-the-dark stuff, why not just use that and be, like, a zillion times cheaper?

Well, for comparison -- and for Science -- I lined the Fermi up with one of my Rockhoppers made in glow PLA and as an added ringer, a random tracer glow airsoft BB.

This is just after a couple of minutes of exposure to the ambient lighting in the room, nothing special, and nothing especially scientific.

This, however, is what happens if I give the entire arrangement a short cooking with my UV flashlight. When it's fully energized, traditional glow-in-the-dark material is miles brighter than the Fermi's tritium capsules. Enough that here you can actually use the raw shine coming off of the Rockhopper to see the outline of the Fermi below it.

But after ten minutes...

...And then an hour...

...And then three hours...

...The semipermanent glow of the tritium capsules demonstrably becomes a significant advantage.

Mind you, once your eyes are well adjusted you can still see the shape and outline of the Rockhopper for 8 or 9 hours, even if only just, which is tough to convey via these pictures but still ought to be good enough for finding it in the dark over the course of most nights. Provided you don't live in Hammerfest or something, anyway, and your nights aren't 14 hours long.

The Knife Part

Other than its atomic party trick, the Fermi is otherwise a fairly unassuming liner locking ball bearing folder with modern looks, but a pretty spartan feature set.

It's fairly compact, 6-7/8" long when open and 3-7/8" closed with a 3" drop pointed blade. The usable edge length is just about 2-7/8", ending in an angular cut that's not quite technically a choil, I guess, but has the same function. So given all that maybe this isn't quite the best tool for fending off bears invading your tent, even if you can find it instantly in the dark.

There is no ricasso, nor is there a flipper heel on it. This is a pure thumb stud opener, and while the stud is ambidextrous it's only illuminated on one side. The other side is just a plain black screw head.

The blade's D2 and is flat ground, although it's not quite a full grind. There is a small flat spot near the spine for about half of its length. It's finished with a nice even PVD coating. Not a single part of this knife is shiny other than, you know, the parts that shine in the dark. This should make any tactical ninja operator happy.

The Fermi has flat G10 scales with full length steel inserts that have lightening holes in them. You'll have to take my word for that last part, though, for reasons we'll soon discuss. The blade's spine is plain and square, with no rounding and no jimping on it, either. Overall the whole thing is very plain-Jane.

It has a deep carry pocket clip with nice flush fitting screws in it, but this is not reversible for no particular reason I can fathom, nor is any option except tip-up carry provided. Beats me as to why because the scales and overall construction are completely symmetrical. I don't see any technical reason why the clip couldn't have been made reversible. They just... didn't.

Likewise, there is no lanyard hole. Nor any assisted opening or any other spring action.

One thing the Fermi does have is this groovy totally flat pivot screw on what's presumably the female side of the pivot. This gives the back side a very attractive minimalist look.

Here's a lineup of this plus a couple of likely EDC contenders.

It's smaller than not only the usual Kershaw CQC-6K, which isn't much of a stretch, but also a Benchmade Bugout -- but versus the latter, only in terms of footprint and not thickness and definitely not weight. That's because it tips the scale at 86.4 grams or 3.05 ounces, nearly triple that of a Bugout.

But on the bright side, the Fermi's G10 scales plus full length liners made it perfectly rigid, and the thicker construction -- 0.499" or nearly precisely half an inch not including the clip -- I think made it feel a lot nicer in your hand.

It may look like it only has partial liners, but that's because they're rebated into the scales with only the jimping sections sticking out.

The Fermi is indeed a ball bearing pivot knife, although you wouldn't know it by reading Glow Rhino's own writeup on it. One upshot of that is the near perfect blade centering, which is unusual for a liner locking knife.

The bearings don't make it any easier to open, though. That's because the Fermi has quite possibly the most ridiculously overdone ball detent in it that I've ever experienced.

Opening it is deceptively tricky. Overcoming the detent takes a lot more force than you'd expect. The studs don't stick out past the scales in the slightest and there's not much gap between them and the scales, either. Nor is there a scallop in them in right spot for access. So there isn't much of a space to work your thumb into, and if that sort of thing matters to you I think that'd make this near impossible to use while wearing gloves.

"Positive" is certainly one word you could use for the closed lockup. If you get the blade even vaguely near home the detent grabs it and snaps it shut for you.

On the bright side, the open lockup is extremely solid as well. As usual with a bearing knife there's no perceptible lash, wiggle, or rattle in the blade when the thing's open.

On Failure

I did ask its owner for permission to disassemble this knife. You won't see that, though, because it's with no small amount of shame I admit to you that I couldn't get it apart.

Not without resorting to barbaric methods and levels of force, anyway, which I wasn't comfortable with.

The main pivot screw has a T8 Torx head on one side, but as we observed earlier it's got nothing on the other side. It sure feels like it has an anti-rotation flat in it, but it's still not enough to do you a fat lot of good. The screw is glued into place with permanent threadlocker and anti-rotation flat or no, the whole thing just spins in its hole without coming undone no matter how you crank on it. You can feel it grab, and there's a distinct lobe where the flats should engage and keep the shank from spinning around in its hole. But it doesn't quite work, and the whole assembly eventually rotates past the hump before the screw will actually let go.

I have various tricks I could employ to circumvent this, and if this were my knife that would start with cooking it with a soldering iron or possibly just grinding a slot into the female side of the screw.

But at the end of the day it ain't mine, and I did pinky swear not to break it. So I won't.

We can see what we can see from the outside. For instance, here is my level best at capturing the speed holes in the Fermi's steel liners.

The handle halves are separated by an aluminum backspacer into which the clip screws and scale screws on both sides sink into. I think this also has threaded inserts in it, because some of the other screws spin forever without coming undone also.

To get that apart, getting in there and grabbing the inserts with pliers would probably be necessary. But that would require getting the blade and pivot screw out as well, and there's a darn hole in my bucket there; see above.

So the hell with it.

Cutting Observations

D2 steel ought to be a known performer provided the manufacturer didn't fuck it up.

Glow Rhino is not a known quantity to me; their specialty seems to be tritium-laced geegaws, and while they do offer several knives I can't quite be sure if these are made in house or outsourced, or if they're just a side hustle for these guys or what.

What I can tell you is that Glow Rhino's website is one of those damnedable cesspits that's constantly popping up (assuredly fake) "So and so in [city, state] added this item to their cart!" messages in the corner of the screen all the time in a limp-wristed gambit to either imply legitimacy or insinuate that these are flying off the shelves in a manner that would require them to be more popular than they probably actually are. Anybody who resorts to that sort of thing automatically gets a bit of side-eye from me.

But what their website doesn't do is specify the Fermi's country of origin, and nor is it marked on the knife anywhere. Maybe it says on the box, but I don't have that.

The marking here appears to be a model descriptor and not a serial number, since from what I can see of about a third of it on the pictures on Glow Rhino's site, the numbers appear to be the same on this example as what they're showing. That, or we got phenomenally lucky in getting the same unit that they used for their product shots. Do you know, somehow I'd doubt that.

And I know they specified both materials in the engraving just to be cheeky. D2 is the steel, obviously, but the H3 is tritium.

Anyway, the Glow Rhino logo is on the reverse and these are the only two markings on the knife.

As it was delivered to me I found the cutting performance of the Fermi to be pretty dire. It was not capable of cleanly cornering a Post-It note.

This example appears to still have its factory edge but I don't know how much its owner has used it.

The edge is also slightly out of true. One side is about 20 degrees and the other side is closer to 25.

I further don't know if this nibble taken off of the tip is how it was manufactured or if it was busted off at some point during use.

However, I did have explicit permission from this knife's owner to treat it as I saw fit.

So I dropped on my Ruxin Pro to reprofile, and sharpened it up real good. Nothing crazy, mind you; I maintained the factory edge geometry although I did reprofile the off edge so that now both sides are the same angle.

Here's what it looks like now.

I'll also mention that this is one of those darn silly arrangements that requires you to remove the thumb stud for a proper sharpening, otherwise it's in the way. At least this unscrews easily.

And lo, its cutting performance is drastically improved. I did not notice any diminishing of cutting ability after using it to eviscerate my last two Post-It notes, and there is no visible sign of burnishing in the coating around the edge so we can probably assume that there were no catastrophic fuckups with the Fermi's heat treatment.

This shouldn't be a praiseworthy attribute in this day and age, but somehow it still is.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I have the same opinion of this as I do of other people's dogs, and for that matter their children.

I'm glad to have had the opportunity to play with this, and it was a fun time. But at the end of the day, I'll be glad to give it back.

For $99 the Fermi's build quality seems a bit hokey to me. Sure, I know that the lion's share of its price tag is down to its included tritium thingamabobs and not the knife itself, especially given that Glow Rhino charge $40 just for a simple glowing keyfob.

There's also the point that the Fermi's main selling feature, just like a Nexus 6 replicant, has a built in lifespan. 12.3 years, if you care to think of it that way, or maybe just a little longer before it reverts back to being a normal knife.

I don't have much room in my collection for a working knife that can't feasibly be disassembled, and for that kind of money you could buy two CQC-6K's. Or a CRKT Cottidae and a glow-in-the-dark paint pen, with change left over.

But then, you wouldn't be able to tell all the ladies that you have a nuclear fuel rod in your pants.

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 tiny bottle of blue stuff.

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 unlabled bottle of goo, which appears appears to be screw threadlocker. (At first I thought this might have been intended to be some kind of lubricant, but it turns out I was wrong.)

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.

But it's doubtful you'll ever get a chance to use it anyway, because the included Torx driver is made of softer steel than the screws. 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 threadlocker 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.

Looks like a Climber, but has no hook and nothing on the scales. There is a mark where there was a triangular loho.

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 20 degrees, and the other is steeper at about 25. 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. One of the dogs padded by and put his nose in my hand. 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.

---

Each summer for three 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 three 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.

Probably 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 older brother, firmly 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 found in the household 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, far past the outskirts of town, 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, just 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. He also had a big old Buck knife he wore when he wasn't in town. That was cool, too, but less interesting.

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 my own 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 marched 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, driver, rider, mechanic, 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 wood or 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 in a puddle 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. These were important now that he was gone, so I should have done a better job. 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, someone's 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 the thing is, you won't know it then.

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.

This knife had been in my pocket for around 5 years with regular use (and sometimes abuse). Would recommend, it's a good selection of actually usable tools to have on you for those times when you aren't carrying a toolbox. Sometimes I've used the pliers even when I do have my toolbox with me, which is not something you would consider with a lot of cheaper multitools.

Over time the casing did become more silver than black and I did manage to break a few things - the can opener didn't like taking a chain link clip off, the precision screwdriver didn't like being used to pry at something (part of inside a door lock from memory), and the large flathead failed when popping a partition cover port off. I thought that last one wasn't something that should have broken the tool so after a few months I finally got around to sending it back for warranty over that and they replaced it without question.

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 @Squiddick17@lemm.ee 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 just received my aluminum model Exo-M in the mail today, and I absolutely love this knife, but it's so damn loud! I feel the urge to fidget with it, but I worry that I'm annoying my neighbors. It's so loud and piercing, it sounds like a Garand ping every time I open a package.

Does anyone have advice for noise reduction on knives? I thought about maybe putting a thin layer of epoxy or silicone or something along the ends of the frame that make contact with the blade, but I feel like the tolerances are so tight that any amount of material being present could possibly interfere with opening/closing the knife, so I don't want to risk something like that just yet. I suspect that any kind of coating I could apply would also just peel off almost immediately, anyway.

Any ideas? Or should I just learn to live with it?