Stop the presses. Hold the phone, blow me down, and stone all the crows.

We can pack it all in. Completion is achieved. SOG — you know, the Seal Pup and Trident people? They've gone and done it. They've invented a better and cheaper Bugout than the Benchmade Bugout, and apparently nobody noticed. This despite the latter apparently living rent free in every manufacturer's head. And ours too, come to think of it.

I labored the entire span of my teenage years believing that SOG stood for "Special Operations Gear." Apparently it's the Studies and Observations Group, and I would have called that an April Fools' day prank if I hadn't seen it written on the box. This is their Ultra XR, which is mildly saddled by having a name that makes it sound like some startup's virtual reality gizmo rather than the spiffing EDC knife that it is.

Oh, yeah. And NKD, by the way. As if my still having the box kicking around my desk didn't tip you off. Now that I've finally gotten around to doing all the photography on this thing I can actually start carrying it without having to hyperventillate about getting pocket lint all over it.

The Ultra XR retails for about $90, so half the cost of a Bugout. And it's got a blade made of S35VN steel, so theoretically two notches better than the S30V that the base Bugout comes with. No, there's no compromise there.

As we all know, Benchmade's patent on the Axis lock expired in 2018. And as we all further know, this opened up the floodgates for every other knifemaker on Earth to nick the idea and run with it. This is well into becoming one of those exasperatingly repeated factlets, like did you know that Steve Buscemi was a firefighter who helped in the rescue efforts after 9/11, or that the US version of Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a reworking of the Japanese game Doki Doki Panic? Did you know???

So while Axis-alike derivatives have been thick on the ground for the last several years, there's been one curious blind spot in the market. If you want a compact Axis folder, up until now your only options have basically been to give Benchmade some money. You can either buy a Full Immunity or a Partial Immunity, or a Mini Bugout, or you can go and soak your head. Everything with a crossbar lock from everyone else is seemingly pathologically in the 3" and up category.

Well, not anymore. For lo, here is the Ultra XR with an Axis-alike lock on it which in its various guises SOG as branded as their "XR lock."

None of this tells you much about what the Ultra XR's big headline feature is. In fact, even looking at it lying on a table like this doesn't do it justice.

This ought to give you a clue.

The Ultra XR is so thin, every cell phone reviewer in a five mile radius just got an inexplicable stiffie. It's only 5.57mm thick (0.217") across its scales, not including the clip or screw heads. They don't add much more, with it measuring up at 9.9mm across the button heads on the lock bar which is its widest point without the clip, or 0.390". Thanks to its single piece carbon fiber handle scales, it also only weighs 34.6 grams or 1.22 ounces — Around two thirds what a Bugout does.

It seems that ought to be an easy enough goal to achieve; just build your knife to be uselessly tiny and you too can enjoy a bunch of minimalist numbers on your spec sheet. But the Ultra XR isn't, and is still sized such that it's an actual Big Boy knife.

It's not that much smaller than an OG Bugout. 6-1/8", by my measure, not including the little part of the clip that sticks out. That's roundabout the same size as the Mini variant of the Bugout, itself a knife that costs twice as much. And that's just the pokey Grivory version, too. If you want a carbon fiber one to mix it with the Ultra XR's racecar materials cred, that'll be a full $325, thank you.

Part of what makes the striking thinness achievable is carbon fiber's high rigidity for its weight and thickness. Thus the Ultra XR doesn't require any liners beneath its scales, and they're constructed purely of thin slabs of carbon fiber. It's not totally unsqueezably rock solid rigid, but it's darn impressive compared to a bog standard old Bugout:

SOG have gotten clever with the XR Lock, as well. It eschews the usual "omega" hair springs that would normally reside in between the liners (or dinky plates, in the case of that-which-is-oft-named) and scales, the former obviously being something this thing hasn't got. Instead, the lock bar is driven by a tiny torsion spring that's wrapped around one of the body spacers.

You can see this easily in this highly uncouth and overexposed down-the-barrel shot that I took by shining a flashlight straight into the gap. Otherwise the lock works in the usual way, and is as ambidextrous as ever.

I took this thickness comparison shot but did not plan ahead to devise an appropriate segue to fit it into the narrative. Here it is anyway, for all that it's worth. The Ultra XR is visibly quite a bit thinner than either Benchmade's old 535 or its little brother. Why the Ultra XR is thus not the undisputed darling of, say, all backpackers everywhere remains a mystery.

The Ultra XR's drop pointed blade is 2-5/8" long or about 67.9mm, and only 0.0805" or 2.05mm thick. There's no thumb stud, since obviously that would add to the thickness. Instead, there's a slot cut into the spine of the blade for grip.

Of course you can still Axis Flick it open and shut all the livelong day. Nobody with an Axis locker uses the thumb studs for anything, regardless of how shiny and anodized they may or may not be.

The Ultra XR has a super deep carry clip that SOG suggest you could also use as a money clip. Despite appearances it is reversible. It sticks out the side more than double the thickness of the knife, but otherwise it's actually really nice. For once in history its not sprung so damn tightly you can't get it to friggin' let go of your pants. The draw is nice and smooth and very easy. I imagine that's largely due to the fact that the thing weighs so little overall that not much spring force is required to keep it clipped.

If you want to employ it as a keychain knife instead, there's no real provision made for that. I suppose you could pass some cord through the mounting holes for the clip if you removed it, or use the holes intended for reversal on the opposite side. You'd probably have to use dental floss, though.

There are two sizes of screw head on the Ultra XR, T6 and T5 Torx. It seems that SOG used T5s on all the things they didn't want you fucking with. The clip screws, for instance, are T6 and there are matching holes on both sides.

The Axis/XR/crossbar/whateveritis lock is a two piece design, and unscrews from one side. It's got T6 heads in both sides, but like everything on this knife is severely threadlockered so you have to stick a driver in each side in order to get it out. In its slot you can see the prong from the little torsion spring that powers it.

The pivot screws are T6 as well and of course also threadlocked. Believe it or not there is an anti-rotation flat in the pivot screw's shank and a matching D shaped cutout machined into one of the scales. It's anyone's guess as to which side is which out of the box, though, since the heads are the same on either side. So tread lightly. The blade rides on what appear to be Nylon washers.

The two carbon fiber handle slabs are separated by four barrel spacers with screws in either side, one of which acts as the end stop pin for the blade. They're also permanently threadlockered, and require a driver in each side to remove. I'm ashamed to admit that I only have one nice Wiha T5 driver bit despite owning oodles of the T6 ones (for obvious career-related reasons) and I snapped the tip off of my cheap T5 trying it. So, you won't get any photos of the back sides of the Ultra XR's handle scales. I'm sure you'll live. There's nothing exciting in there anyway, except the little torsion spring which I imagine has one leg slotted into a tiny hole drilled in one scale, and is probably prone to go "ping!" and get lost.

In case you forget what SOG actually stands for, they've helpfully laser engraved it in the back side of the blade. And speaking as the proud owner of a very nice laser engraver myself, I am now well versed in exactly what that kind of thing looks like. They used different power level or pulse width settings for the blade steel descriptor than they did for the branding. Cheeky devils.

I had a whole paragraph here speculating on what the blade was coated with to make it black, but I realize belatedly that it's all moot. The front of the box says right there that it's a titanium nitride coating, so undoubtedly applied via some manner of PVD process. I don't normally go for a coated blade but this one at least looks very nice for now. Time will tell if it holds up acceptably for a change, or winds up annoying me and I laser it off.

What I can tell you is that this thing is exceptionally sharp out of the box. The blade's thin geometry makes it slice through suitable materials very easily, although this will obviously never be a fighter or a bushcraft knife.

The Inevitable Conclusion

In case you couldn't tell, I'm just smitten with the Ultra XR. As SOG themselves tell it, it's the perfect urban carry or polite company EDC knife. It's short enough to be within the legal length limit practically everywhere, is made of a nice steel, and has a build quality that can't be criticized. It also weighs practically nothing and rides in your pocket so discreetly that, the marketing department actually being truthful for once, you may genuinely forget that it's there.

It doesn't hurt that it looks cool as hell, too. Even non-knife people can tell as soon as they handle it that it's something special.

I say this a lot, and in fact I might have made it my life's secondary mission to find all the myriad ways to prove this, but as long as the Ultra XR exists there's really no reason to spend the money for a Bugout. Like, ever. (My life's primary mission seems to have become to collect every balisong and screwball knife in the world.) Surely the big B has taken notice of this sort of thing, and all of the above probably has a lot to do with the rumors that the Bugout is finally slated to get a redesign for next year with purported aluminum handles plus a new thinner lock.

I think somebody's running scared. I'm still not in a big rush to buy one, though, because now I have this.

What I went and did was make myself a website:

https://www.flightlessforge.com/

We're going straight back to the Web 1.0 with this one. I haven't maintained a personal website since, oh, probably about 2002. It may thus surprise you to learn that my day job also involves maintaining a website, and one that's a heck of a lot more complicated than this. But given that I've already got one headache to manage I'd rather not give myself another one, so we're keeping this simple for now.

This is surely one of those personal vanity project things which will attract single-digit readership while I have a limitless forum to rattle on to myself forever about whatever off-topic nonsense is on my mind at the moment. If you lot think I type too much here, just imagine what I can get done when I don't have anyone around to stop me.

Anyway, several of you expressed interest in purchasing an Emperor knife. Not to deliberately play the FOMO card or anything, but I have thusly produced one (1) additional example of the same which is up for sale. It's serial number 1. I didn't make more than one because, uh...

I'm out of steel.

So this is seed capital; The sale of this knife will fund my purchase of enough materials to make several more, and eventually we can get to cooking. I'm also putting my Rockhoppers up for sale if any of you lot would like to get your hands on one of those and not have to buy a 3D printer. I figure this is probably a slightly better deal than giving me money via Patreon or Ko-Fi (nudge, nudge) whereupon you get nothing in return. I'm still building up my stock of those, so bear with me. I'll put some Adélies up later, once my printer is no longer busy on its current task.

We will return to our regularly scheduled shitposting, oh, hopefully tomorrow.

I employed my filament swapping plan when I printed the handle scales for this one, adding some stripes of a rather fetching green (if you ask me). It matches the pattern on the sheath, more or less.

I had some concerns about the fragility of the edge taking it down as thin as I did with my personal example, so on this one I left a lot more thickness behind the edge.

I heard you like clickbait.

This is my knife. There are no others like it, and this one is mine.

No, it really is. I made it with my own hands. As a matter of fact, I might have possibly taken the notion of making it with my own hands just a bit too far.

The Secret Of Show Business, Again

This all started fairly innocently. You see, I have this OG Böker Rold. Have done for years. I never got around to talking about it here.

The Rold is a fine knife. I was using it as my default camp knife for quite a while, hence the surface wear you see on its blade there. Böker themselves describe it as a "very durable Outdoor and Camp Knife," which in this business is a bold statement rather akin to standing on top of a hill in a thunderstorm with a copper tureen on your head while holding a flagpole, yelling about how all gods are sissies. That's because what with "bushcraft" still being so much in vogue amongst them as watch too much Youtube, you're likely to find dudebros attempting to use your creation for nothing less than hacking down the last of the sequoias and trying to baton rocks. It seems nobody thinks to pack an axe anymore or, heavens forbid, some type of folding saw.

But so far as I've been able to tell the Rold is the real deal in that respect. It's a Jesper Voxnæs design, he of previous fame around here for also coming up with the Gnome, which we inspected quite some time ago. So far mine remains resolutely unbroken, but as these are now out of production and apparently in ascendancy to becoming collector's items, mine doesn't see much use anymore.

There are a lot of things I like about the Rold, but then again there are some things I don't. On the positive side it's a bit of an ergonomic tour-de-force, with a clever forward grip design that allows you to place your index finger through the massive choil forward of the guard to choke up on it for control, or hold it back on the main handle to give yourself more leverage. It's also not exactly a small object at an 11" overall length, and it's made out of D2, m'favorite steel. But it's got a matte finish made of grey enamel or something that scuffs and scratches as soon as you look at it, the handle scales can't be dismounted, and with the best will in the world the sheath it came with is a bit naff. Mine required significant tuning with a heat gun straight out of the box.

Plus, for as large as it is I am still immensely covetous of my nephew's Scrapyard Dog Son of Dogfather for filling the same role, another currently unobtainable piece which has a similar jam as the Rold but is much, much thicker. Thus like a cat reading a newspaper, I concluded to myself one fine day not too long that I ought to make my own damn knife and see if I can marry the elements of these that are my favorites. Just then and there, on the spot. Just like that.

So, you see, what you do is you find an act that works.

And steal it.

How Hard Can It Be?

There are men in this world — and they are universally men — who will send away to have a blade blank cut, and then send away to have it heat treated, and then send away to have handles made for it and yet they'll still stick their thumbs in their suspenders and insist to you as bold as you please that they're a custom knife maker. Uh-huh. Sure you are, bud.

Thus at the outset of all this, I wrote one ironclad rule: I will do all of this in house, by myself. No outsourcing. This is Lemmy, after all; we love seizing the means of production around here.

And to as great an extent as possible, no outside research, either. You can spend all day watching videos or bickering on forums and never get anything done. I'm a bird of considerable resource and, let's face it, also the ownership of a couple of hundred knives. So part of that's got to rub off via some kind of horizontal osmosis to expertise in building knives as well.

...Right?

I've also got a quite broad selection of tools at my disposal amassed over the course of a lifetime. Surely this'll be a cinch.

The Plan

An individual with more enthusiasm and rather less hard earned cynicism would grab the nearest chunk of scrap metal and go at it with the angle grinder straight away. But not me. Much to my own astonishment as much as anyone else's, I sat down and planned this out.

In fact, I drafted my vision down to every last detail in FreeCAD.

I started with the general ergonomic plan from the Rold and got to modifying. With a whack-diddle-diddle-hi-ho, and a stretch here and a tweak there, I arrived at a first draft. I also made it bigger. Much bigger.

As you all are no doubt aware I am also the owner of a ludicrously large 3D printer. So I employed the same for, I think for the first time in my life, actually accomplishing one of the original stated intentions of the whole damn process, which was to prototype a 1:1 life sized replica of my blade blank.

Printing your plan out on paper is one thing, but actually being able to produce in less than an hour a real physical representation of your design that you can hold in your hand is an incredible game changer. There are ergonomic considerations you won't be able to make just looking at the representation of a thing on the screen. I was able to iterate on my design basically for free, so I went through several prototype stages before settling on the final shape. And when you hold it, it is real in a sense that no mere paper proxy can approach.

This is not a how-to column, and in fact may actually turn out to be a how-to-not piece instead. But if I'm going to offer one piece of advice, it's this one: If you're going to get into this sort of thing, get your hands on some manner of rapid prototyping system. It doesn't necessarily have to be a 3D printer. Something like a CNC router or similar that can reasonably precisely hack your design out of plywood or whatever material would also do. But you're going to want something. Trust me on this.

Instruct Me Not

I bought some steel.

Total bill of materials cost: $30.

Alas, it seems to have arrived upside down. No matter; I'm certain I can make it work anyway.

Truth be told, this entire odyssey actually started when I was noodling around on the internet and I read about the heat treating process for D2 steel. I'm not actually a total stranger to metalworking, and I've seen enough about how this works. Regular carbon steels, and a lot of other alloys besides, are heat treated by the typical medieval style heat-and-dunk method you may be picturing which results in a large hiss and a bloody great cloud of steam. You can do this at home, if you've got a forge or some other suitable way to get your metal cooking red hot — but D2 doesn't work that way. It's an air hardening steel, and that's exactly what it sounds like: Heat it up, and... That's it. Just let it sit there. I found this fascinating.

You still have to temper it, of course, because at the end of the hardening and/or quenching phase most steels are rock hard but also possess a glassine brittleness which is certainly not a property you want in your big old tree-mauling chopper of a knife.

But I watched someone do this and I immediately thought, "Hey, I could do that, too!" So I did.

And D2 is still my favorite knife steel in the world. This is just icing on the cake.

Step one here was to print a full sized template of my design. This is significantly less fancified than my replica prototypes, which had edge bevels and everything. This is just a slab in the complete outline of the final product. I traced this out on a chunk of my raw D2 steel which alas I neglected to take a picture of at the time so you'll have to use your imagination on how that works.

Actually, back up a bit. Step one was actually to figure out whether or not the D2 flat stock I just bought from some rando on eBay in trifling hobbyist quantities actually arrived in its annealed state.

D2, you see, can be hardened to an extreme degree. Like, a drill bit dulling and tool breaking degree. I had to determine if my metal arrived soft and annealed as it should have, or if I was going to have a heat treating operation on my hands right out of the gate.

I don't have a fancy Rockwell hardness testing machine, but I do have this suspiciously cheap set of allegedly Japanese hardness grading files I bought off of the internet for twenty bucks some time ago.

Trepidatiously, I started with the hardest one and worked my way down until I determined that, yes, the corner of my D2 slab succumbed to each and every one of them. So it ought to be soft enough to drill.

I also had some misgivings about being able to accurately locate the three holes I'd need to lance into the handle in order to put the scale mounting screws through. I devised a solution which I'm proud to declare that I think is clever, which was to make this set of printed bushings whose inner diameters match the business end of my centerpunch precisely, and which fit through the holes in my template in exactly the right positions, provided I manage not to move the template at all between punchings.

I have been told that starting your holes with a centering bit is actually the "wrong" way to do it. It worked for me, though. Thus I was able to bore all three holes without much trouble.

I ain't not no undummy; I drilled the holes first, whereupon I would discover whether I was bashing my head against a brick wall or not, purposefully long before wasting an entire afternoon hacking the profile of the blade out of the metal and winding up with a complicated chunk of scrap after discovering I couldn't put holes through it.

The astute among you will probably have realized that since D2 hardens by heating it and simply allowing the stuff to cool to room temperature, doing anything to it that creates heat will readily cause it to work harden. And this is indeed so, including the bits immediately adjacent to where you have, just for purest sake of example, just been throwing a nine foot long rooster tail of sparks off of it with your angle grinder.

I don't like to toot my own horn except in very precise and specialized circumstances. This is one of those. I am by my own recognition the king of all angle grinders. I can do damn near anything with an angle grinder, up to and including this, and all the things I couldn't I turned out on my little belt sander, the same one I use for reprofiling blades and getting nicks out of edges.

...Almost everything.

I quickly concluded that my weedy Harbor Freight 1x30" sander was absolutely not going to hack it for the blade's primary grind. Oh, believe me that I gave it a damn good try anyway. But after spending an hour and winding up with little more than just shining up the first eighth of an inch I boldly gave up. My stock is a quarter of an inch thick and I made the deeply questionable decision to put a full or at least nearly full flat grind on this thing, just like the one its inspiration has.

So.

I Was On The Internet This Week...

And I bought this.

Some manner of honest-to-goodness belt grinder has been on my shopping list for literal years, and today on this glorious day I was finally handed a solid justification.

Total bill of materials cost: $829.

This highly suspicious Chinese model seems to be built on the same pattern as pretty much all of them on offer around this size and price point. I picked one based purely on lead time, and here it is. I couldn't tell you who actually made it. Probably no one can.

It arrived in an alarmingly dense crate as if I'd actually ordered a Tasmanian devil. I had to break it apart with hammers and a crowbar.

To illustrate the true breadth of the cost cutting measures we're dealing with here, this thing is so cheap the manufacturer couldn't even be bothered to make a 120 volt version for North American consumption. Instead it comes with this yum-cha 120 to 240v step up transformer which I'm totally certain will not randomly blow up in my face and subsequently burn down my shop some day. I'll just keep this unplugged when it's not in use, I think, if it's all the same to you.

I'm also chuffed to bits to discover that it came prewired with this mountable VFD unit that would be right at home in an industrial control panel enclosure. Astonishingly, it worked right out of the box, although in my opinion by default the motor ought to spin the other way. I believe rectifying that is a simple matter of switching two wires, but there's also a reverse button right there on the panel and so for now I can't be bothered.

I'm much less chuffed to report that no part of the perfunctory instructions leaflet that came with this thing wastes any words on explaining how the hell you're meant assemble it. It also doesn't tell you the trick to correctly tensioning the belt, but I figured it all out readily enough.

I am given to understand that there is no upper limit to the potential bodaciousness of a belt grinding setup, and the true aficionados inevitably build their own. I'm pleased as punch to report that this one sure does it for me, though. The complete and utter lack of safety mechanisms, guards, or interlocks makes it feel right at home in my workshop. And my Harbor Freight sander feels like an electric toothbrush by comparison. For reference, that's the little green jobbie immediately to the left of this that looks as if you could just about stick it in your shirt pocket.

In sheer recognition of the extent of my talents, I also bought this handy jig for holding your knife at a consistent angle while you're grinding the bevel into it. Certainly I could do it freehand like a Real Man, I tell myself in order get to sleep at night, it's just that this will provide a more consistent finish. Yeah, that's the ticket.

What the hell. It was only twenty bucks.

Total bill of materials cost: $849.

Even with my shiny new toy I found that the primary grind was taking an inordinate amount of time. I eventually determined that this was because I was running my grinder entirely too slowly, out of a combination of misunderstanding the readout on the VFD's panel and also being afraid to wind it up too high lest the thing suck me bodily into the works and spit me out the other side.

The former was easy enough to rectify and the latter turned out to be a non-issue, since even at maximum throttle I actually found the process to be fully controllable. Except, now we were making real sparks.

Schoolboy errors made: 1.

Finishing the primary grind still took a much larger chunk of the afternoon than I would have liked. My troubles may come down to using the equally cheap and Chinese belts supplied alongside my grinder. Since this whole process is a learning experience, we'll chalk up that one thusly: For the next knife, buy a better set of belts.

This entire affair produced an alarming yet curiously satisfying amount of metal dust.

After taking this picture I placed a five gallon bucket full of water directly below the belt path on my grinder to catch the bulk of the shavings, which appeared to accomplish absolutely nothing.

With the primary grind complete, now it was time for the fun part.

The Fun Part

Recall, many paragraphs ago, that I said I would do no outsourcing of my production. I was not kidding when I said that. I was making my Serious Samurai face and everything. I absolutely will not send this away for heat treating. Get the fuck outta here with that.

I am now proud owner of my very own heat treating kiln.

Total bill of materials cost: $3804.

This is a Hot Shot Ovens 18K knifemaker's kiln, for knifemaking, by knifemakers. Which is what I am. Unlike my grinder it is a highly competent piece of equipment. Yes, I even got the one with the fancy "TAP" programmable controller. Hey, it was only a hundred bucks more. That basically fits within a rounding error by this point.

Actually, if I were to do it all again I probably would have foregone the fancy controller and just gotten the regular single stage one. The TAP controller is wi-fi enabled and theoretically offers smartphone control, but it's another one of those thrice damned things where the manufacturer expects you to pay a monthly subscription to unlock some of the features built into it, and I'll be stuffed if I'm doing that. You can still do multi-step programming of the kiln with timings and temperature curves and all right on the screen, so I'll be sticking to that instead.

Paywall or not, this baby will still do 2200° F. I don't need it to, mind you, but it's nice to know that I can.

Step 2: Bake at 1875° F for 40 minutes, then allow to cool.

It feels wrong doing a "quench" on a piece of red hot glowing steel by dangling it off of a chunk of round stock clamped in the vise and just leaving it there.

After cooling off the blade has this rather attractive patina on it.

Schoolboy errors made: 2.

The more sage among you are aware that I made a critical blunder, here. You see, D2 is a high chromium content steel and when you're cooking it at thousands of degrees you really ought to protect it from the atmosphere somehow, which I in my combination of exuberance and inexperience, plus being acquainted only with plain carbon steels, failed to do. That black stuff all over the blade is a layer of steel that's decarburized, and has instead allowed the chromium to come out of solution and form up on the surface to oxidize.

On plain carbon steel you also get forge scale all over it, or I guess whatever the equivalent of that ought to be called if you haven't actually forged the thing, but this is trivially easy to knock off with a quick trip back to your belt sander.

Not so with the chromium rich layer encrusting what was until forty minutes ago my beautiful and shiny knife-to-be. Even my meanest 24 grit belt would barely touch the stuff. You know what they make out of chromium oxide, right? The grit for abrasives. Like, it's the active ingredient in that bar of green stropping compound that makes it green. And it's the stuff that's in Flitz, too. That means it's harder than steel, Q.E.D.

Fortunately I had another brain wave, which was to try dunking it in acid. White vinegar, in this case, which after a 30 minute bath enticed the stuff to let go to the extent that I could blast it off with a high speed wire wheel.

Still and all, next time I'll use some toolmaker's foil to wrap my blade before heat treatment. I'd rather not go through all that again.

The final phase after tempering (500° F for two hours, chosen to prioritize toughness over hardness/edge retention) was to polish up all of the surfaces from the ugliness I imparted on them by being a dummy about the heat treatment. I stepped up through my collection of belts until I reached 180 grit which was the finest I had for my big belt grinder. I briefly toyed with the idea of switching to my little machine to keep going, since I have an array of specialty sharpening belts for it going all the way up to the equivalent of 2000 grit. But I ultimately decided against it because A) the blade is so damn big I'm not sure I could get even coverage with the little machine to begin with, and B) for a bushwhacking knockaround knife I'm not sure I want a satiny smooth finish on it I'll just fuck up in the first three seconds anyhow.

So the hell with it.

I also realized at this point that I'd forgotten to cut my planned jimping into the spine.

Schoolboy errors made: 3.

Life pro tip: Next time, do those cuts before hardening the fucking thing. I'll bet you it'll be easier.

I deftly avoided one other obvious pratfall in all of this. You'll note that at no point doing this treatise did I say anything about putting an edge on it. That's because I didn't until the very last step, in order to save myself from amputating all ten of my fingertips while I was grinding and tempering and polishing and all the rest of it.

I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy.

A Clever Dick

I hate making handle scales. I've only done it twice in my life, and it was a pain in my tailfeathers both times. I resolved not to do it again.

Fortunately, I already had a plan in place. The beauty of drafting my knife in CAD down to the last maniacal detail is that I can simply instruct my 3D printer to print out a set of handle scales for me. Perfectly formed, pre-holed, the same on both sides, and direct fitting. And you don't have to breathe a single molecule of Micarta dust.

Sometimes my genius is tangible.

Additional Financial Considerations

Throughout this procedure, several friends and acquaintances stopped by my workshop to see what all the noise was. The ultimate upshot of that is, I now have six or seven open orders for more of these.

In light of that, I made another decision.

Total bill of materials cost: $7403.

Do I need a $3599 large format 100 watt fiber laser engraver? No, absolutely not. Could I have made do with a lesser 60 or even 40 watt machine? Yes, probably. But I wanted a 100 watt fiber laser engraver, you see. And now I have a good excuse.

Plus, it lets me do this.

I don't envy people who have to justify their toy purchases to their wives. Not one little bit. Man, my life really is rad sometimes.

Laser engraving is another whole skill set I'll have to add to my repertoire. I'm getting there slowly and I'm sure I'll have lots to say about it later. For now, I used the offcut from my first piece of steel to figure out what the best settings are for my material, and had at it.

To celebrate this momentous occasion I drew up a new logo and everything. You know, now that we're not making knives out of plastic anymore.

The Review Part

I now find myself in the unique and somewhat unenviable position of having to present to you... er, my own knife. Foibles and all. It's not perfect, but to be fair it is literally my first attempt at this pattern, in this steel, with this machinery.

I would like you to meet the Flightless Forge Emperor. So named after the most humongous of all extant penguins, an attribute which it shares.

It is, without a doubt, fucking massive. Of course this is by design. It's 12-5/8" (320mm) long from tip to tail, with a 7-1/4" (184mm) blade with every little bit of it being usable as a result of the choil at the base that's big enough to fit even a gloved index finger into. All told it weighs 16.72 ounces (474.2 grams). Of course it does — It's a quarter inch thick slab of D2. If you are a wimp, this is not the knife for you.

Since my ISO standard comparison method would be close to useless, here it is next to the oft aforementioned Böker Rold. The latter is in and of itself not a small knife. The Emperor could probably cleave it in half.

The blade is a flat grind that's nearly the full breadth of the knife ending in a roughly 20 degree microbevel that should result in unparalleled chopping and splitting power. Opening your mail, fine whittling, cleaning your fingernails, trimming your arm hairs: These are all tasks that the Emperor is absolutely not designed to do. The Emperor is for bifurcating logs and fighting bears, and looking mean as hell doing it.

One of the things about the Rold that annoys me is its pronounced and slightly wonky plunge line separating the primary taper from the flat part of the knife, which bisects the front of the choil and leaves an unrefined stairstep there. Plus, with the best will in the world it's also not quite the same on both sides. Thus the Emperor has no plunge line at all, with the grind gently and at least mostly smoothly transitioning into the flat just before the handle. This leaves nothing to snag, and also no crevice for gunk to accumulate in.

A small ramp on the spine of the blade provides a forward endstop for your thumb when you're holding the Emperor in either position. This is jimped subtly for tactile feel more than any kind of grip, since the ramp and the finger guard should prove sufficiently proof against sliding up onto the edge. The edge which is, mind you, nearly a full inch and a half below the lower edge of the handle anyway. In order for the Emperor to bite you in any situation something must have seriously gone wrong, although provided only you can keep your off hand out from in between it and whatever unfortunate object you have underneath it on the stump.

(The blurry thing behind it in the shot is one of those telescopic magnet retriever tools, which I'm using as a kickstand to prop the knife up. It won't quite stand up on a flat surface and makes an almighty clang every time it hits the deck when you attempt to do so.)

This also means that every single iota of its cutting edge can be brought down on a flat surface. Not even the finger guard interferes with this. It's not exactly shaped to be great at, say, slicing tomatoes wafer thin. But because of all of the above, you could probably still do it if you were a sufficiently high caliber of nut.

The handle has a sculpted bird's head design with a pronounced flare at the pommel to prevent it from sliding forward out of your grip. You can hold it either fore...

...Or aft of the finger guard depending on what you're planning to do with it.

On the final article the scales are 3D printed ABS. This material is both heat and impact resistant, but also dead easy for me to print without driving myself into apoplectic fits. Unlike a depressing number of purported "bushcraft ready" knives, these are screwed rather than pinned into place so the scales are readily dismountable for cleaning, customization, or let's face it — replacement. One of the major knocks against the current crop of swanky Micarta handled models that are all the rage out there now is that you're forever afraid of fucking up your irreplaceable bespoke handle scales because they're permanently pinned into place.

I've long maintained that a fancy knife you won't use is automatically lesser than a ratty one which you will, so that's not how it works here. If, somehow, you manage to mar or even break the Emperor's handles you can simply take them off. The print job to make a new pair takes less than an hour, and they'll bolt right up.

Before I handled the first pair I was predicting for sure that printed scales would be stupid and terrible. Surprisingly, they're not. The inherent layer structure of the print results in a rather Micarta-esque texture or, if we're feeling especially charitable, one that's reminiscent of woodgrain. This results in a surface that's grippy but not too rough on your hands. It looks, feels, and acts like the business.

I deliberately sought out hollow handle screws for this so that those lanyard types of people could have something to put their cord through without doing anything so vulgar as punching a vestigial hole through the entire assembly that'd rankle you forever if you didn't use it. As it happened, such hardware was tougher to find than you'd think.

You guys will love the solution I came up with. Are you ready for this? These are stainless steel chainring bolts for a bicycle.

They're authoritatively rustrpoof, swank as all hell, and you can see daylight right through them. They're also readily undone with a garden variety 5mm Allen key, and you don't even need to stick a spanner driver in the other side. It's a bit of a squeeze to get 550 paracord through the hole in the middle although it can be done if you use a nail or the end of an awl or something as a pusher. 3mm cord, however, sails right through like it was meant for it.

The left hand side bears my new Flightless Forge logo, which you've already seen. Left hand, that is, relative to holding it in your right hand with the edge down, i.e. ready for use.

Just who is that handsome penguin, anyway?

The right hand side proudly proclaims that no robots, AI, underpaid child laborers, or CNC machinery (well, except for my 3D printer if you want to be pedantic) were involved in the creation of this knife. Mine is also a serial number that no one else can ever ever have. Neener, neener, neener.

I figure now that I'm working in steel rather than silly old plastic I ought to invent a new brand to illustrate that we're no longer fucking around.

Well, but we demonstrably are fucking around. This is just like playing store when you were a kid — we'll pretend to be a real outfit with a logo and a cash register and the hours on the door and everything. Except in this case, it's bad ass.

The Emperor requires what might possibly be the widest Kydex sheath ever concieved in history. The upper mounting screws are spaced such that it is technically Tek-Lok compatible, at least if you are stark raving loony enough to try it. Otherwise, the webbing belt loop provided is a much more practical option and is comprised of the fattest webbing I've ever seen in my life. It's 4" across!

With the Emperor dangling off of your belt no one at the campground, or hell, anywhere within half a mile of you will be able to doubt your virility or outdoors credibility.

The Emperor's edge is mirror polished at 2000 grit and thanks to the flat grind going nearly all the way down to the apex, it doesn't need to be very broad. The chopping power is phenomenal, which is half and half due to the geometry but also due to the monumental heft of the knife. The weight distribution is somewhat blade biased, with the point of balance being nearly precisely on the first bit of the edge forward of the choil.

Yes, it batons.

Hacking at the grain crosswise is likewise no problem.

As stated, the Emperor is a full quarter of an inch thick at the spine. This makes it absurdly robust at the expense, of course, of weighing over a pound.

On the left, the Emperor. On the right, the Böker Rold, itself not exactly a svelte object.

I spent all afternoon whacking every piece of scrap wood I could lay my hands on into kindling. This had no noticeable impact on the finish nor the edge, even after one ill-fated attempt to split a hardwood log that was about 10" across and got the knife so irrevocably stuck I had to use a rubber mallet to knock it free. I call that a success, I don't know about you.

I only filmed some of this. The bulk of it will surely remain lost to history since Lemmy only lets you post little snippets, although I might be talked into it if the weather's nice and there's any market at all for, say, a live stream of me and my stupid penguin face smashing random chunks of wood into toothpicks for hours on end. It can't possibly be any more insipid than what most of the kids seem to be watching these days.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This is my knife. There will some day be others like it, but this one will always be mine.

I've heard it said that for your first knife you should start with something uncomplicated, in an easy to work with steel, and above all small.

Um...

No.

If there's one thing you can say about CRKT, it's that they certainly let their designers fly their freak flags high. Their name has crossed our desks many times already with a whole array of the abstract and the absurd, several of which we've looked at previously.

There are gentlemen's knives in the world, and then again there's this. Here's the Michael Walker designed Model 4200 "Bladelock," an article for which no one seems to have been able to think up a snappier name.

Mr. Walker's résumé famously includes the invention of "over 50" blade locking mechanisms. This includes, apparently, the liner lock with which we are all familiar and has gone on to dominate the world. I imagine he could have stopped there, really, and in light of such boundless ongoing creativity I don't know if anyone's been around to check lately if he's possibly been inadvertently stapled to his drafting table and is thus unable to escape, or what. Regardless, this is a production item in a long line of CRKT produced Walker Bladelockers which I am given to understand originally sprang forth from a couple of custom knives built by the man himself, about which I can find scant information online. That is aside from e.g. this listing for one astonishing example, which can evidently be yours for the mere trifling sum of $38,500. (Screen shot saved here, by the way, in case this listing ever goes dark in the future.)

Has, uh, anyone got a line on what those guys who did the Louvre job are up to these days? I might have some work for them. Asking for a friend.

Meanwhile this Model 4200 variant is a production item and freely available, not to mention attainable by mere mortals. But even so, there's no denying it's a veritable work of art. The level of unnecessary details encrusting it are so confidently flagrant that the effect goes straight through gaudy and bursts out the other side, emerging as elegance instead. Take, for instance, the fact that lightly textured G-10 scales are not only so densely machined, but also retained on the forward end by four screws all in neat row like this.

Why four when one certainly would have sufficed? Because fuck you, that's why.

The pivot screw is encircled by exquisitely machined gear-tooth disks which serve no purpose whatsoever and exist only to look cool, and because Mr. Walker is flouting that he can. Look carefully at the heel of the blade when it's open and you'll see a section of matching texture, cut to a radius that precisely matches the round tips of the liners with apparently subatomic precision.

You'll also note the distinct lack of a liner lock in there, regardless of whether or not Mike Walker invented the damn thing.

The name probably tipped you off that this sports one of his other inventions instead. The 4200 is indeed packing the "Bladelock" mechanism, which is a clever arrangement that combines the locking and unlocking button with the thumb stud. When at rest the blade is locked in place with the same precision as the breech on Jesus' very own 1911 and with no apparent way to make it open. To unlock it, you press the thumb stud down into the blade slightly, at which point it can be pivoted to glide open in near silence.

Closing it is the same, but I find that the action of opening it is more intuitive and feels a lot less awkward. Due to the unusual spot you have to put pressure on given the location of the stud when the blade is out, it takes some effort and practice to smoothly shut the 4200 and this requires a specific manner of grip. Your natural inclination if you're not paying attention is virtually guaranteed to be a hand-jive that ultimately involves shutting it on your fingers until you figure it out.

I now know two things about Mr. Walker, only one of which is that he invented the liner lock. The other one is that he's right handed, and I know this because the 4200 is the most right handed knife in the world. There is a traditionally constructed pocket clip living on one side, and only one side. Like everything on this knife it's obsessively styled, and has an asymmetrical design. This precludes putting it on the other side which is just as well, because nobody was uncouth enough to sully the opposite side with a bunch of unused screw holes just for the off chance that someone would be gauche enough to show up being left handed.

The second clue is that because of how the mechanism works, there's only a single thumb stud on the right hand side of the knife. That's not reversible either, although mechanically speaking there really isn't much in the way of designing it such that it would have been, which we'll see in a little bit. Opening this with your left hand is thusly not technically impossible, if you roll a natural 20 on your dexterity all the time and you think you use your index finger rather than your thumb, but functionally it may as well be.

If you are a subscriber Jurassic Park Binoculars Object Density Luxury Index, the 4200 is likely to make you very pleased indeed. Despite being an eminently EDC-able 7" long overall when open and 4-1/16" closed, it's deceptively dense at 116.5 grams (4.11 ounces). It feels solid and chunky in the hand with its 0.540" thickness (13.75mm) which isn't hipster levels of thin'n'light, exactly, but also isn't too out of the ordinary in thickness compared with plenty of other knives.

The blade is 3" long (CRKT call it "2.93") and 0.139" thick (3.55mm) which ought to slot this neatly in to the legal EDC category in most places. It's 14C28N, so while not terribly fancy by today's standards it ought to hold a good edge and stand up to typical daily tasks of the sort you'll find in civilized society. I imagine the marginally increased thickness is necessary in order to fit the locking mechanism in there, but that also winds up having the next effect if making it seem a lot more stout than your typical EDC whatsamajig.

Just when you thought it was safe to forget about the CQC-6K, it's back.

The 4200 rides about the same and is a little shorter, but feels beefier somehow even though it plainly isn't. Believe it or not, it draws pretty cleanly as well despite the byzantine texture cut into the scales. It's got a nice balance of grab and release on the clip with the right amount of springiness, which for once in this damn fool world means that somebody probably actually put some thought into that for a change. Given everything else I can't say as I'm too surprised.

And, of course, no exploration of a funky knife is complete without a thorough warranty voiding in order to learn of its secrets.

I will say this about that. I own precisely zero non-ridiculous CRKT folders and as far as normal knives of theirs go I've only ever taken apart one Model M16, so my field of comparison may as well be nonexistent. But damned if this thing doesn't go together like a friggin' Swiss watch. No part of the disassembly overtly fought me in that none of the screws refused to come out, but all the parts fit together with a stubborn interference fit that is equal parts impressive and mildly aggravating. Not just the Bauhaus exposed cross pin between the liners and the broach for the main screw, but even the scales themselves which envelop and encapsulate the liners are ground with such precision that I literally had to pry them off with a guitar pick.

Every bit of the inside of this thing must be Mr. Walker having us on. The gear-tooth disks, for instance, look like maybe they ought to spin around like a fidget toy. And on a lesser knife they might, and forever be rattly and noisy as a result. That would be lack refinement, so in this case it's not how it works. There were also a dozen other easier ways they could have been retained. Broaching them for the same anti-rotation flat as is already found on the pivot screw would be favorite. But where would be the skill in that? So instead Mr. Walker decided to press a shiny steel detent ball into both handle liners, positioned exactly just so, which interfaces with just one of the holes drilled in each of the disks. Any of them; it doesn't matter which one when you're putting it back together.

This is a lunatic solution to what ought to be a trivial engineering detail. No one who is specifically dedicated enough to wrestle this thing apart would ever notice. It's pure, unadulterated showing off.

The 4200's action is so smooth because it's a ball bearing opener. As usual CRKT utterly neglect to mention this anywhere in the blurb. Here you can also see the two pockets into which the lock bar falls for both the open and closed positions, and some cruft I failed to adequately clean away.

The backspacer is screwed through on one side and the other side is press fit. The interference here was so tight that I couldn't get this pair to budge, so I left them as is. This is all you get.

Here are the real goods. The Bladelock system consists of a machined and presumably hardened steel bar with a little coil spring hidden under it, which seesaws on a pin which you can just see here has been driven into the spine of the blade and ground flush. This is permanent, and there's no matching reveal on the other side. Thus the bar can't be dismounted without enacting significant violence, which I'm not about to try. Without this, say if the bar were retained by a small screw driven into the same location, the locking system could have theoretically been made reversible by punching the requisite cuts into both liners rather than just one, and allowing the bar to be removed and flipped over. That's not the universe we're living in, though.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The 4200 Walker Bladelock may very well be a stylistic tour-de-force and a masterclass in elegance. Just not if you happen to be left handed.

This must be what the youngsters these days are calling drip. I really want to like this thing, and everything about it screams quality, luxury, and competence.

There's just no getting around the fact that ergonomically speaking the Bladelock mechanism is just a bit naff. It doesn't take much effort to press in the stud, objectively speaking, but the force it does take is still slightly too much. Locating where to put that force and not causing the thing to mousetrap shut on your fingers in the process results in a knife that you have to think about a trifle too hard in order to use which is, yes, not elegant.

I am fully aware that this gripe is pretty rich coming from a chump who deliberately carries a balisong knife on a daily basis. Quiet, you.

But despite somehow being less than the sum of its parts there's still so much left about it that calls to me, sings to me, whispers to me not to put it down. And what can I say? I'm still listening.

Can I be honest with you? Rule number five on that sidebar there. No brand elitism. I had one brand in mind when I wrote that, and it's Gerber.

I've just never liked them. Maybe it's their preponderance of crappy multi tools and low rent knives incessantly festooning the shelves of all the department stores which among other things consistently and for decades couldn't even be bothered to specify what they were made out of. Maybe it was seeing yet another one of those stupid Bear Grylls "survival" knives snapped off at the hilt, or having one too many Paraframes brought to me for sharpening with the tips busted off.

Come to think of it, maybe it's actually Gerber owners I have a problem with.

Well, like it or not, now I am one. Again.

Because here is the Gerber Doubledown, a notionally Balisong Shaped Object which is a classification of thing, as we all know, which can't cross my airspace without at least one example falling into my hands.

But, you say, what's so special about it?

Hur, hur, hur.

That's a Kershaw Moonsault in front, there, which is already so much so one of the largest balisongs on the market that I believe I used the term "ridiculon hugeitude" to describe it in my own ancient writeup on the same. And then, the Doubledown makes it look like a trinket you ought to dangle off of your charm bracelet.

In fact, Gerber don't even market the Doubledown as a knife. Instead they bill it as a "folding machete," describing it as "an outdoor tool that delivers never-before-seen function with an innovative design."

I certainly suppose you could say that.

Therefore, looking at it in knife terms the Doubledown is absolutely gigantic: 9-1/8" when it's closed, and a full 15-1/4" open with a rather imposing 7" long blade. Said blade is 3/16" thick and right there in the blurb Gerber claim that it can be used for chopping and batoning. The wisdom, or potential lack thereof, of trying this remains thus far unknown.

All told the Doubledown weighs just over half a kilo, 503.7 grams or 17.77 ounces by my scale. That's just the article itself, not including its included nylon pouch thing.

Several months ago I retired my storebought little illuminated photo box and built a bigger one, to my own specifications, from scratch. I'm glad I did. But for the Doubledown it's still not big enough. I had to employ a considerable degree of wide angle trickery to take most of these pictures and even then I just barely pulled it off. That's what we're dealing with, here.

The sheer enormity of the box it comes in ought to clue you in to the fact that this is in no way, shape, or form an EDC piece. And of course, what drew me to this in the first place is that it's very clearly something approximating a fuck-off massive balisong knife.

Well, almost.

On the head end we find a few familiar features such as the usual double pivoting arrangement, which is in this case curiously geared. There's also a single enormous kicker pin here. Not, it must be said, two of them which is a little odd and would be more expected of a balisong knife. But hey, the Benchmade Model 42 got away with only one pin and that thing's a bonna fide classic, right? So maybe there's nothing to worry about after all.

The tail sports a swinging latch which is a little unusual in that it slots into a pocket in the tip of its opposite handle rather than wrapping all the way around to grab it from the outside. But to call up Benchmade once again, that's how the Model 87 does it so it's not like that's without precedent, either.

A spring prong cut into the steel liner there detents the pegs in the latch into place and there's a little croquet hoop there for your lanyard as well.

You can't butterfly-swing the Doubledown open, though. That's because it's equipped with Gerber's "patent-pending 4 lock system which engages in 3 positions to ensure safe operation," which is something they sure do make an awful lot of noise about.

That would be these, which are a quartet of pinch latches with one on each side of both handles. You have to squeeze all four of them fully to get the Doubledown's action to let go. Regardless of what the latch is doing these lock it — plus or minus a certain amount of lash and wiggle — in both the open and closed positions.

And lest you think this is just another one of my gratuitous knife-half-open glamor photos, for some damn fool reason they also lock it in precisely this position as well if you're not holding them all pinched throughout the handles' full range of travel. Gerber describes this as a feature and not a bug; it's the third position alluded to in the marketing copy.

I presume this is meant to catch the handles when you're closing the knife, not necessarily when opening it, in order to forestall chopping your own fingers off if you're incautious. And to be fair, the Doubledown probably has enough heft that it could do it.

Here's the full song and dance with its action:

All of this is probably warranted, as you'll discover once you start reading the reviews on this thing.

"Dangerous!" writes 'Brandon,' "Love this knife. Caution it is very sharp. Kinda clunky when closing keep it away from your body. I accidentally dropped it when closing it and it went right through my shorts and cut my thigh deep. The safety stop to keep you from cutting your fingers off works well. Make sure you have a good grip."

Or,

"So sharp I had to go to the ER," from 'Nelson121.' "I love this knife, despite my trip to the hospital. It’s compact, rugged, and sharp. So sharp that right out of the box I cut myself. Note, while closing the knife there is a snag point to keep the knife from closing on your own fingers, good feature, but if you’re not ready for it, it may cause you to drop the knife. Even while sitting cross legged and the knife only falling 6-8 inches it pierced through my foot near my ankle, severing an artery."

And so on, and so forth. Perhaps that shade I was throwing by picking on Gerber owners wasn't quite going far enough, in retrospect.

The Doubledown's blade is not shaving sharp out of the box, but it is indeed keen enough to deal you or anyone else a significant mischief if you're waving it around like a nincompoop. It's made of 420HC which is not a very fancy steel. But then, so is the venerable Buck 119 and its sister the 120, and nobody ever seems to complain about those. Plus, iT's tHe wEeD NuMbEr!!!1!one!!! Surely that's got to count for something.

I do like that Gerber has resisted the urge to spraypaint this with some manner of crud that'll get rubbed off instantly, and not only left the steel bare but also applied a nondirectional brushed finish all over it that'll help conceal scratches and scuffs. What I'm less keen on is the splotches and discolored spots that my example arrived with straight out of the box. Or rather, I would be if I weren't confident I'll trample them instantly by doing a whole lot worse to the surface as soon as I start using this thing.

If I had to take a guess at it I'd conjecture that the edge is hand ground. It's extremely toothy, which may be to its advantage if you're meant to be using this thing to hack your way through the jungle, or whatever. Keep your stone handy, though, because it's likely the Doubledown's edge will probably require dressing pretty frequently.

I forgot to take a picture of the trueness of the edge. Rest assured, it isn't. I did take this picture up towards the tip, though. The Doubledown's profile is not very stabby, and is clearly not designed for thrusting in any capacity.

Grind aside, one thing that you can't fault Geber for is that at least some of their knives are apparently still made in the US. In light of that and as absurd as it may be, that probably makes this one of the more affordable options left for a USA made balisong. Go figure.

And now you all know my serial number in case you want to impersonate me for warranty purposes. Or something.

The Doubledown is ludicrously chunky. It's constructed of single piece sheet steel liners over injection moulded scales that are, I presume, some manner of fiber reinforced polymer. It's massively thick, just a hair under an inch, especially at the widest point in the flares in the scales. They're heavily sculpted with all kinds of swoops and dips and greebles moulded into them.

There's a significant cutout with a generous index finger notch in it which seems to be where they expect your grip to fall as you hold this. This puts your hand quite far down towards the tail, and well away from the choppy bit.

It takes an inordinate amount of effort to latch the thing open, and unlike when it's in the closed position the latch goes into a more traditional location when you're locking it here. It sticks out, probably quite deliberately, combining with the flare in the tip of that handle to produce a pronounced bird's head shape probably in an attempt to keep the thing from flinging out of your hand and burying itself up to the hilt in the forehead of the guy at the next campsite over. Geber, if nothing else, probably know their customer base well.

You don't get a pocket clip with the Doubledown. Don't be an idiot.

Instead you get this fancy ballistic nylon pouch with a Velcro closer. How fancy is it?

It's so fancy that it's got a MOLLE compatible mount on the back of it for some twisted reason.

In fact, for the Smooth Operators in the crowd the top loading design of this thing plus the absurdly long profile and MOLLE mount put one distinctly in mind of a P90 magazine pouch.

Yes, I was able to put this suspicion to the test handily. And now for tax purposes I refuse to elaborate further.

Instead, let's take this sucker apart and see how hard it is to defeat all those stupid locks, because they're really cramping my style.

Getting into the Doubledown isn't actually too tough. The pivot screws are T12 Torx heads and the rest of them are all T8. All of the above are threadlockered, but I found that the scale screws let go when attacked with concerted effort and a quality bit, and the pivot screws are broached with anti-rotation flats so you wont be stymied by the fact there's no driver heads in the reverse side. Despite the amount of grunt involved, nothing felt like it was going to strip.

The safety latches are dead simple, just a steel stamping that seesaws on a pin, with a little clothespin spring underneath. As an aside, these knurled pins are easily the nicest piece of machine work in the entire assemblage.

There's a square hook on the end of each which engages with a set of matching cutouts in the heel of the blade.

That works like so, and you can see here the slots for that stupid tertiary midway lock position. I imagine if you wanted to disable the middle lock position specifically, or maybe any of the others, you could just fill in the cutouts with your material of choice. Epoxy, maybe. Or solder. That's left as an exercise for the reader.

The latch just swings on a pin which is also threaded, and the latter is retained by two of the scale screws. There's also a threaded hole immediately adjacent to this for no purpose whatsoever as far as I can tell, because nothing screws in there. 'Tis a mystery.

Gerber used red threadlocker on the majority of the screws, and I can tell this because they also got it everywhere like you see here. It's all dried on so it's not going anywhere, and none of it is visible from the outside. Still, though. Thanks bloody awfully.

The Doubledown consists of approximately nineteen million parts, most of which are latches and screws. All of the screws save for those in the pivots are the same, at least, so you can't do any harm by mixing them up. So are the safety latches and their attendant springs. It's obvious that they don't intend for you to disassemble this thing, but it's nice to know that at least you can if you have to.

Here's the blade heel, and here you can see the funky gear teeth cut into the pivots as well. There's no closed position endstop mechanism for this, and it seems that Gerber expect the cross pin in the latch living in its little pocket in the tail to serve as what keeps the tips of the handles from clashing into each other when you're carrying the thing around. For what it's worth the tips of the handles do indeed clash before the inside of the liner contacts the blade's edge. There's a pretty generous gap left over between the edge and the inner surface of the liner even when you have the handles clacked together as far as they'll go — by my reckoning, at least an eighth of an inch. So at least this isn't a self dulling knife, but until I checked for myself I wouldn't have put anything past anyone these days.

I was also interested to see what kinds of bushings or washers the Doubledown has to aid its action. The answer turns out to be none, as it happens, with just a set of bosses stamped into the liners as a token concession to the pivot feel. But given that as designed it's categorically impossible to open this thing one handed anyway, I can't imagine that was much of a consideration.

That's pretty easy to rectify, by the way. If they annoy you, you can easily defeat the safety latches entirely by the trivial expedient of just not putting them back in.

That, plus a small degree of fooling with the pivot screw retention, ultimately nets you this:

Achtung, baby. Fur der erfahren messerflippen only. I feel safer already.

The enormous heft and length notwithstanding, flipping the Doubledown around is a distinctly uncanny affair because of those geared handle tips. The gears are not just there for decoration; they're fully functional and act to rigidly enforce symmetry between the handles at all times. If you pivot one handle, so goes the other by the same amount no matter what you do. And the blade with all of its mass remains exactly in the middle, always. I imagine that this will make some selection of balisong tricks utterly impossible to perform with this even if you were crazy enough to try.

Another point of contention which you may have noticed is that Gerber saw fit to place the latch on the wrong handle. The bite side is the latchless one, and don't get that wrong because I have no doubt that the experience of having the blade close on your fingers would not be a pleasant one.

In fact, for my inaugural flight here you'll notice I'm wearing a cutproof Nomex glove and a full gauntlet sleeve made of the same stuff. You won't catch me out with that one; I prefer all of my digits to remain firmly attached.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Doubledown is, I think, a bit of an albatross. It's fitting, not just in the metaphorical sense but also once you take into account its sheer wingspan.

There are objectively better choices for a knockaround bushcrafty camp knife. Like, just to name an example or two, practically all of them. But barring a few shining exceptions, all of those are boring. None of them will scratch that hipster itch, whereas the Doubledown is clearly superior by way of being bizarre, mechanically overwrought, and designed to be deliberately difficult to use.

You're going to tell me none of those sound like advantages to you. Uh, you have met balisong users, haven't you?

So the Doubledown remains more or less in a class all by itself. It's flamboyant, it's ridiculous, it's absurd.

It's awful. It's fantastic.

Gentlemen.

Be it not said that I've been idle these past weeks.

Rather, what I've been doing for the last little while is dramatically brooding here in the dark, fingers intertwined in my very best Gendo Ikari pose, contemplating how the hell I'm going to explain all of this to you.

(And no part of it was due to me being too lazy to dismount the Bird Lens from my camera and find somewhere to put it away. Honest.)

A while ago a good friend of mine said to me in reference to Moxy Früvous' iconic historical ballad, Video Bargainville, "I've figured it out. In Video Bargainville, you're Roger!" Thus upon reflection and a bit of inspiration from another recent conversation here in the Fediverse, I've finally come to another important realization: I'm not Mr. Ikari, regardless of how mysterious and interesting I may be. No. I'm Mr. Dink.

Always with the latest gadget or toy in hand. Like, for instance and no particular reason whatsoever, this fuckin' thing.

This, gentle readers, is the Terrain 365 Invictus-Bali Ti. It costs $325, and it's got a hyphen in it because it's somehow an offshoot of Terrain 365's largely erstwhile Invictus Series despite not appearing there when you search for the same on their website. Except obviously it's a balisong version, and not only that but it's one of the apparently dwindling number of EDC sized offerings in that category, coming complete with a pocket clip (a vanishingly rare phenomenon), ceramic ball bearing pivots, and a spring loaded latch. All of this, as you know, has me written all over it in six inch high letters.

The Invictus-Bali is 8-1/8" long from tip to tail when it's open not including the latch, and 4-3/4" by my measure when closed. The blade is 3-11/16" long from the ends of the handles to its point, with let's call it 3-1/8" of usable edge in a spear point kind of profile complete with a fancy fuller and a back bevel in it. Despite as much of it as possible being made from titanium, it's a dense little number at 130.6 grams in total or 4.61 ounces. So not, with the best will in the world, the absolute lightest and most ephemeral of EDC balisong options. (That distinction probably still belongs to the Benchmade 32 Mini Morpho, or at least so far as I am aware and able to empirically observe via the expedient of apparently doing my level best to own at least one example of every damn fool balisong knife on Earth.)

So what's so bloody weird about it, then?

Neon Genesis Unobtainium

Well, in order to explain that we'll have to get into what the rest of this thing is made out of.

It's Terrain 365's "Terravantium Dendritic Cobalt Super-Alloy," which is something that the manufacturer makes an awful lot of noise about. Their claims about it, for instance in the blurb, are incessantly in triplicate, thus: that it's rust proof, non-magnetic, and they go on to boast that it will "hold an edge longer than virtually any blade steel and stainless steel alloys." Maybe says I on the first and third points, but the second one is trivially easy to verify. Verily, a magnet doesn't stick to the stuff, whatever it's ultimately made out of.

For their part, Terrain 365 are suspiciously mum about what, exactly, goes into the secret blend of herbs and spices in their particular "Terravanium" alloy that makes it different from anyone else's. Various dendritic cobalt alloys, or possibly the same one, have sporadically seen use in knife blades from various manufacturers over the years. Boye Knives by way of David Boye seems to be the progenitor of the concept or at the very least certainly the major contributor to whatever minimal popularity it's got. It seems we can neither confirm nor deny whether or not the Terravantium flavor is the same stuff or is somehow appreciably different. For whatever it's worth, Terrain 365 claim that they at least used to sell their alloy in bar stock form for others to fiddle with, but that product category on their site (linked above) is now conspicuously empty.

It's tough to find any definitive answers about the stuff online. Various punters only seem to refer to it as "dendritic cobalt steel" out of sheer force of habit. It's not entirely clear that it contains much if any iron at all, so referring to it as "steel" is probably wrong. Nobody will admit to its full composition.

There is some verbiage on how it's supposed to work here on the Boye Knives site, for a start. The general gist of it seems to be that there are ultra hard carbides suspended more-or-less uniformly throughout a cobalt alloy matrix. It's supposed to be those carbides sawing away at the material you're cutting like so many tiny teeth that make all the performance happen. Thus the scuttlebutt online is that the dendritic cobalt alloys are supposed to somehow keep cutting even after your edge feels dull, and apparently it's supposed to be the bee's own knees for cutting cord and rope in particular.

With its purported total rustproofness plus excellence at rope cutting, it seems the Invictus-Bali is angling to be the ultimate seafarer's knife, and the fact that a balisong based stab at that idea exists is so clearly prima facie absurd that there was absolutely no way I couldn't participate. And so, you see, here we are.

Of course everyone makes the same claims about whatever the hell their knife is made out of, vis-a-vis superior edge retention, corrosion resistance, sharpenability, toughness, and if you believe the marketing department they'll try to tell you it'll make your more handsome and have better luck with the ladies, too. As far as the Terravantium alloy goes, it's hard to say how much of it is bullshit.

For whatever it's worth, the factory edge doesn't feel that sharp. It's got a decidedly obtuse angle, probably for durability's sake, and when I threw it at my dinkum Post-It note slicing test it peaked at 126.8 grams before ultimately crushing the note without completing the cut. But if you draw the edge against any surface rather than just press, it cuts inexplicably well. Maybe there's something to all that suspended carbide malarkey.

It's probably misguided to regard this dendritic cobalt stuff using the same metrics as steel. It's dead soft, for a start. Trepidatiously, I attacked it with my graded hardness file set and discovered that it succumbs to the second softest file, just 45 HRC. And yet, they claim it'll hold an edge better than typical steel. You have to wonder about that.

One thing I'm sure about, or at least I'm pretty sure about, or at minimum I can be pretty sure I'm pretty sure about is that the Invictus-Bali's blade is shaped like that because it's not machined but cast that way. A consistent unique property of the various dendritic cobalt alloys is that they can be moulded into shape via an investment casting process. Apparently this actually works, much unlike steel which would result in absolutely disastrous mechanical properties if anyone were dumb enough to try it. So you can dispense with all that forging, rolling, milling, and machining. Just squirt the stuff into a mould, whack two holes in it and grind the edge, and off you go!

The blade's surface finish has a distinctive textured finish you can see under high magnification, and a complete dearth of the machine marks you would expect to see on the primary bevel of any production knife.

One wonders if this allowed Terrain 365 to save any cash at all in the Invictus-Bali's production, and if so why they didn't see quite clear to passing any of those savings on to the buyer.

Bali Bebop

The Invictus-Bali puts on quite a display convincing you it's an ultra premium knife, which you'd damn well expect it to thanks to it also arriving at such an eye-watering price. It's extremely solid feeling in the hand and covered in tiny fine details like the jimping in the ears on the blade, plus matching patches of it on its titanium handle spacers.

It's so refined that it almost feels like one of those knives that's too nice to use. Perhaps it's just as well, then, that when you look closely you'll notice that the grooves in the latch head are machined crooked.

Thanks a lot, guys.

If I were a more vindictive kind of bird I might complain to the manufacturer about this. But do you know what? I'm almost glad the Invictus-Bali has at least one wart on it, because otherwise I'd never use it and thus I'd never get the chance over the upcoming weeks to determine whether or not Terrain 365's intrepid claims about its edge retention were just so many fiddlesticks.

The Invictus-Bali isn't a Zen pin knife, but rather has a traditional dual kicker pin design. I'm assuming the pins are titanium just like the handles are, since they appear to be pressed through and not cast out of the same dendritic stuff as the rest of the blade. My suspicions are furthered by the noise it makes on the rebound, or rather lack thereof, which would be readily explained by the contact bits being titanium-on-titanium.

We've covered several highly bombastic and noisy knives here before. I'm not entirely sure which one is the current frontrunner between the Kershaw Moonsault or the Revo Nexus, but it's got to be one or the other of them. The Invictus-Bali, conversely, is easily the quietest balisong I've ever flipped.

There's a titanium pocket clip on here which Terrain 365 bill as billet machined. It's held on with a single screw and recessed into a pocket on that one handle scale which is absent on the other side, so it's not reversible. It's also on the wrong side of the knife as usual, gods damn it, and there isn't a single thing you can do about it.

It's kind of football shaped in cross section (that'd be an American football, not the other kind) and also feels distressingly thin. I'm not sure if it's actually thin enough to be a problem or not, but if you're one of those oiks who insists on dangling your knife backwards off of your belt you'll certainly want to rethink that strategy with this one.

The Invictus-Bali's most immediate comparison is obvious. It's a little bigger than a Model 32 but certainly much smaller than practically everything else in the category.

I can't find anything to gripe about with the action. Uncanny, I think, is the best descriptor of the Invictus-Bali's mechanics. Despite their short stature the handles carry a significant amount of inertia and thanks to the ceramic ball bearings inside the pivots are absolutely, unquestionably, unerringly without any wiggle whatsoever. There is no tap and not a single molecule of blade play. Even if you shake the whole knife vigorously and regardless of whether it's open or closed, the only thing that rattles is the tiny torsion spring for the latch, where it's slotted into its equally minuscule mounting hole.

The latch is skeletonized and, yes, spring loaded. It's under spring motive all the time, so after you squeeze the handles and it boings out into its open position it'll stay there, and the spring prevents it from clashing with the handles or blade.

For some reason Terrain 365 play up the Invictus-Bali's nonmagnetism heavily. I have no idea why that would be a compelling feature for anyone on their knife, or what use case such a thing could possibly benefit. But it's true — as far as I can tell, the only thing that even vaguely responds to a magnet is the latch spring itself. The blade is of course made out of that funky Terravanium stuff, the scales and handle spacers are titanium, and Terrain claims that the Invictus-Bali has "titanium hardware" as well. I imagine they're talking about the latch and clip, because the screws certainly aren't. But in dedication to the theme, whatever steel they're made out of seems to be a high nickel or chromium content one, probably for anti-corrosion purposes, and thus they're nonmagnetic as well.

Terrain 365's maker's mark lives on one side of the blade and the reverse is unadorned.

Aria: The Disassembly

There's not a whole heck of a lot inside the Invictus-Bali. It's held together with a grand total of six screws, two of which are the pivots. For $325 you might wish for a longer bill of materials, but that's your lot.

In fact, after taking apart the latch side handle I concluded I'd already seen all there is to see, and didn't even bother with the other side. I had an ulterior motive for picking that handle, of course. I wanted to see if one could cheat their way into a clip reversal, by way of swapping the upper and lower scales on that side.

Well, you can't.

The handle spacer is retained by a pin which sinks into a recess in each scale. And it's offset, so you can't flip the scales over and still be able to put it back in the right way 'round. There's no mechanical reason for that other than sheer obstreperousness.

Foiled again. Eternal is my wrath, and wicked shall be my vengeance.

Well, okay. Maybe not the second part.

They've dealt with the obvious conflict of materials with the ceramic bearings riding on soft titanium by sticking a thin shim washer in between. I presume this is also some type of hyper corrosion resistant stainless alloy, because it too does not respond to a magnet.

The Inevitable Conclusion

It's tough to tell just who, exactly, Terrain's marketing is trying to aim this thing at. Is it salty fishermen, or tactical operators, or the flannel and beard wax crowd? Half of the blurb is talking about shedding unnecessary weight, which combined with the tree makes you think they're expecting you to go backpacking with it. But the other half of it goes on to mention "those who demand reliability from every component of their knife," so who the hell knows?

It's just possible, at the outside, that if it's half as good as the very select band of weirdos are saying then some day this dendritic cobalt stuff will become the next big thing in cutlery. But it also hasn't set the world on fire yet, and maybe that says everything about it we need to know.

There's no denying that it's damn strange, though. So I'm here for it.

Brain wave.

I assume you all are familiar with my Adélie 3d printable, CQC hook pocket hook openable, fully printable utility knife thing. If you weren't, you are now.

Just the other day I had an idea.

Actually, no. Back that up. Just the other day, I remembered the Secret Of Show Business, vis-a-vis another arctic bird adjacent folder, our good friend the QSP Penguin. One thing that's been a thorn in my side with the Adélie since the beginning is that, since a 3D printer is not a lathe, the inevitable overhangs on the crossbar/Axis lock part are problematic. I burned through a couple of strategies for that, including replacing the sharp shoulders with a chamfer (which caused binding issues) or reshaping the slot that the crossbar rides in, and so forth.

But then along came QSP's knife, which deals with the protrusions on the Axis crossbar by making them separate pieces.

Uh. So why don't we just do that?

Duh.

So meet the new and improved, cool and froody, always ready and never glooby, Adélie M6.

Why M6? Oh yeah. Because I also revised the screws to be M6x1.0 a while ago so you can use 12mm setscrews in place of the printed screws if you want to.

Printables link: https://www.printables.com/model/928938-adelie-crossbar-locking-utility-knife-with-pocket

In this small community I might be late to the party but in case not, I thought I would pass along a rather fun YouTube channel that I discovered just recently called Knife Nerdery

https://www.youtube.com/@KnifeNerdery/videos

It seems custom made (har?) for this community. Especially the latest two videos, the most recent of which goes through a short history of folding knives with blades bigger than their handles.

Not trying to astroturf for the channel or anything, I don't have any association. Just figured I would pass it along.

As this year draws to a close in just a few short days, now is the time to pour ourselves a drink and spend a wintry evening by the fire reminiscing on what we've done. All while using the opportunity to crank out a low effort clipshow style post retreading ground we've already covered.

Doesn't that sound like fun?

Herewith, then, is a listicle containing an arbitrary number of the Dork's most favored knives of 2025. I declare that this number shall be three, and these are chosen for highly subjective and probably deeply spurious reasons. These are not the top three best knives of 2025, or even knives that came out in 2025, nor is this buying advice of any stripe.

Many other knives are brilliant. But I like these.

#3: The HOKC Finka-C

I must admit, I wasn't completely kind to the Finka-C in my initial assessment of it, and in retrospect I was probably a little unfair to the poor little... er, big thing. But despite its various warts there's something about the Finka keeps drawing me back to it, and I've been finding myself carrying it more and more as time goes on. Yes, the dinky toggling secondary lock is silly and the clip leaves a little bit to be desired, and there I go damning it with faint praise again.

But you can't deny that the Finka is put together way better than it has any right to be and being such a big ol' honking slab of D2 brings a grin to my face every time I pick it up. On more than one occasion this year it's been more than enough to make itself the only folder I bothered to bring as a camp knife, which is saying a lot from somebody who usually veritably clanks as they walk in the woods.

The highly effective pocket hook opening mechanism built in absolutely completes it, and just how much I love all of my Kershaw/Emerson CQCs probably goes a long way towards explaining why I like the Finka so much, too. It's the same effect but even moreso, and the Finka is so confident in your hand it makes you feel like you ought to be able to use it to fight off a moose.

#2: The QSP Penguin Glyde Lock

Let's face it, there's no way a knife named after my spirit bird wasn't going to make it onto this list. Add in the fact that it's an Axis locker with ceramic ball bearing pivots, a deep carry clip with an offside filler, and comes in the correct colorway, the Penguin is a shoo-in.

The Penguin is the perfect form factor for a true everyday carry knife and comes with an inoffensive and nonthreatening blade shape that is nevertheless highly functional, and made out of decent steel to boot. Honestly, it's everything the perennially recommended Benchmade Bugout ought to be but isn't, since it authoritatively trumps the Benchy on rigidity and pivot feel while managing to slide in at a mere quarter of the cost.

#1: The Böker Tactical Balisong 06EX229

Come on. You knew this was coming.

The Böker 06EX229 still probably represents the best value for money in the current arena of butterfly knives. It's very close to being my favorite of all time, in fact, and when that's coming from our platform's Premier Balisong Nerd, that's saying a lot. The 06EX229 is built like a nuclear fallout shelter and it's got a list of premium features as long as your arm, and much unlike the big name options from the big boys these days, it does it all for you without driving you to into bankruptcy.

If there is any such thing as the perfect EDC balisong knife, the 06EX229 is probably it. And if it isn't, its smaller sibling the 06EX227 certainly is, and the only reason the latter isn't here as well is because it's disqualified due to my writeup on it appearing last year.

Mine is seen here wearing its fancy new 3D printed duds, which you can nab for yourself here. In stock trim, it only comes in black. Really, that's the only knock against it I can think of.

The Inevitable Conclusion

And you will rarely read me write these words, but that's all I have to say on the matter.

For the year, in fact. I'll see all you dorks on the flip side.

Those were my favorites from the last 52 weeks. What were yours?

Alright, my merry waddlers. How's your Christmas going? Spending some quality time with the family, or maybe having yourself a little R&R? Well, here's how I'm spending mine: By shitposting about knives on the internet, as usual. Because that's just the kind of no-social-life-having predictable son of a bitch that I am.

It occurs to me that I haven't wasted pages and pages blathering about a balisong knife lately. Lest we think these days I do nothing but handle bottom notch quality Chinese bargain subbasement meme knives anymore, here's the Revo Nexus.

Revo is another one of those up and coming startup knife companies that I've been studiously ignoring until these went on some kind of hyper-sale several months ago. This fetching two tone green variant currently lists for the thick end of $350 if Revo's website is to be believed, but you could score these a little while back from all the usual online suspects for around $175. If I were on top of things I could have alerted you all to that fact at the time, but I wasn't. So here we are.

The Nexus tickled my fancy because while it's made by Revo Knives in Colorado, it's purported to be designed by BRS. This explains why it's got a name riffing off of a certain Harrison Ford flick, in case that didn't tip you off. Yes, that'd be the same BRS behind the perennially sought after yet unobtainable Replicant and Alpha Beast balisong models... Or rather they would be if they ever felt like actually manufacturing anything for once, rather than apparently being proud to display an entire website consisting solely of sad little "sold out" tags and nothing else.

So while the true BRS models are suffering from a terminal case of nonexistence at the moment, these Revos have the advantage of being as thick on the ground as Christmas morning's snow.

The Nexus is a product of its time, i.e. right now at this very exact second, and is thus a hyper-modern offering that encapsulates every single shred of what's in fashion with the balisong-slinging youngsters these days. So that means it's both latchless and earless and it's got a sleek cyberpunk silhouette, with full length machined aluminum handles, kickerless Zen pins, and it's even packing ceramic ball bearing pivots. And noodles.

Basically, it's 90% of a BRS Alpha Beast or Barebones, but minus the latch and half the price. And while it may be slightly Vaporwave, it manages to actually exist so it isn't vaporware. A sterling stand-in, then, for anybody who may have missed the boat on the former two.

So, pretty much everyone.

The Nexus is a sandwich design rather than channel milled, so each half of its handles is a separate machining and they're mounted up with these spacers which are, I believe, titanium. Fancy.

Note also the distinct lack of a latch. I knew this this full well going into it, but I still did so with some trepidation since I have to say the latchless thing isn't my usual cup of tea. Despite owning thirty six balisong knives and quite a number of otherwise balisong shaped non-knife objects, I actually only had two* latchless knives before picking up this one.

The primary one being this channel milled "BRS" "Replicant" with a Squiddy-esque pattern machined into the handles which is, I'm very sorry to report, fake as a snake. It's a Chinese knockoff but it's a decent one, and it's not like you can buy a real Replicant right now for love nor money anyway so I'm not too broken up about it. It's of pretty similar proportions to the Nexus, and that's probably no accident.

In the middle there is the larger of the two Böker Tacticals, the 06EX229, my current most oft carried balisong, just for comparison purposes. (Identifiable here by my screaming neon printed handle scales, because I'm just such a dweeb.)

The Nexus is 10-1/8" long open by my measure, and basically exactly 6" long closed. The blade is 4-1/2" long precisely and has just under 4" of usable edge, and it's made of 154CM.

The blade has a weehawk-ish profile and is stone tumbled. I do like a good stone tumbled finish, and I like the looks of this one a lot too, but if you stare at it closely enough you can just barely see some of the machine marks left in it.

The Nexus is allegedly Revo's first knife to be made in the US. They're not going to let you forget about it, either, not only with this massive etching but also that entire deal on the front of the box. That's fair enough, as it goes — It's entirely too easy to buy a cynical Chinese knockoff knife for not much money these days, but depressingly difficult to buy one that's made in America without having to take out a second mortgage.

Because it's very fancy, it's got flush fitting, or at least nearly flush fitting, screws with driverless heads on one side.

The other side accepts a T-10 Torx bit and while Revo imply that the thing is designed to be disassembled via this video embedded in their website, I found all of the screws in mine to be permanently threadlockered. And since today's my day off, I concluded I can't be bothered to crack this thing open right now. Revo have kindly allowed me to outsource that entire endeavor, so if you want to see how it all goes together you can just watch their video instead.

Besides, you all have seen the insides of butterfly knives a couple of times before. You'll live.

The other reason I'm disinclined to mess with it is because I like it just like it is. Mine appears to have been pre-tuned at the factory to be just about perfect. The pivot action is flawless, the bearing assembly means there's no blade tap and vanishingly little wiggle in the handles, and manipulating the Nexus just feels nice. If you need a flipper for confidently showing off, this is it.

Except for some reason the Nexus is quite possibly the loudest knife I've ever had the occasion to wave around. Verily it clangs, it rings, and it jingles. Anyone else in the room with you would be forgiven for thinking you've got spurs on while you're messing with this thing.

It's not especially unpleasant or resonant or anything, but it is just exceptionally noisy. If you are a ninja, the Nexus is absolutely not the knife for you.

I have no idea if this is down to the shape of the machined aluminum handles, or the position of those concealed Zen pins, or what.

Otherwise I can't find much else not to recommend the Nexus over, but you have to be into the kind of thing that it inherently is. Thanks to the complete and utter lack of both a latch and a clip, you're on your own for figuring out how you'd want to carry it, for a start. The Nexus comes bundled in custom wrapping paper inside its box, but that's it — There's no sheath or pouch provided, not even a perfunctory ratty low-denier Nylon and Velcro one. Likewise, there's absolutely no differentiation between the handles whatsoever so there's no tactile indication which side's the bitey one and which side's not. Revo didn't even see fit to provide a 2¢ silicone band or something to stick over the bite handle to mark it, so either provide your own or git gud in a hurry, noob.

You probably should, too. Because the Nexus does indeed come out of its box very sharp from the factory. The edge grind is perfectly passable, however...

For a $350 list price you don't even get a true edge from the factory.

I'm starting to think I might be the only person on Earth who actually notices this sort of thing. Guys, am I the asshole here?

The Inevitable Conclusion

There are probably any amount of hobbies more financially responsible than being into balisongs. Like, maybe methamphetamines.

The thing about the Revo Nexus is that it's a very niche object, which will appeal squarely to a few extremely specific people and practically nobody else. Nobody in their right mind would suggest this as a work knife, or an EDC knife, or a camp knife, or for any purpose other than A) collecting, because you are a nerd, or B) showing off, because you are also a nerd. A distant third option is because none of the people who watch too much Youtube will take you seriously if you haven't got yourself a trendy and highly collectible big name knife.

Here's the thing. Because of all of that, the balisong sphere — at least most entries in it that aren't explicitly junk, anyway — is inherently comprised basically entirely of limited edition stuff. With the best will in the world, no balisong model you can actually name will ever be a volume seller. Just like the latest Nexus 6 replicant, this stuff all has a built in artificial lifespan. And so, if you can't handle a perpetual fear of missing out then this is probably not the type of knife you want to develop the affliction of having an affinity for.

At the moment, the Nexus is obtainable. Not only is it slick and stylish and fully compliant with all of the latest fads, but it's also here. That probably counts for a lot, because so many of its contemporaries aren't.

All those models, all those knives, lost in time. Like tears. In the rain.

Dang.

I have an online friend and he

says you can pay one price for three

Just look for Kershaw

At Samuel's Retail Hell

And here we are once more, speedrunning towards irrelevance in the narrow window between right now and that inescapable moment at precisely 12:01 AM on the 25th that these instantly transition from the hot ticket to yesterday's news. Hey, at least you can't say I'm not timely for once.

Allow me to introduce you to this flowchart, which handily sums up the ground state of being in this hobby:

Thus, among all the other cut-rate crap on display at Wally World I obviously couldn't pass these up and brought this trio home for some yule tide yuks. It's rare enough to find anything in this vein that purports to be from any real brand, let alone one I actually like. These retail for the same $30 as Wal Mart's other current holiday smorgasbord packs, but notably the Kershaw set has only three knives rather than seven, and notably contains zero pieces of other ancillary pack-in trash that serves no purpose other than diverting some part of a meager manufacturing budget from, you know, the actual knives.

Could these be the value-for-dollar sweet spot for a low cost EDC knockaround knife, and can we use them to finally vanquish Betteridge's Law Of Headlines once and for all?

Threefer

Let's put on our thinking caps for this one. What do you think?

Kershaw's self-titled "2025PROMOX" pack contains three knives that are not just a repackaging of their existing models. Instead, these are bespoke pieces specifically contrived to be shoved into this holiday pack, the likes of which we've never seen before and will never see again. They haven't even bothered to invent faux model names for these. We have only the melodiously titled "6.3 in. Knife," "6.7 in Knife," and "7.25 in. Knife." So will these instantly become highly sought after short run collector's items, or gently fade into obscurity by about sunset on New Years Eve?

Do you know, I have a hunch it's going to be the second one.

Not a single attempt was made to differentiate these things. In addition to not bothering to supply model numbers on the box, they don't even sport them on the knives themselves. Each of them has the same "2025PROMO" marking on the back with no other identifying information other than a Kershaw logo and the obligatory China mark.

You can try matching these up to some other Kershaw model or another to figure out what they've been derived from, but as far as I can tell this is a doomed endeavor. The closest I can come up with is that the smaller two of them kinda-sorta follow the pattern of the Outfield but not really.

All three are, per the back of the box, made out of 3cr13 steel. Needless to say, this is deeply unexciting. So despite everything these are clearly low rent junk tailor made for the types of idiots who buy it, if that reminds you of anyone you know.

But there are a couple of things to recommend these over the mountain of other bullshit cutlery-adjacent options found at your local big box junk purveyor.

For a start, the back of the card purports that these are subject to the same lifetime warranty as Kershaw's other products. This is cruising so many miles above the warranty you'd typically receive on a Wal Mart knife, i.e. none, that I wonder if they put this here by accident.

All three of them are also spring assisted openers. And that's awesome.

Kershaw don't make as much of a fuss over their "SpeedSafe" spring assisted opening methodology as they used to, probably because the patent's expired on it by now and everybody else has ripped it off. But in these dark winter months when I'm sitting here feeling both introspective and retrospective, seeing these brought me right back to that summer day all those years ago when I bought one of my very first "real" knives from Walmart with my own money. That was another Kershaw, a Whirlwind model 1650. With these gazing up at me all full of hope and sorrowful trepidation, I decided I couldn't just leave them there. Even if they're cheap and janky and obviously mildly cursed, they still needed a home.

Remember: A pocketknife isn't just for Christmas. It's until you break it or it snags on some brambles and you lose it down a crevasse.

Ah, crap. That came out wrong.

The Nickel Tour

I see that what I've actually done here is make my job three times harder for myself by multiplying it triple.

So do you know what? I can't be bothered today. I'm not going to look at each one of these individually in excruciating detail. They're all basically the same so we can deal with them in aggregate.

Except they're not. Despite being made of the same stuff and ostensibly differing only in size, each one has one unique attribute that the others don't share. Two of the three have the same overall blade shape but have different finishes with the smallest being tumbled stonewashed while the medium one is as-machined satin; all three have rear flippers to open them but only the largest one has thumb studs...

...The medium one has a jimped spine on the blade whereas the other two don't...

...All three of them have deep carry pocket clips...

...But for some reason despite otherwise being the most feature complete of the bunch with not only the aforementioned thumb studs but also a backspacer with an integrated lanyard loop, for some reason the biggest knife's clip is the only one that's not reversible.

Somehow like the sisters Phorcides, there's some competence only one of each of these can have and apparently there wasn't enough to share around. It's decidedly strange.

Among the bunch I think I like the littlest one best. I do enjoy a drop pointed knife and I like the tumbled stonewash finish the most out of the available options, and the compactness is appealing.

The big one's coated blade is a big detraction if you ask me, especially for something probably destined to be a beater. It's going to get scruffy in a hurry.

The middle child is, aside from the blade surface finish, probably the best looking of them. The jimping on the spine makes it look complete in a way that the the other two don't manage.

All three of 'em are liner lockers, of course. As usual there's a minor difference: The big one has a textured lock bar, and the other two are smooth.

...This is like one of those spot-the-difference puzzles you used to get in the back of Highlights magazine, only much cooler.

If I had to cast about for a comparison, what I would say these remind me of the most — especially the largest one — is my old Kershaw Brawler. The Brawler is another similarly proportioned SpeedSafe spring opener with a rear flipper, and although the latter is much beefier than these three, there is a distinct sense of design similarity about it with the overall length and the vibe of the injection molded scales.

The Kershaw Holiday knives certainly look nice. But then again, I suppose that's their actual job.

Smashola

In keeping with our theme of laziness, I'm not taking all three of these apart. I don't doubt there are trivial construction differences between them to excite select types of hyper-nerds in the audience, and I know one of them offhand. But by and large they all work the same way and go together the same way.

Given that I care for it the least out of all of them, I took the big one apart just in case something wound up going hilariously wrong and I broke it.

In retrospect, that might have been a mean thing to say about it.

Yes, they all have flush fit and smooth headed pivot screws just like your big brother's knife.

The clip on this one is recessed, and as usual it's a unique feature to this knife that the other two don't share. In exchange for that it's not reversible. One of its screws also pulls double duty to hold the handle together, which isn't how it works on the others. This probably goes some way towards explaining why you can't flip it over.

The clip and body screws are assembled with real blue Locktite. Not superglue, and not the gritty chalky Chinese stuff.

Instead, you'll find that under the pivot screw. But thankfully not to such an extreme degree as our last subject. I'm pleased to report that to go along with the smoothed head the pivot screw has an anti-rotation flat in it that's the real deal. Only one of the liners is broached for it, though, probably to save a penny.

Here's the springamadoo that drives the assist action.

The "safe" part of Kershaw's SpeedSafe arrangement is that the spring itself is totally relaxed at both ends of the range, when the knife is either fully opened or fully closed. This is much unlike various other spring assisted schemes from back in the early aughts which were much more like unto switchblade mechanisms, just with the switch part defeated. That motley bunch were theoretically capable of getting set off in your pocket if any of their parts were worn or busted, whereas the SpeedSafe arrangement can't.

Partially opening the blade loads up the spring, and once you get it past about 20 degrees or so it goes from being compressed to being allowed to spring back out, which handily flicks the blade open the rest of the way. This means that it does take some effort to get one of the SpeedSafe Kershaws over the hump and into a position where it can fire off. But if you fail to do so, the blade will snap back into its closed position rather than trying to open on you. The original patent actually described a variety of spring shapes and not this zigzag arrangement, but the mechanical action is the same.

This obviates the need for the little safety switches and toggles which festooned early spring assisted knives and are, let's face it, hugely annoying. The world decided that Kershaw's plan was better, so much so that nowadays if you crack open any given Chinese knockoff piece of shit you're sure to find a clone of Kershaw's idea with one of those wiggly springs in there.

One other random observation here is that the scales are screwed to the liners via the inside as well as the outside. I suspect this is to keep the scales in firm contact with the liners and discourage the spring from escaping.

The big knife has white plastic pivot washers that may or may not be some fancy low coefficient of friction material, but probably aren't. Wait for it, wait for it... The other two are different, because of course they are, and self-evidently sport bronze pivot washers instead which are visible from the outside:

There's a semiconcealed endstop pin in here which rides in a little cutout in the back of the blade. Here you can also see the SpeedSafe spring peeking through its hole. Because I like you guys so much, the stray piece of lint I'll throw in for free.

Here's the sum total of what's inside:

The hardware lineup.

The scales are some manner of injection molded fiber reinforced stuff, and the backspacer appears to be the same. The handle is separated with two plain threaded barrels which slide through the backspacer; for $10 each in a three pack, you're certainly not getting fancy machined aluminum spacers. I noticed also that one of the interior scale screws was kind of wonky from the factory, but it still goes in fine without seeming to affect anything so what can you say.

So How Bad Is It, Then?

One thing I've always been able to say for Kershaw is that even their cheap knives are put together very well. These are no exception. The blade centering is very good on the big one...

...The medium one...

...And the little one.

Do you hear that? I could swear there's a noise. What is that?

Oh, yeah. It's the entire readership of this column screaming at their computer monitors, "But they're made of crap steel!!!"

Look, there's no escaping it. Calling 3cr13 a budget steel is probably the nicest thing we can do to it. It does bring a couple of bullet points to the table which Kershaw studiously play up, including a very high degree of rustproofness, resistance to snapping, and, ah, "ease of sharpening."

That's because 3cr's edge retention is a lot less of a bullet point, per se, and more like a ragged bullet hole. The stuff only has 0.3% carbon in it, for fuck's sake, which is a far cry even from boring old 440C's 1.1-1.2%. Its hardenability is so low that you could slip it through the crack under your door. It's looking up at the worms in the dirt. It's limbo dancing in hell.

I chose the medium sized knife out of the lineup for my testing, because I'll be buggered if I'm repeating this for all three. I'm not expecting a Christmas miracle to befall me on this day of days, just on one knife out of the trio above the other two; they're all made out of the same stuff and they're all going to work the same way.

Attacking its edge with my graded set of hardness files reveals... That it only manages to fall in between 45 and 50. If I were you I'd be careful using this on your Christmas cheeseboard; the cheese may actually win.

As it happened to just so shake out, I was vindicated anyway because the medium sized one had the best edge out of the box. Here it is up close.

All three edges also arrived noticeably out of true, and they're also corkscrewed. Here is the medium one.

And the same again for the small one:

And the big one:

The latter actually arrived with a flat spot on its edge out at the tip which is visible to the naked eye. I don't know if it was ground that way or if it got whacked somehow in transit. All three knives had the obligatory and by now familiar polypropylene tip protector thingies on them in the package, so given all we've seen it's most likely the factory just did a crap job in sharpening it.

Shocker.

In our standard Highly Scientific Post-It Note Chop Test, the medium knife scored the best with an average cut pressure of 60.5 g and a peak of 77.7 g. The little one scored a less respectable 103.8 g peak and 85.89 g average and the big one slouched up at a truly abysmal 129.7 g peak and 104.69 g average.

Numbers are boring. We need something a little more exciting, more superlative, more bombastic.

So apropos of nothing, and after our last little incident, I've been trying to cook up a slightly smarter way to repeatably knock down the sharpness of knives without fucking up the surface finish. I don't know if I've succeeded, but I've settled on using this rather clever cutter thingy I found on Printables to process down the frankly prodigious and highly absurd amount of cardboard that accumulates around here into standardized strips. My new and hugely rigorous testing regimen involves taking stacks of these six strips tall and julienning them across the grain into confetti. This highly productive activity has the net effect of throwing the equivalent of nine linear inches of cardboard cutting at the edge with each chop, while theoretically the cut off bits flake away from the blade, so that mostly only it rather than the entire surface gets exposed to the shocking amount of abrasive bullshit that's found in ordinary cardboard.

That's the idea, anyway.

With the sharpness it had right out of the box I took the medium Kershaw and hacked at the stack five times.

You guys want to guess what it scored after I did that?

That's right, with only 45 combined linear inches of cardboard under its belt, the poor little thing was too dull to even complete the Post-It test again. The cutting force went right off the top of the chart until ultimately the thing smashed the Post-It into an accordion without managing to achieve any length of cut in it at all.

Well, crap.

Undeterred, I dutifully ground the blade back into full sharpness at a 17° per side angle, which is no doubt hopelessly optimistic for this steel but still better than the 15° I usually do. This took practically no time at all, so at least the bit about 3cr's ease of sharpenability was the fuckin' honest truth.

This brought matters back in hand, with the cutting performance evened out and restored to within spitting distance of its former, er, glory. For anyone wondering, the reason that the thing appeared to achieve that degree of sharpness at all was because the edge was decidedly sawtoothy and probably heavily burred, which has an advantage for cutting plain paper any time you draw the full length of it through the cut which I do when performing my little assessment. But once that burr snaps off and the little teefies wear away, it's Dullsville for you.

I repeated the cardboard test.

With an actual edge on it, the medium Kershaw's performance was significantly less embarrassing but still not exactly stellar. After 5 cuts, sharpness was reduced to needing 116 g peak and 82.82 g average, and after 10 cuts it leveled off to 123 g peak and 99.77 g average, whereupon at the tail end of the test the edge snagged and once again crushed the remaining little bit of Post-It rather than cutting it.

And that's a wrap. You guys remember all that howling I've been doing for years about how fancy knife steel doesn't really matter for casual everyday use? It turns out there's a definite floor somewhere down near the bottom of the barrel where that doesn't apply anymore. Now we know just about how deep it is.

That's right, kids. I was wrong about something.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Don't think of this as gifting somebody a cheesy knife, or even three cheesy knives. We can do a lot better than that. Instead, give the gift of teaching somebody how to sharpen their knife this Christmas.

Because believe you me, with these fuckers they're going to get good at it. Or else.

But still, I wouldn't be too pissed to get a pack of these in my stocking. It could be worse. It could be a golf tee puller, or yet another novelty tie. And this time I think we really have finally managed to break out of the flowchart. Here's a trio of beater knives that I really won't care about if I destroy them.

To quote the inimitable Tom Lehrer: Just the thing I need.

How nice.

So here it is: the BBK

All your nice words about my last experiment gave me the drive to get it done, thank you all for that!

I knew I had a "butterfly comb" laying around somewhere.
I cut off the comb part of it with an angle grinder and then cut the knife blade to the right size.
I did not remove the handles though and that ended up biting me in the ass...

Using a magnet, I positioned the blade against and in line with the stub left from the comb and proceeded to stick weld them together.
I was dreading that moment as I'm not good with welding and even worse when it comes to thin-ish material, but it went pretty smoothly and I'm happy how it turned out!

I then went on to grinding. I tried removing the handles but only one came off, the heat from the welding must have something to do with that...

Anyways, the hard part was behind me and all that was left was to grind, sand and polish it as well as my impatient self was willing to.

And there it was:

In all its splendor

The

Butter

Fly

Butter

Knife

I heard we were doing homemades.

Hi, I'm dual_sport_dork. You may know me from such projects as, A Bullshit Plastic Knife, and This Other Bullshit Plastic Knife.

Now that I think back on it, it turns out I've been at this rather a long time.

I no longer own this... object... so I had to dig the pictures out of my digital reliquary. The reason this looks like it was photographed with a potato is because it was. (Actually, it was my wizened and venerable Cannon PowerShot A40.) I had to check the file date — I made this in December of 2002. This son of a bitch is old enough to vote.

I'm pretty sure the impetus for this was in response to people on the internet back then moaning about my locality's recently passed knee-jerk ban on nonmetallic knives. So this is a fully functional, for acceptably small values of "functional," frame locking folder made out of Plexiglass and nylon screws. The edges of it look mildly burned because I hogged most of it out by hand with a Dremel. I planned nothing and measured nothing; I just threw this together by the seat of my pants and it more-or-less worked.

It opened, closed, and locked. It also sported something approaching an edge. I don't know if you've ever tried to sharpen a chunk of 0.100" Plexiglass, but the long and short of it is that it would keep an edge on it just about suitable for use as a letter opener. Hey, it was the principle of the thing.

I'm tickled pink to rediscover that even back then I apparently had a penchant for taking pictures of stuff on a white sheet of paper. It seems old habits die hard.

Hello everyone,
I'm new to this community, got a suggestion to cross-post this from !imadethis@lemmy.zip , hope you appreciate my rough looking knife :)

For making sandwiches on the job because I don't like spreading stuff with a sharp pointy knife or a box cutter.

I made the handle with a piece of L shaped aluminum profile crudely bent using clamps.

I then pierced a hole through the blade and the handle and test fitted it. I didn't like how it looked when closed so I decided to drill a new hole after flipping the handle around. (Hence the hole at the end of the handle and the second hole on the blade).

I then riveted everything together twice (one smaller rivet inside a bigger one, no idea if thats a good idea or not but it looks better). Cut the handle to shape with an angle grinder and softened the edges with a file then different grits of sandpaper.

I got the idea for the handle from the Higonokami.

Thanks for reading, let me know if you have adidas for the next version!

Just in time for your winter solstice adjacent giving holiday of choice, there's a whole bunch of new crap at Walmart ready to sucker your grandma out of her cash and turn every cutlery nerd's unboxing day into pure disappointment when it turns out you wound up with three of these damn things from various distant relations because everybody heard you're into knives, right?

I was at my local orphan-crushing retail juggernaut the other day and noticed that the full array all of these displays must've finally hit the sales floor between now and the last time I darkened their doorstep in order to buy this. It seems the theme this year is sets, or maybe it is every year but I dunno because I don't check, plus I deliberately ignore the Internet scuttlebutt over this kind of thing like I'm avoiding Silksong spoilers or some shit. Anyway, the play here is to make you think a pile of crappy knives all sold together is somehow a better value than a single crappy knife all sold on its lonesome. Although given the ultimate fate of probably most cheap Walmart knives what with getting busted, lost forever in the fishin' hole, or confiscated by airport security there might be something to be said about having a whole charcuterie board of the little bastards to begin with so you'll have a ready supply of backups.

I browsed and documented a fair assortment of the available offerings which include this fuckin' thing, and this fuckin' thing, and these fuckin' things, and these fuckin' things. I have to admit that this SOG branded set was almost intriguing enough to get me to cave, and this box cutter set with a pair of Gerber EAB knockoffs in it is also interesting enough to warrant a mention if you're into that kind of thing. Likewise, this Kershaw branded set was coquettishly beckoning in my direction. I almost bought this interchangeable blade dressing knife combo just for the whimsy until I realized that I will never in a thousand years need to dress game for any purpose, and even if I found myself in that situation in the aftermath of some manner of hypothetical zombie attack scenario I of all people would probably not have any trouble laying my hands on a sharpened implement as it is.

The problem with all of this kind of crap is that, just like those Black Friday "doorbusters" these days, all of these kits are purposefully cut-down models commissioned specifically for the purposes of cramming them into bad value-for-dollar bundles like this and you'd pretty much always be better off buying a single boxed copy of some other knife actually from its purported maker. All of these were either explicitly constructed of garbo low end steels or didn't bother to specify, and ultimately didn't include much of anything I actually gave a shit about. So I left them alone.

Except.

Except, except, except.

Yeah, I still bought this one. Of course I did; you all saw the headline.

Among various other options, this one in particular is the Swiss Tech "Helden" kit. These things apparently all have international-chic faux Swedish names, sort of like Ikea furniture. And it's precisely an EDC Bro Starter Pack meme, but in real life.

If you apply a couple of brain cells to this you'll quickly realize the inherent shortcoming in these sorts of kits, vis-a-vis the fact that any presumptive loved one you'd be gifting this to who is into the discipline in question is pretty likely to already have a selection of spiffy knives, pens, keyring doodads, and other trinkets that they've picked out for themselves for various reasons. Thus they're unlikely to be excited by a perfunctory spread of Chinese knockoff stand-ins carelessly curated from the back of the vendor catalog because that's where the lowest bill of materials cost is.

Except.

I already said except.

A couple of things tickled my fancy, here. First is that in addition to a dinky EDC pen and wholly unexciting keyring, the Helden set also includes a little pen shaped interchangeable bit screwdriver kit, which according to the box comes with T6 and T8 Torx bits inside (as well as a 2.5mm slotted driver) which ought to be just about perfect for fiddling with knife screws in the field. It's even got a little pocket clip.

Second is that it includes an only mildly cheapified instance of Swiss Tech's Stämmig knife, which sports a gen-u-wine 12C27 Sandvik steel blade which is a mile or two beyond the 3cr and 420 bladed dreck in the other assortment kits, and got off mostly unscathed with the only visible downgrade being getting busted down from the full fat models' aluminum and carbon fiber scale options to regular G-10. This is labeled as the "Stämmig M2" version to indicate its cheapness.

It's worth mentioning that the carbon fiber scale version of this knife is $25 all on its lonesome. This whole kit is $30, like apparently all of the current gift combos, so you're basically allowing Hangzhou GreatStar Industrial Co., Ltd. to save $2 on the scales and you get to spend the change on a screwdriver and a little pen. "Cut, write, maintain, and carry," claims the front of the box. We'll see about all of that in due time, I'm sure.

I don't know where the hell "Helden" comes from in all of this. Nothing in the kit itself is named such; apparently it's the name of the entire box set, as whole. It translates to, "the hero." Oh, save us all from the marketing department.

Minus the gift box packaging, here's the full spread of what you get. There's also a small baggie with a trio of screws, presumably provided as replacements for some of those in the knife. There's no instructions leaflet or anything, though. Just a cardboard tray and some self-adhesive thingummies holding in all the various bits and bobs.

Nöt För Fïghtïng The Møøsë

Let's start with the Stämmig M2 itself.

The box actually has quite a bit to say about it and for once manages not to miss too many of the important aspects, listing not only the 12C27 blade first and foremost, but also the ceramic ball bearings, G-10 handles, and "updated skeletonized liners for added weight reduction."

The Stämmig is a fat chickadee masquerading as a knife. It's broadly rectangular and not terribly short at only 3-1/2" when closed, but it's 1-7/16" across so the ultimate result is a stubby look and feel. The blade is 1-15/16" long if you measure from the very forwardmost tip of the handle but manages to have a cutting edge that's slightly longer at a full 2", thanks to part of the edge extending past the end of the handles when it's open. The whole thing is 5-11/16" long by my measure. I dunno about adding less weight, however the hell that's supposed to work, but the Stämmig is a pretty chunky (for its length) 103.4 grams in total or 3.65 ounces.

I don't know what the hell you call its blade. It's a drop point sheepsfoot reverse tanto with an upsweep and a big hole in the middle of it. The edge is curved upwards noticeably from root to tip which genuinely does let you get almost all of it brought to bear on a flat surface. And because the primary taper can't start until after the hole finishes, it's a pretty steep ski slope down to the true edge's grind.

The Stämmig has a big fat and big flat pocket clip that'd be deep carry if it weren't positioned so unfortunately, or if its designers could restrain themselves from making so much of a flying leap at faux-Nordic fashionability and the tail of the thing weren't so angled. In any event, the back of the box suggests you could use this as a money clip and that's probably an attractive feature for anyone with fat stacks, unlike me who spends all of them on damn silly knives all the time.

The current Swiss Tech logo is punched into the clip here in addition to the head on the pivot screw. It's worth mentioning that Swiss Tech's logo is now this tree and not the cross it used to be. I imagine that's because they got sued, given that the entire point of the brand previously was apparently to exist in the hope that people would get it confused with Victorinox of Swiss Army Knife fame, kind of like those vaguely terrifying DVD knockoffs of Disney movies that used to lurk like so much fungus around supermarket checkout counters. Or, maybe it's because they got told off by the Red Cross organization and it's the same story as why all the medkits in Doom are green now. Or maybe both at once.

Oh, and the clip is also not reversible. For no particular reason, since the clip itself is completely symmetrical. There just aren't any holes for it on the other side.

In place of a thumb stud the Stämmig instead has this disk, which ought to put any Kershaw/Emerson CQC owner right at home. Other than that you don't get any opening gimmicks. There's no spring assist and there's sure as hell no pocket hook. The blurb on the box once again suggests you could use it as a front flipper, but this is bullshit and it's the kind of mindless trend chasing that really chafes my tailfeathers. Calling the Stämmig any kind of front flipper is a stretch that'd even make your yoga instructor blanch. It's basically impossible to open that way not only because it's too broad, but because anyone with eyes can see that no part of the jimped heel of the thing actually sticks out forward of the handles to begin with.

I'll also point out that the blemish in the screw head there is exactly as mine came out of the box.

It's an ordinary liner locker. There absolutely was room in here to make this an Axis locker which'd make it pretty much the only non-Benchmade entry in the 2" long blade class if it were. But it ain't, and it'll do you no good at all wishing for things that ain't. Maybe Santa Claus will bring you a Full Immunity this year.

Superficially a least, the Stämmig's build quality appears not to be bullshit. There are no telltale hallmarks of phoning in; the lockup is solid and positive, the blade doesn't rattle, and it even stays shut properly when it's not in use.

Instead, the Stämmig's bullshit isn't so much physical as it is conceptual. There's no escaping that it's just a bit too tryhard, with pseudominimalistic design language that only wishes it were hip and Nordic, and packaging doing its best to sell you on a pine scented zeitgeist of something that doesn't quite actually exist. If the Helden Kit's box were a person it'd be somebody who just found out about Eurovision yesterday and now they're going around calling themselves a "citizen of the world."

For instance the Stämmig, through its blurb on the box, makes a lot of noise about lightweight EDC minimalism without — you realize after inspecting it more carefully — actually managing to achieve it. For all its swish skeletonizing both within and without, and the end of the day it's still all steel with no fancy wondermaterials in it anywhere so it's actually pretty heavy. The wide money clip works, sure, but it's still not exactly discreet if you use it to clip the thing to your pants. And while we're at it we could do without the hole in the blade which surely serves only to make the blade itself a trifle weaker and be a place to accumulate pocket lint.

But then, the hole in the blade is also what makes the Stämmig carry any visual interest at all. So without it the entire ensemble would be worse even though removing it would objectively make it better. So roll that up and stick it in your koan, and ponder it for a while.

Where the Stämmig does succeed is in being a short bladed and nonthreatening urban EDC microknife, only just handily excising the "micro" part. Many of its ostensible competitors are with the best will in the world simply too small. Despite its short stature, nothing about the Stämmig feels small at all. It may be little compared to your favorite full sized tactical whatsit but when handling and using it you still feel as if you're holding a real knife rather than some ephemeral fingernail-picker that'll quail at the sight of anything more challenging than opening your next Amazon package. No, you're not going to use this to split kindling or cut down a tree, and you're probably not fighting anybody with it, either. But it's well above the minimum threshold where it graduates from being a keychain bauble to a usable cutting implement. And it's even made out of a decent steel. All this in a 2" folder that's got a short enough blade it ought to be pretty universally legal, at least within the US.

So there's a lot to recommend about the Stämmig.

Except.

Except for one thing. (I'm saying "except" a lot in this column.) We'll get to that. First, let's look at the rest of the package.

Skruvmejsel

The little screwdriver in this kit probably excited me at first more than the knife. Oh, sure, the knife is a fine thing in and of itself. But I have tons of knives, and ever since my CRKT Pocket Driver inexplicably went MIA I haven't had anything to carry around to twiddle and tune knives in the field other than my entire Wiha bit kit.

Like apparently almost everything they offer, Swiss Tech have gone and given this a gratuitous Swedish name and called it the "Basteln." You could translate this from Swedish (and German, for that matter) as "craft."

And is it not written, if I were rolling my eyes any harder I'd flip upside down.

Anyway, the Basteln is fairly self explanatory. The various EDC whatsits included in this package purport to be made of titanium but this doesn't, and as far as I can tell it's made of aluminum. It's quite small, only 3-1/4" long with its little endplug installed, and hexagonal in cross section with almost exactly the same thickness as a typical #2 pencil. It does have a pocket clip although that's mounted very low, which leaves about one third of the thing sticking up above the hem and makes you look like an enormous nerd. If that's not your jam you could dangle it from a keyring instead via the hole in its endplug.

Inside are the three advertised screwdriver tips in T6 and T8 Torx, plus a 2.5mm slotted driver which the package calls "# 2.5" for some reason. These aren't the usual 1/4" hexagonal driver bits but rather the smaller 3/16" size which are typically found in your dinky cell phone repair kits and so forth.

These types of bits are a commodity item, except in this case they've been sawn roughly in half so that all three of them will fit inside the Basteln's handle. You can use it with the normal longer bits as well, but if you're thinking of carrying around a different bit in this thing note that you can only fit one of the full sized ones in it.

There's a magnet in the socket on the business end and the bits work in it exactly as you'd expect. The Basteln's main drawback is that its cross section is hilariously tiny and not a very comfortable shape to grip, so if you ever find yourself needing to really crank on any particular screw you'll probably find that you actually, er, can't.

This will become relevant very soon.

The included T6 and T8 bits appear to be bespoke items, or at least manufactured with some modicum of attention to detail. The slotted bit clearly isn't, and has just been sawn off at the knees. Unlike the other two, its bottom is flat and nobody's bothered to recreate the chamfer around its edges. This doesn't affect anything, it's just one of those little observations.

Brütålïzätïøn

Right there on the back of the box the Helden kit claims the included screwdriver is for maintaining your knife. So what happens if you try?

Boy am I glad you asked.

Getting the clip off is only mildly arduous. The screws are T6 heads which fit one of the bits that come with the driver. They're cranked, though, and also threadlockered with what appears to be the equivalent of permanent (i.e. red) threadlocker. It's theoretically possible that you may be able to undo these with the dinky Basteln driver but unlikely. I'm not exactly hopeless when it comes to swinging tools around but even I couldn't do it without resorting to grabbing the Basteln with pliers or something and thus marring its finish. I didn't, and I gave up and switched to my Wiha driver instead. After some struggle, the clip screws came out. Great! Now what?

Removing the thumb disk is also a hassle. You'd probably want to before attempting to sharpen Stämmig, because even if the blade is broad enough to hit your target angle without it getting in the way (it probably is) you still wouldn't want to mess up that swanky red anodized finish. Its screw is T6 as well, and also glued in with permanent threadlocker. Grand.

But that's only an appetizer. The body and pivot screws are also slathered in permanent threadlocker and some hateful bastard at the factory also apparently cranked them down with about a hundred and six ugga-duggas. Thanks a lot, asshole. So they're not budging. At all.

Thus the notion that you can use the bit driver included with this kit to get into the knife is thoroughly dashed. You're welcome to try, but you'll simply ream the tips off of the drivers. Their quality isn't awful, but they're not exactly premium either. The Stämmig is designed with no user serviceable parts inside, and the means you're likely to find this out involve destroying the very bits your kit came with, which it told you were intended to take apart this selfsame knife. What an absolute steaming crock of lutefisk. So just forget it.

Well, you can forget it. I have a reputation to uphold.

I'm no stranger to getting apart impossible to disassemble knives. I torqued three of my dwindling supply of T6 Torx bits so hard that their tips corkscrewed and then broke off before wising up, and then tried attacking the threadlocker directly. The typical way to go about this sort of thing is to take your soldering iron and use it to cook the heads of the offending screws until the shanks hit 300° F or thereabouts, which is the temperature at which even permanent threadlocker (excepting the specialty high temperature variants) decomposes and lets go. You'll find that some cheapola Chinese knives are assembled with bonna fide superglue instead of Loctite, but not to worry; that also breaks down at around 300 degrees.

During this process I discovered two things:

1. The heating element in my soldering iron has apparently partially given up the ghost, so fuck me, and
2. The body screws in the Stämmig are not T6 but in fact T7, a bit which does not even come with its bit kit, so fuck you.

It seems they really don't intend you to take this thing apart after all.

Well, bully for them. You can't keep this bird down.

These are without a doubt the singular most crudded up with threadlocker screws I have ever removed from a knife in all my years. The crap is everywhere: On the threads, in the boreholes, in the rebates in the scales, and all over the outsides of the aluminum handle spacers as well.

Inside is at least one interesting construction detail, which is the crescent moon track and endstop peg integrated into the blade which is nearly identical to the one we found in the Ozark Trail Valor from last week. That plus the overall construction similarity lends more credence to the theory that the latter is unmistakably yet another Hangzhou joint.

Note also that this has a functioning anti-rotating pivot screw, and a good thing, too. Because without it the blasted thing would be even more difficult to get apart than it already is.

The Stämmig has very nice ceramic ball bearing assemblies with brass carriers. These are way nicer than the ones found in the aforementioned Valor, and probably represent a significant fraction of the $5 price premium. The detent ball in the liner lock is also ceramic.

The blade is pocketed to accept these but the liners are flat.

The back of the box was telling the truth about the skeletonized liners, at least. The two halves are separated by a pair of aluminum diabolo shaped spacers which are anodized red just like the thumb disk.

Here's the hardware lineup, sans the two body screws on the scale I didn't bother to take apart because I'm tired, boss.

From left to right, here are the clip screws, the pivot, both body screws from one side, the thumb disk, the bearings, and the three extra screws included in the package.

Which... don't... match any of the others. What in the nine circles of Alighierian hell now?

The instructions don't tell you this because there aren't any. But I eventually figured out that these are intended to fill the holes in the scale if you intend to remove the clip. I think.

The clip, you see, is located via three protrusions on its back face which index into the holes drilled in the scale on that side.

So including special screws to fill these is a whole entire layer of extra that's just absolutely uncalled for. Neat that they bothered, I mean, sure, I guess. But it's exasperatingly unlikely that anyone would A) bother to attempt to remove the clip, and B) actually manage to do it with the included tools, let alone C) notice or care about the difference in sizes in the screw heads, versus just putting the original clip screws back in where they came from.

What the actual fuck.

Do you know what I would have liked much better than three unnecessary clip hole filler screws? A T7 bit that actually fits half of the friggin' screws on this knife. Oh, and rounding up whoever is responsible for applying the threadlocker on these and kicking him directly off of the end of the nearest pier.

Tråkig

Here's the included keyring. The incorrigible punters in the marketing department have insisted on naming it "Binden," per the back of the box. I don't know why. This doesn't mean "keyring," it means "bind."

Fair enough, I suppose. But was this trip really necessary?

It's one of those flat profiled jobbies that are all the rage among the EDC cool kids nowadays. At least it's genuinely titanium, just like its description says. I assume so, anyway. A magnet doesn't stick to it and it's clearly neither aluminum nor cast zinc.

There's not much else to say about it, really. If, for some reason, you find yourself in desperate need of specifically a flat titanium keyring, this one can be yours for a mere $30 with a knife and pen and screwdriver thrown in for free.

I think there's probably slightly more efficient ways to go about it in that case, if we're honest.

Scrïbblën

Somehow, the included pen does not have a gratuitous Swedish nametag.

I'm not complaining, but given the pattern so far that's kind of weird. It is, at least, pretty nice for what it is.

For a start, it is also genuinely titanium. Well, the body and its cap are, anyway. The preinstalled little keyring is steel, and so is the pen point and ballpoint ink tube inside. It's only 4.6 grams (0.16 ounces!) including the ring and all. It's also seriously tiny: 3-1/8" long with the cap installed and only 0.197" or 5.14mm in diameter. With the cap removed it's only 2-7/8" long which for me at least is actually too short to comfortably write with since it's too short to actually reach the web of my hand. If you're old enough to have ever scribbled something on an old Palm Pilot with its included stylus, well, this'll remind you a lot of that. Welcome back to 1999.

The cap is a screw on arrangement and can't be posted on the tail of the pen. That seems dumb, but the intended arrangement is to dangle this from a zipper tab or something and leave the cap there when you unscrew the pen from it.

This is just a regular old cheapo ballpoint writer and not a gel pen or anything. Inside is a regular-ish old ballpoint mechanism. It looks like just a cheap ballpoint, it writes just like a cheap ballpoint. It works; it's nothing special. You can get at it by unscrewing the tiny little endplug on the tail end of the pen.

You get two refills with the kit. By the time you actually get around to needing them these are guaranteed by ancient rite and custom to have long since vanished. That's no matter, since you could handily replace one of these with probably any old thing stolen from a donor pen. You only have to be willing to hack the ink tube down to be short enough and risk getting gunk all over yourself in the process. Habitual office stationery fiddlers know how this all works.

Astute readers will notice that the refills come with threaded black plastic caps on the ends whereas the original cartridge installed in the pen doesn't.

And lo, these won't screw into the pen body. Thus I strongly suspect that these are actually readily available commodity refills for something else, which Hangzhou GreatStar or whoever have co-opted for use here.

It doesn't seem like this ought to work, but when the time comes you can just rip the black plastic caps off. It turns out they're not held on by anything. It'd be helpful if the instructions mentioned this, but first it'd have to come with instructions.

Any time serious photography equipment is brought in close proximity to a ballpoint pen it is required by law that a high magnification macro shot of the pen's point must be produced. Herewith, I present the following:

There's a silicone O-ring at the base of the threads here which probably doesn't do a great deal to keep water out of this but does serve as a friction aid to prevent the pen from coming unscrewed from its cap of its own accord and disappearing.

Here's the article in question compared to a smattering of mini EDC-ish pens located by casting around those strewn about my desk at the moment: From the bottom up this is an Ohto Tasche, the obligatory Fisher Bullet space pen, a OLight O'Pen Mini, our subject, a crusty old Nite Ize Inka, and whatever the fuck this is. The Swiss Tech pen is probably now the smallest functional pen I own.

Perførmåncë

Look.

I knew I was going to get myself into trouble producing graphs in my last review, because now everyone's going to expect the same level of rigor for every damn fool shard of metal that crosses my desk from now on.

I'm not doing that today. Maybe later for this knife, but not right now. But here's what I can tell you.

As the Stämmig comes out of the box it is heckin' sharp.

Its edge grind is not exceptionally refined or polished, but it's got a wicked apex on it which is probably the keenest I've ever encountered on a production knife this cheap.

I don't know if this is a fluke or what, but mine is also nearly perfectly true. That, combined with the 12C27 steel which I measured at between 55 and 60 HRC, means that the Stämmig ought to be a perfectly satisfactory cutter right from the jump for the purposes of all but the most persnickety knife nerds. And anyone in that camp will probably just resharpen the damn thing themselves anyway.

You want a graph? Here's a graph.

With its stock edge and geometry, the Stämmig scores with an average cutting force pressure of 49.45 grams and a peak pressure of only 49.9 grams via my ISO standard Post-It slice test. It's also suspiciously consistent across the entire length of its edge. I will remind you that in our last test, after mirror polishing the edge on my Ozark Valor it scored 39.94g and 55.5g on the same tests. That's... not far off, all from a knife I haven't fiddled with at all.

Suffice it to say, anybody who finds one of these stuffed in their stocking on Christmas morning probably shouldn't handle it incautiously.

I'm not doing a long-winded cardboard cutting edge retention test on this just yet. I don't have the time, I've only owned this for a day and I don't want to fuck the finish up on it already, and practically no prospective buyer of this thing is going to care.

Thë Inevitable Cønclüsion

The Stämmig and by extension its Helden kit box thing are, amazingly, mostly not crap. I had a hunch, or more accurately a hope, that this would be the case. Which is ultimately exactly why I picked this out of lineup among all of its peers. It's nice to be right sometimes.

Actually, something just occurred to me. If this was supposed to be an EDC starter kit, you guys forgot to include the obligatory crappy 3xAAA flashlight.

...Guys? Ah, well. I guess there's always next year.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go find the guy in charge of the Loctite at the Hangzhou GreatStar factory and dump this load of coal down his chimney.

Look, you probably won't believe me when I say I don't really follow much of the internet scuttlebutt that we will hesitantly refer to as The Online Knife Community. I've got a multitude of reasons, not least of which being that during daylight hours I'm actually doing other things with my life. Yes, I know that's just as unbelievable. But the real crux of it is that over a lifetime I've already had my fill of the ol' WWW. That is to say, not the internet as a whole but rather the three overarching themes looming over literally every hobby-sphere where there really isn't enough for everybody to say on a daily basis to keep the algorithm happy, so we wind up with a steady diet of:

• Whining
• Whacked Takes
• and Willful Ignorance

It gets even worse if you scroll into the comments.

Anyhoo, that means I probably miss out on most of the "viral" knives that bubble up through the Intertubes unless I happen to wind up with one independently and then find out about it afterwards. Even when I try for it on purpose it tends not to work out. Take, for instance, the Walmart/Ozark Trail TR2203R1-11 V2, the mid-cycle facelift and successor to the TR2203R1-11 V1, the now apparent OG, a sequence of words I never thought I would write in a million years about a fucking Walmart product of all things.

Yeah, I've totally got one of those. I bought it with the honest intention of writing all about it, but found myself without anything compelling to say on the topic. It's just like its predecessor except the clip's properly reversible now, you can also get it in green, and if you have the orange one the color is a little more vibrant. Woo! I'll bet I can stretch that out into a thousand words. That's another column in the books, boys. Wrap it up and print it.

Well, we're not reviewing that knife because it's been usurped.

This is the Ozark Trail Valor. That's right, they're giving them names now. Not only that, but this is a Walmart private label knife and it doesn't even come on a stupid hang card. It comes in a real box:

I left the stickers on it for reference, and also for posterity. And for the lulz.

The Valor is one of as far as I can tell the trio of new-ish "premium" named boxed knives now available from Sam Walton's Big Rock Candy Mountain. The Valor is probably the best deal of the bunch if you ask me, and I also saw its siblings the "Sonder" and "Nimbus" on display but left them alone. The Sonder is a Civivi-esque button locker with green G10 handles which is probably the second place contender of the bunch in the interesting-enough-to-bother-with stakes. It's 12C27 steel, which is another Sandvik option but one peg lower on the totem pole, but the main reason I left it there is because button lockers aren't really my forté. If anyone says they care I may pick one up later and mess with it.

For what it's worth, Walmart is doing a crap job of marketing these. For instance, their listed names aren't even shown on Walmart's on website, which makes them a trifle annoying to track down unless you already know what they look like.

These aren't the only cheapie Ozarks that have suddenly sprouted names. This seems to be a theme this year with several other of the traditional crapola models typically found on the rotating coutnertop rack or tucked away down the camping aisle also sporting nametags, with such examples of the "Vertex" and "Fauna" low-rent liner lockers, "Eagle Rock" and "Forge" fixed blades, and another Axis locker with injection molded scales, the "Glacier." At least this makes identifying the damn things in store somewhat possible for any weirdo who really wants to stuff themselves down this strange and awful rabbit hole. I snapped several quick pics of these, which you can see here, here, and here.

The old orange D2 version is still here, too. It hasn't been given a new name and is still just another nondescript "7.5 Inch Folding Knife." It's also $2 cheaper than when I bought mine, damn it. I suspect my retirement fund strategy of hanging onto my unopened one until it somehow appreciates in value is probably not going to pan out anytime soon.

Look At You, College Boy

I spotted the Valor by pure chance in the glass case at my local Walmart. I always look, of course, because that's the law and you have to. As you can see I also always cruise the cheap peg racks for anything new and interesting, or at least overtly whack and highly suspicious, either of which could be the very leavening from which the dough of content is made. And lo, this stood out to me.

It also marks the first time in my life I've ever gone so far as to bother to buy any non-brand-name knife from the Walmart glass case.

That's really highfalutin'. Did you forget your roots, son? Are you gonna tell me you actually washed yer truck before you took your girl to Dairy Queen in it, too? Combed your mullet before you put on that tux, didja? Get a load of this, Bill, this guy bought his knife from the counter! They made him pay for it right there! Haw haw haw.

And yes, when I got home I checked online and discovered that the Internet already went absolutely berserk all over this knife. Every asshole with a mouth and a Youtube channel apparently had a hot take about it around four months ago and as usual I missed it.

I don't care. The Valor is only $20 and it's actually pretty nice.

Here's how you identify one of these. Apparently there's a hang card version of this as well, but you want a boxed copy. That's because the box fully protects the article in question, whereas the hang card packaging leaves the handle exposed to get all fucked up in transit.

As usual for Walmart's own brand stuff, the bumf on the box doesn't really do a great job of selling you on the product. They blithely list it as a "7.5 Inch Folding Knife" in the headline which serves as no differentiation at all between this and the other crap they sell that's not as good. The back lists a "slide lock" at least (an Axis lock to you and me) as well as a "belt clip," once again continuing the proud tradition of misrepresenting the intended use of the pocket clip on your knife, enticing bozos to dangle it on the outside of their pants where it can get hooked on stuff and break, and then prompt the owners to moan about it.

Stop that.

It also lists the recyclability of the box (cardboard) and interior tray (cardboard) as well as an "insert," (paper) the latter of which was MIA from mine. I have no idea if this was a packaging thing or is intended to be some manner of instructions leaflet, and in the latter case it may have been a deep well of hilarity but now we'll never know.

Oh, yeah. It also lets slip that the Valor has a 14C28N blade.

After the Axis lock, that's the second thing I spotted on this knife when I was looking at it in that glass case. It's rare enough that Ozark Trail knives even admit what they're made out of at all, let alone turn up being made out of a steel that's actually supposed to be pretty good.

So I'll be damned. There's my twenty bucks down, and into my pocket this went.

The Skinny

It's so irresistibly tempting to call the Valor yet another Benchmade Bugout clone that practically nobody seems to be capable of mentioning the thing without saying it. In terms of being an Axis locking folder with a drop point blade of roughly the same length, I guess that's accurate in a way.

What's new here isn't just the 14C28N blade but also the anodized aluminum handle scales. The Ozark Trail Axis lockers have historically already been plenty rigid enough thanks to full length steel liners beneath their scales, but this one takes it one step further.

Not to come over all like a cell phone reviewer about it, but this makes the Valor feel a lot more premium due to being denser in the hand than previous outings. It's 93.6 grams or 3.3 ounces overall, which is up 13 grams and some change from its plastic scaled predecessor. The injection molded scales on the prior editions were certainly functional and by no means bad, but with the best will in the world they always felt a little cheap.

Walmart calls the blade 3-1/4" and it's actually 3-3/16" from the forwardpost point on the handle by my measure. It's a modified tanto point and exactly 0.090" thick. The grind is very subtly hollow, nearly flat, but not quite. The open length is allegedly 7-1/2" but once again they overshot, and I measure mine at 7-3/8".

Some punters on the Internet are trying to call this a Kershaw Iridium clone. I don't see it, personally. It's not too tough to figure out who Walmart is trying to take a swing at here, yet again.

The Valor is a lot thicker than a Bugout, too, but if you ask me it feels nicer to handle. For some baffling reason all of the jimping has been omitted from this other than that on the back of the blade. The old plastic handled incarnations had a Benchmade-esque strip of it on the back of the handle as well, but this doesn't. That plus the smooth scales superficially ought to make the Valor a metal bar of soap, and maybe if you were using it in the wet or with thick gloves on it would be. For EDC use by hypothetical normal people, whoever the hell those may be, you'll probably think it feels great. There's nothing quite like a smooth slab of cold metal in your hand.

The blade is coated with some kind of PVD finish which is variously called bronze or copper depending on who you ask. Me, I'm calling it brown. Look, you can try to fancify it all you want but it doesn't work. Under any lighting, in any condition...

It's brown.

I'm not a fan of that, only because I'm not a fan of coated blades in general. I think this'd be much more boss with a bare steel blade. The previous D2 models were undoubtedly coated for rust resistance, but 14C28N is way more corrosion proof than so that's really unnecessary here. Instead, they've apparently spraypainted the blade on this one specifically to annoy you once it gets scuffed up.

Or me. When I said you I meant me. (Hey, hey.)

There's a deep carry pocket clip that they even managed to pull off right this time. Just like the previous D2 folders it's really stiff, but in this case thanks to the smooth handle scales the draw is very nice bad. It's the usual through-hole design but this time around the screws actually are flush fitting.

Well, almost. Never mind the one sticking out there. That's how mine came out of the box, but after messing with it myself I was able to get it to go right back in and it stayed there. The clip screws are exactly as long as they need to be to sink into the liners, not one molecule more, and thanks to its bodacious spring tension the base of the clip won't sit flat in its little mounting pocket enough to get the second screw in unless you think to mash the clip down with your thumb before doing up the second screw. Otherwise it looks like it goes in but doesn't actually grab anything.

I choose to take this as a fantastic sign that some factory worker with cojones like cannonballs finally went and invented the concept of the Chinese weekend. Mine must've been made last thing on a Friday.

Either that, or they're all like this. So watch out.

We didn't have to wait for version two to come out in order to get a reversible clip this time. There's a matching pocket in the opposite scale for lefties if you want to swap the clip over. You only get tip up carry, though. This ain't no Spyderco. You also don't get anything to fill the empty divot with.

You can't miss the Axis lock crossbar on this thing. There it is. It looks fine, it feels good, it works. My example has perfect lockup and action. No rattle, no wiggle, no hitches, no kinks.

One thing the back of the box forgot to mention is that this totally is a ball bearing knife. That's not hard to guess given that the last two versions were as well. Once you have a chance to play with it that's unmistakable. But still, they could have bothered to say.

I'm really stoked about this, by the way. Not the Valor in particular, but the apparent fact that everybody's figured out that little thrust bearings aren't premium and they never were, so everything's showing up with them nowadays. I'm sure some Nedermeyer will pop out of the woodwork now with a list of cons to go with the pros, but nobody cares. Er, you shouldn't use them in dusty environments or underwater or in space! Whatever. Ball bearings are a quick and effective path to smooth opening with broadly wiggle-free pivots and is loads better than whatever cut rate bullshit the Chinese have been throwing in their crappy knives for decades. So I say bring it on. Ball bearings in everything. Let's fuckin' go already.

There has been much speculation and wild theorizing online about who actually makes this thing. Some extremely hopeful punters are claiming it "must" be of CIVIVI manufacture, or Kershaw, or whoever else. I'm not buying any of it. Hangzhou GreatStar Industrial Co., Ltd has historically been the manufacturer of insofar as we can tell every recent Ozark Trail and Walmart knife, up to an including the myriad Swiss Tech models and so on and so forth. There's no compelling reason to surmise that this isn't as well. If your uncle works in the factory or something and you've got insider information on it, do by all means let us know. But in the absence of that I'm calling it as the same as the previous versions, especially since the fit and finish of this, not to mention the construction methodology, is highly reminiscent of other knives in similar guises from various faceless Chinese manufacturers these days. Just to name one off the top of my head, this thing really puts me in mind of my HUAAO Bugout clone.

You can spot a shitty knife from a mile off if the blade centering is out of whack. This one isn't, which stands to reason since it's not a liner locker and it's got ball bearings. But it's nice to see all the same. So on that note, I can't wait any longer to see what we'll find inside it.

Giblets

Nowhere does Walmart or Ozark Trail or anybody make any mention of whether or not the Valor's got any kind of warranty. Maybe it was on the insert I was supposed to get. Well, either way mine probably doesn't anymore. Bombs away!

There's stuff in here I like. There's stuff in here I don't like, but I'm not too surprised by. But for what it's worth my Valor wasn't difficult to take apart at all. The major screws are threadlockered, but they let go with a minimum of drama.

The aluminum scales are single piece machinings, and they're made pretty well. The anodizing obviously comes after the machining and surface texturing. The outsides are lightly textured, presumably bead blasted or similar.

The liners are plain steel. Everything is gooped up with corrosion inhibiting oil of some variety and I left these exactly as they were for this photo. But there are already tiny rust spots on mine, which is discouraging. Only the nerds and the obsessive compulsive will probably see this, but still. Would it cost that much more to make these out of cheap stainless? Or chrome plate them?

Actually, forget I said that. It probably would.

If you were paying attention you'll have noticed that the Valor has a driverless head on one side of its pivot screw. If you weren't paying attention, now's your chance to pretend you were.

This caused me some trepidation initially, but I soldiered on anyway. It turns out the pivot screw is an anti-rotating one with a flat on it, and the liners are broached correctly for this and everything (for once), so no tricks are necessary to get the screw off.

Inside is the usual Axis lock arrangement. Omega springs, single piece crossbar, you know how it is by now.

What's more interesting is the Valor's lack of endstop pins. Instead there's a captive pin pressed into the blade itself which runs in a semicircular track in the liners. That's pretty unusual, and I wonder if this is some sort of patent avoidance thing, or what. Truth be told I didn't notice that there's no endstop pin until I took it apart and saw this. Right now is when you'll realize that where that pin would be, in a traditionally designed Axis lock folder, instead they've cheekily cut away that part of the handle and left it as a stylish 45 degree chamfer.

The older D2 Axis folder did have an endstop pin, and it was cheap and horrible and not held in by anything, and liked to fall out as soon as you took the fucker apart. This is better.

The pin in the blade is apparently pressed in. It's not coming out without a fight, probably by whacking it with a pin punch, so I left it alone.

There is also a tiny little burr on the tip of the pivot screw on mine, which made pressing it out about 2% more inconvenient than it needed to be.

The Valor uses incredibly thin thrust bearing assemblies. The balls are steel and the carriers are Nylon, so you're not getting anything super fancy. Still, they do their job well. Presumably because of this, neither the liners nor the blade are pocketed to accept these bearings.

In fact, the bearing assemblies are so thin that they'd probably be thin enough to act as drop in replacements for the ordinary washers found in a non-bearing knife. That is, if only you could figure out where to get your hands on a bunch of these with identical specifications. Now there's an interesting idea.

There's a full aluminum backspacer. The lanyard hole is here as well and this sticks out proud of the aluminum scales when the knife is assembled. This is much unlike the true Bugout clones which only have little diabolo screw spacers here instead. I like this idea better which seems sturdier and less failure prone, plus it looks cool.

Here's most of the ensemble. I didn't take the other scale off because there's no difference between the two sizes and I'm lazy.

Per-formance

Oh boy, where the rubber meets the road. Here's where the fuckin' opinions always start.

Written columns like this one and, indeed, every single user written review of every stupid knife in the universe always have the same problem. A knife's sharpness is basically impossible to accurately express in text, and so beyond exceptionally egregiously bad examples it's really not even beneficial to try. "Real sharp," declares every single quasi-literate chump who's managed to figure out how to swipe at his phone's keyboard. We should all hope so, because that's how knives are supposed to work, innit? But these are also the same bozos who on average are likely to use the tip of their Gerber as a screwdriver or chop vegetables on a glass serving tray, so they may or may not know what a sharp knife would be like if you dropped one on them point first from a helicopter, nor be able to gather up enough articulation to cut their way out of a brown paper bag in order to tell you about it even if they did. Unless you have the opportunity to demand that any given keyboard warrior present to you his credentials before you either consider or outright discard his assessment, none of this is likely to be useful.

It gets worse when you start asking people about edge retention rather than just plain old seat-of-the-pants sharpness. Because good lord, everybody suddenly has nine different opinions and hazy half-recollected soundbytes about how this steel is better than that steel is worse than the other steel, most of which is bullshit and all of which smells a lot more like dogma than science.

So. What to do about this.

I am versed in CARTA edge retention testing, at least as far as knowing what it is and broadly how it works. But I'm not making this my job to the extent of actually ponying up the cash to purchase the requisite equipment. I'm also aware of the BESS sharpness testing methodology, which is, ah, certainly something that indeed exists. I'm too skint to get into that either, but it's also clearly a "system" that seems to exist largely to sell proprietary consumables and that just ruffles my feathers the wrong way.

But there may be a kernel of usefulness, there. I considered this for some time, and eventually determined we can surely come up with something achieving 80, maybe 90% of the functionality and silliness of the BESS system with only about 1% of the cost.

So meet this fuckin' thing, which is my own invention.

We're all familiar with that Youtube staple, the standing paper cut test, right? What you do is take a piece of random paper and fold it in half, stand it up on a table or something, and then lop it in two without supporting it in order to show off to everybody how studly your sharpening skills are. And if you want to cheat, just carefully select your paper to be thinner or thicker or more rigid or whatever it is you need to make yourself look good, slap it on Tiktok, and rake in those like'n'subscribes.

This standardizes that somewhat. Instead of random paper it accepts normal square Post-It notes, which I determined by probing sheets from several packs of them with my micrometer are actually of remarkably consistent thickness. They're also always the same size, and you can steal them from work. Perfect!

I've paired this with the cheap digital desktop scale I use to weigh all the various trinkets in my writeups. The BESS scale you can buy for $170 is allegedly much fancier than this, and may just at the periphery have a couple of genuinely handy extra features like locking its readout to the highest read value, which my $10 weed scale can't do. But I'll bet you it's not objectively any more accurate, and we can record our stats simply enough by just pointing any of our myriad cameras and the display and taking a video recording. That ain't too tough.

What you do is crease a Post-It into a V, stick it in the slot standing up, and place it on the scale. Tare the scale so it reads zero with the weight of the holder and Post-it on it, place it on a rigid surface, and chop that sucker in half. Note how much force it takes (I used grams) to make the cut. Just like golf, lower numbers are better.

In my head I've long decried the lack of hard data in our little enterprise, here. Now the flashlight guys don't get to have all the fun.

Here's a chart of how much pressure it takes to cleave a Post-It in twain with the Valor's stock edge. It peaked at 127.7 grams with an average of 80.38 grams of force required. So what the fuck does that mean?

Not a whole hell of a lot, without something to compare it to. So here with the gold line is the same test done with my Benchmade Bugout, which has been personally sharpened by yours truly and not used for much (insofar as I can remember) since. It's profiled at a 30° angle which matters because in the realm of knife sharpness goddamn everything matters. How easily a knife will cut any given thing depends on how the knife's profile is shaped, how acute the edge is, how well it's sharpened, and how much of that edge has been folded or chipped or abraded away in the meantime, i.e. how much dulling has occurred.

I figure this all ought to be self-evident. But you never know. There are a zillion variables to control for, and I'm going to go ahead and account for none of them. Thin skinny knives cut better than fat lumpy ones. That's a fact. In this test, a skinny little knife will score better than a thick one. And so what if it does? That's how it'll work in the real world, too.

Anyhoo, what I'm more interested in as a quality benchmark is edge retention. And if there's one thing knife bros get super hot and bothered about more than anything else in the entire universe, it's edge retention. When we're nattering away about a steel's performance, this is almost invariably what we mean. "Better" steels have more of it, "worse" steels have less, and when it's worth the tradeoff for more or less edge retention for more or less corrosion resistance, or ease of sharpening, or more toughness that'll translate to you being less likely to just snap your blade like a piece of glass? Oy, vey. We never shut up about it. Holy wars and crusades have been started over less. Ask three people about this and you'll inevitably get nine opinions, six of which will actually be wrong because the claimant is parroting some half-remembered factoid or oversimplification of how alloys work. Two of them will just be a pair of idiots bleating "it's all in the heat treatment" over and over again because they're desperately envious of everyone else's high performance knives and trying to stave off buyer's remorse of their own cheap 420HC blades. The ninth opinion may well be something quoting Larrin Thomas and thus actually hold some weight. But then only maybe.

And hey, Mr. Thomas says right here that 14C28N is his top pick for a budget knife steel, so this thing ought to do pretty alright.

Right?

I boldly set off to find out, and along the way I discovered a few things about the Valor and its edge.

First, I don't have one of those fancy Rockwell hardness testing machines, either. But I do have a cheap set of allegedly Japanese graded hardness files, with which I gleefully attacked the Valor's edge before sharpening it. Mine only go in 5 HRC increments, so what I can tell you for sure is that the Valor's steel is between 55 and 60 HRC at the edge — not at the spine or anywhere else, which even if we had more decimal places would not necessarily result in a number producing any kind of useful performance prediction.

55 is kind of on the low end of allegedly optimum hardness for 14C28N, and the high range is 62 which is higher than what my files imply it is. So if one thing is for certain the actual value can't be up there. It's possible that the Valor's heat treatment leaves its steel on the soft side, I suppose, but without more precise equipment it's difficult to be sure. I can tell you that a truly catastrophically bad heat treating job would have been immediately apparent, registering on the next grade down's file (50 HRC) and it seems that's not what we've got on our hands here. So that's hopeful.

While we're at it, here's what the edge looks like as received right out of the box. This is a pretty typical factory edge grind for a not-too-expensive knife. The Valor has no ricasso at the base of the blade, and there's an equivalent of a choil back there even though there's no stop pin or mechanical reason for there to be one. Regardless of the reason, the edge runs all the way from the tip to the base.

Except.

The thumb stud on this puppy is non-removable. Oh, I'm sure it gets mounted at the factory by screwing its two halves together, but the stud hasn't got anywhere to insert any kind of bit driver on either side of it, and even if it is a threaded assembly it's definitely glued together as well. You could attempt to grip this with padded pliers and probably not succeed, or simply clamp either side in a duo of Vise Grips and possibly succeed but definitely mar the finish. I decided against either strategy and left it alone.

But that means with where the thumb studs are positioned relative to the edge, and how tall they stick up, it's functionally impossible to sharpen all of the Valor's edge all the way down to the base at a shallow angle without also striking the studs with your stone and scuffing them up.

The tip is acceptably pointy, and as usual for a cheap tanto pointed knife the edge angles between the main grind along the length of the blade and the secondary section of the edge up at the point are not quite the same.

The edge trueness isn't bad, but it's still not the same angle on either side.

To get a known starting point, I dutifully clamped the Valor into my Ruixin sharpener and bullied its edge down to a consistent 30°, 15° per side. I went down to 2000 grit on my diamond stones, and then lightly finished up with some DMT 0.5 micron diamond stuff on a strop. Here's what that wound up looking like:

This is down near the base of the edge, so notice the unsharpened bit all the way on the right hand side. That's the short section of the edge that was blocked by the thumb studs, and is maybe a shade under 1/4" long. I could have messed with this further. I decided against it.

While I was at it I discovered that a short portion of the edge down near the tip, and only on one side, is dished. You can see as it catches the light that the edge isn't straight and there's a small wiggle in it. Not anymore; I ground this out along with everything else.

After sharpening and polishing down to that 30° angle, the Valor's cutting performance increased dramatically. Although, you'd bloody well expect it to.

That's the red line there. The blue one is the data from the factory edge. On the first cut it required only a maximum of 55.5 grams of force to cut a full Post-It, and an average of only 39.94. Yowzer.

Now what? Well, we need to see if it stays that way after cutting a bunch of stuff.

Spoiler: It won't. No knife ever will.

Plain old corrugated cardboard is a cheap and abundant cutting medium, especially at this time of year. It's also shockingly abrasive, as anyone who cuts a lot of boxes in a day can tell you. Using it to dull your knife in a consistent manner is dead simple, just prepare some sheets of it in a consistent width — I settled on 12" — and get to slicing. If you want quicker results, be sure to cut against the grain of the corrugations. Or, if you're a little diaper baby who isn't confident of their sharpening job, you could cut along the grain instead and have this take a lot longer.

I pitted my Valor against the obvious competition, a Benchmade Bugout, in what ought to be superficially at least much more performant S30V. After ten rounds each of hackin' and whackin' in 12" increments, i.e. ten linear feet of cutting, I took a reading at the scale. But because I ran out of cardboard, I only did this twice per knife.

The Valor diminished to needing an average of 70.94 grams to complete its cut test after 10 rounds of cardboard, and 113.09 grams after 20. The Bugout, meanwhile, started off before any cuts at an average 48.21, dulled to needing 56.11 after 10 cardboard cuts, and 83.78 after 20.

The blues are the Valor and the golds are the Bugout, and if you're colorblind I'm very sorry but I can't help you with that. The numbers don't lie, the Bugout started off requiring slightly less peak pressure to complete its cuts and remained sharper longer than the Valor did. Maybe that's to be expected considering the much fancier steel, but the other thing to keep in mind is that a Bugout costs nine times more.

At the end of the day the Valor lost a lot of its peak sharpness but still wound up being about 74% as sharp as the Bugout at the conclusion of the test. Both knives are still objectively sharp at the end, being able to shave off arm hairs with only a little more noticeable effort required with the Valor. If you absolutely need your knife to remain 26% better at cutting cardboard over time, is it worth a 900% premium in price? If I keep going, will the gap widen even more?

I don't fuckin' know, you tell me. I ran out of cardboard in any case.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Oh, and while we're at it, this is what the cardboard cutting test did to that brown finish on my knife:

All this is permanent. I mitigated it somewhat by scrubbing at it, but it'll never go away. However it came out of the box is as pristine as a coated blade will ever be, and if you're the sort of person who likes to keep your stuff looking nice this is going to piss you off forever.

Not that I'd know, or anything.

So here's the thing. Up until now, every Walmart knife has come with the same kind of apology preattached to it. You know how it is. Yeah, well, it's only ten bucks, or seven bucks, or even five bucks. It's not meant to be taken seriously, right? It's not a proper knife, so what can you expect?

This doesn't.

The old advice is evergreen, but to the point that we're all getting sick of saying it: It's great for what it is, but if you're willing to spend just that little bit more you can get something better.

Well, now I don't think you can. Not anymore, anyway. The mic has well and truly been dropped. Gauntlet, flung down. Treatise, nailed to the cathedral door.

For $20 you're going to be hard pressed to get your hands on a blade made of 14C28N, let alone in an Axis locker, and with ball bearing pivots. That makes the Valor a hell of a deal even with its baffling design decisions that piss me the hell off.

So now its in a category where I don't know what the hell to do with it. All I want for Christmas is two things: Sell it with a bare uncoated blade, maybe tumble finished if you can afford it, and put some Torx heads in the thumb studs. I think that's all they're going to have to do to break the whole damn internet.

Not intending it to be a theme but, for my second post in a row, I'll be discussing a knife designed by another YouTube knife personality.

In this case Ben "What is Up Guys!" Pettersen. Originally seen in BladeHQ.com videos, Ben left and started his own company KNAFS where he's been slowly and steadily working and improving. You may have seen his "Lander" series of knives, or maybe you know him from the WE/Civivi designs like the Banter series.

The Civivi Sendy is a bit of an odd duck for Ben, and his design language. But it's not an odd knife by any means.

The Sendy is loosly inspired by the classic barlow-shaped folding knife popuplar since the 1600's (and possibly before). It lacks the classic barlow bolster but otherwise does a good stand-in for the pattern.

The Sendy can be had with a, IMHO, fairly nondescript drop-point blade. I don't personally think that blade shape gives it as much character as the other option seen here: the spey blade. Traditionally this is a blade shape used in animal husbandry, in particular the castration of sheep. For that, and other reasons, it's long been one of the 3 blade shapes included in the stockman pattern of slipjoint knives.

While the shape may have had somewhat, uncomfortable, origins, the utility of the shape cannot be overstated. This is a great jack-of-most-trades blade shape.

A flipper-tab only knife, the design keeps the roughly barlow shape true by posistioning the flipper in-line with the handle. You have to get on top of the flipper really, in order to open the blade. One might even argue it's a top flipper at that point.

Unlike a classic barlow, this is a locking knife. The liner lock is easy to access through a right-side cutout.

The Sendy in particular also has a nifty feature: in the handle it hides tweezers and a metal toothpick bring the utility factor even higher!

The tweezers are particularly excellent. Way better than the Victorinox ones you find in the Swiss Army Knife for sure.

You may have noticed as well that the scales are rather textured. In fact they mimic the wood grain pattern of cedar (the designer referencing cedar siding and shingles in particular). Originally the knife was to be called the Cedar but something about a copyright concern on the part of Civivi forced a last minute change.

Regardless of what it's called this is a great knife. After carrying the Maximal all summer I've been carrying the Sendy ever since. It's been used quite a bit and sharpened twice. The Nitro-V blade steel can take a very fine edge and it's quite stainless. Blade thickness of 2.3mm is very efficent with the full flat grind.

This is not a knife for heavy duty tasks and I wouldn't want to use it for hours on end. That's not its job. It's a single-blade multi-tool that (IMHO) looks good in most any setting and performs well to boot.

A-badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom...

Yes, the jokes about this one positively really write themselves.

This is, verbatim, the "Snake Knife." By, er, NoEnName_Null. But don't just take my word for it.

It's like a Chinese knockoff of PlayerUnknown. (Okay, actually I'm positive it's a placeholder that gets put there instead of an error when an Aliexpress seller somehow doesn't have a "brand" name defined. Not that that their brand names mean much anyway.)

It's literally called the "Snake Knife." Iroquois Pliskin, eat your heart out.

So it says in the product image, anyway. It's certainly a lot snappier than, "Folding Pocket Tactical Survival Knife Multi-purpose Hunting Camping Military Tool with EDC Mini Self Defense Utility Fishing."

I love it when I score a knife with EDC-Mini-Self-Defense-Utility-Fishing. It's the best kind.

Anyway, they're playing up its snakiness because this is trying, albeit not trying very hard, to be like until the Craighill Sidewinder.

As luck would have it, I've got one of those. We've dissected it previously, and for that reason I'm not going to include the entire buttload of comparison photographs with it because we've already seen it to the usual maniacal level of detail. Instead I'll only include a perfunctory half buttload.

If I didn't already have one of those it's doubtful I would have bothered to click on this, nor spend $15.66 on it. But I do, so I did. And here we are.

The Snake is 44.8 grams (1.58 ounces) of pure sinusoidal Sino-silliness. At the very least, it's successfully nicked the Sidewinder's clever and artistic, albeit rather impractical, double pivoted interlocking handle mechanism. You might not know this just by looking at it online, though, because the seller really doesn't do a great job of communicating this. Since I've already got a Sidewinder I already had a pretty good expectation of how it ought to work, and I'm pleased to be able to report that how it does its thing is in exactly the manner you'd hope.

Well, more or less.

The Snake makes the appearance of being a flipper opener, just like the OG. It's got two pivots in the heel of the blade instead of one, so when you swing it out it separates the two toothed handle halves and they swap places by one notch before they interlock again.

The Snake, however, has the disadvantage of being significantly smaller and lighter than the original Sidewinder. It's not an outright counterfeit, not even close. It's just very heavily inspired by its, um, inspiration.

Its handle halves are also machined out of solid titanium. None of that sounds much like a drawback, and in any other circumstances I'd be just chuffed to bits that it really is titanium and not just ratty old potmetal. But in this specific case, it means that the Snake's blade and handles are too light and it can't carry enough inertia to carry itself all the way through to the open position with one flick of the kicker on the rear. The original Sidewinder, meanwhile, can. With a bit of practice, anyway.

The Snake stops in the middle every time, and that by necessity makes it a two-handed knife. You can just about close it with one hand if you're clever about it, but opening it with one hand in a single motion is impossible. It doesn't matter how hard you flick it or snap your wrist. Truly, we're pioneering new ergonomic frontiers, here.

Otherwise, the Snake looks pretty slick. The titanium handles feel way more premium than they have any right to be, and the grey parts have a stonewashy finish over them. The blue parts are blue because they're anodized rather than painted or coated in any way, which means the finish ought to be durable enough for pocket duty. But since titanium anodizing imparts its color on surfaces via refraction off of the nanoscopic features on its surface, if any gunk gets on it that changes the color until it's wiped off. In the Snake's case that makes the surface turn a duller purpleish-grey anywhere it's dirty, and since the surfaces are also matte finished that also makes every spot and smudge singularly difficult to clean off. Which is why it so often looks like that in these photos.

I must have cleaned this thing about 946 times during this, and it still did me no good.

In my musings on the Sidewinder I proposed that it really doesn't need a lock, despite being a liner locking knife. Whoever made this must have arrived at the same conclusion, because it hasn't got one. Instead there's just a prong machined into it to serve as a detent. This ought to make it legal in places where locking knives aren't.

There's a steel detent ball on the underside of that prong which falls into a pair of holes on the blade, one each for the open and closed positions. And it's true, the Snake doesn't need anything other than that. As long as you're clamping its handle halves together it can't fold up, since they're mechanically connected to the blade and by necessity they must separate and switch positions in order for it to move.

The detent bar is pressing on the blade all the time, though, as evidenced here. It's probably one of the contributors to the Snake's slothful mechanism — all that which adds together to prevent you from opening it with one hand.

There's another problem, too.

There's a conspicuous keyring hole in on the end of the blade heel. You've probably already spotted what the issue with it is.

Yep, a whole fat lot of good that'll do you.

The hole has to pass between the handle halves, so this is yet another rinky-dink Chinese knife with a keyring mount design that actively prevents you from opening it. It's just as well in the end, I suppose, because the original Sidewinder doesn't have any carrying provision at all. So it's not like we've lost anything there.

Mine even included a little split keyring in its aforementioned black gift box, which I've surely still got around here someplace. This is conspicuously absent in every single product photo, and it's no wonder why.

The rest of the specs seem to be accurate, other than the pictures consistently depicting the Snake being a lighter blue than it is in reality. I suspect that heavy photo editing was involved in all of its pictures, as per usual. If we're counting, the color is apparently supposed to be "Mini Folding Knife." Believe me that I tried, but I can't find that one anywhere on my Pantone charts.

They really don't say much about the blade. Especially not its composition, which is only listed as "stainless steel." It's about 2-1/4" long by my measure with 2-1/16" of usable edge. It's got a real choil on it which is surprising, and against all expectation for a crummy Chinese novelty knife mine actually arrived from the factory quite sharp. It's also got a fabulously useless fingernail slot in it, which is totally inaccessible between the handles when the knife is closed so I have no idea why it's there.

Its primary grind is of course ratty and laden with unpolished machine marks. But the edge itself is not actually bad.

Somehow, it's also accurate and close to true.

I took both of these photos with my new L-Series 100mm macro lens, by the way. The one above is focus stacked, and obliquely illuminated with one of my many random EDC flashlights. The background is the sheet of ordinary paper I take most of my photos on, because the process process inevitably gets grease and crumbs of gods-know-what all over everything when I do my disassemblies and I'd prefer the surface to be disposable. And just look at that texture on it. I briefly considered dropping the exposures showing this off of the stack, but in the end I just couldn't not show them off.

As it turns out, the Snake has a couple of other surprises ~~up its sleeves~~ hidden inside.

For a start, what I was positive at first were just plain brass washers around the pivots turned out to actually be the weensiest little thrust ball bearing assemblies I've ever seen.

Look at the tiny bearing, it's so cute. The inner diameter is just 3mm. I really shouldn't be surprised that these are available as a commodity. RC nerds, most likely, will put a thrust bearing on any damn fool thing, and the smaller and more fiddly it is the better. Now four of 'em have found a home here.

The original Sidewinder has ball bearing pivots, too. Significantly larger ones. This undoubtedly contributes to its openability, and I'm sure the makers of this were trying to follow suit.

But in an apparent cost-cutting move, the Snake's other end is forlorn and bearingless. Its tail linkage is just a plain flat surface riding on the inner faces of the handles. There's a bunch of drag created here which probably doesn't do the thing any favors in the trying-to-open-it department. I did mess with the screw tension here and also lubricated the faces thoroughly, which improved matters slightly but I still can't get the bastard to open in a single action. Oh well.

Here's the detent bar and its ball. If I were going to machine a detent out of a single slab of material this is exactly how I'd do it. I don't know if that makes me smart or these guys dumb.

The total bill of materials. Despite being a bearing knife I'm kind of surprised to see that neither the blade nor the handles are pocketed for the bearings. The handle slabs remain in parallel because the linkage at the end is the same thickness, at least more or less, as the blade plus a pair of the bearings.

Here's all the hardware. The screws are all T6 heads, and they were threadlockered to hell and back. This thing is extremely sensitive to the screw tension, so that's probably on purpose. None of the screws have anti-rotation flats so you have to stick a driver in both sides if you want to get them out.

The tail linkage is also totally symmetrical, and thus not as elegant on the one in the OG Sidewinder which is concave in order to never stick out past the tips of the handles. The one in the Snake visibly does, albeit just a touch, when it's in its open position.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you absolutely need to have a poor man's Craighill Sidewinder in your life for some reason, I think this thing is just about in a class of one. If nothing else it's about 80% as practical, but only 8.79% of the price.

The Snake is somehow both over- and under-built, with some premium(ish) materials and components which still somehow don't quite manage to add up to a totally competent final product. There's probably some social commentary to be found in there somewhere, but on that note there's still nothing new under the sun.

And yes, I read the reviews.

I still bought the damn thing, though, because I'm stupid and I've got a brand to maintain. Maybe I ought to buy a brown table and work on my Scottish accent while I'm at it.

If you spend any time on YouTube watching knife content, you'll probably come across the KnifeCenter.com channel and David C. Andersen. Not only is he the host of their YouTube videos he's also a knife designer.

And he's always been a proponent of user-friendly, practical, no-nonsense, and affordable pocket knives for everyday use.

His first design is certainly that. You might say, much like the Civivi Elementum, it's almost too "generic" but I disagree. This is a knife that is an easy entry into carrying a knife daily for those who've never done it before.

The Maximal has a 2.95 inch (74.9 mm) blade and an overall length of 6.89 inches (175 mm). A practical drop-point blade shape with, surprisingly a small amount of recurve towards the back. I couldn't get any good photos of the recurve on my typical stump-as-photo-table as it is too bumpy, but here's a close approximation.

It's so subtle that I thought it was a bad grind from the factory, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It will probably be removed naturally after the first two re-sharpenings.

Because CJRB is making it, they're using (with the base models) their proprietary AR-RPM9 steel. This is derived from another word salad steel: 9CR18MoV but with better properties. The knife pictured here, however, has a newer steel. Called AR-SFII, it's also proprietary to CJRB but an upgrade from their RPM9. Supposedly equivalent to 154CM (a rather famous knife steel, used extensively by Bob Loveless who popularized the drop-point blade shape back in the day), it's an improvement over their AR-RPM9 in edge retention while retaining toughness.

And while all of this may be true, I do not have the skill set to verify these claims. What I do know is that, based on my use, AR-SFII will hold an edge for a very long time.

Now I've not been abusing the knife, but I've not been babying it either. It was my main carry all summer and has cut food, paracord, zip ties, made wood shavings for fire building, and yes, broken down a box or two or a bunch, and it's still relatively sharp.

In-hand it's comfortable for me but not something I would use for hours on end. (What pocket knife /does/ meet that criteria?). The drop-point blade, 2.5mm thick, is a very capable slicer but I do wish it was hollow-ground instead for easier food prep. The crossbar lock is well tuned and the pivot houses ceramic ball bearing washers.

The clip is deep carry but not obnoxiously so like many knives today. This version has full carbon fiber scales (no overlays). This is my first carbon fiber handled knife and I have to say, it's quite nice. Smooth and lightweight like aluminum but not cold to the touch and won't show its wear as easily.

Here it is next to some similarly sized knives that I had close at hand. The Kizer Drop Bear and the Benchmade Mini Griptilian. The mini Grip is a bit smaller than the other two but I think it lives in the same basic space.

The Kizer has 154CM steel and micarta scales. Had I purchased the Griptilian just a few weeks before I did, it too would have a 154CM blade, but when I was finally ready to buy one they had switched over to S30V (where they've remained for almost 7 years).

Anyway, as you can see the Maximal lives in a happy middle ground of knife shapes and features. The blade is not as utilitarian as the Drop Bear and not as aggressive as the Griptilian. The taller scales fit my hand well and the overall length is not too long (bigger hands might have a different experience). And the crossbar lock gives it the fidget factor that's very satisfying.

This is definitely a knife that I would recommend to basically anyone. (Not a lawyer, check local knife laws, etc). It won't dull quickly and it should be easy to re-sharpen. It doesn't sit obtrusively in the pocket nor does it get lost, and it offers a great shape for a large variety of tasks.

I paid $70 for mine but the base model can be had for $50 and sometimes less. For some that may seem like a lot of money for a knife but with the fit and finish offered, you're certainly Maximalizing your money with this one. (I'll show myself out.)

Hey kids!

Do you ever think to yourself, "Golly gee willikers, it'd be swell if my knife were infeasible to carry and totally impossible to open with one hand?!?!"

Boy, let me tell you what.

Just when you think you've gotten the Chinese and their search terms all figured out, here's this. It's the Gragi Knives "Interesting Utility Pocket Knife,2.4" All Metal Construction Stainless Steel Blade,Quick Change Retractable Box Cutter,Tool EDC," model G512-A.

I thought I'd seen it all. I've seen the mechanical, the novelty, the elegant, and even the cool-knives-for-men. But now. Now the gauntlet has really been thrown. Interesting. Once again, I feel like somebody's calling me out. I couldn't not click on this.

I assure you I am not making this up.

This sort of thing might give a bird a reputation. Now I know what Dave Barry was on about all the time.

You could probably think of the Gragi Interesting as being broadly related to those "pantographic" knives you see all the time. You know, the ones that are for some inexplicable reason always shaped like the Freemasons' logo? Uh-huh. So here's how it do:

Just fabulous. Three out of ten, with rice. No notes whatsoever.

The Interesting or the G5120A or whatever has exactly the mechanical design that would result if somebody described how a balisong or butterfly knife works in Latin, wrote it on a piece of parchment and stuffed it in a bottle, threw it into the ocean, and it washed up in Quanzhou. It's a double handle, gear driven, half pivoting, out-the-front opener.

I'm also making it look much slicker than it is in that .gif, because I'm now very practiced with it via the expedient of fiddling around with it incessantly at my desk for the past week.

If you grab both halves of the Interesting's handles and pull them apart, a pair of armatures swing out and carry the blade to its halfway position. The tips of them end in little gears that genuinely do mesh with each other, and believe it or not they functionally serve to keep the blade in alignment.

But then it just stops there. If you're deft you can get it to balance in that middle position like I did here. But usually, if you let go it just snaps back into its retracted state and stares at you sulkily from between the handles. In order to actually get the thing to deploy you have to work it into that halfway position and then give either the blade or one of its arms a little nudge forward. Then it'll go over-square far enough that when you let go it'll spring out into its extended position.

Note that this is categorically impossible to do with one hand.

The motive is provided by a little clothespin spring on the hinged end.

The tips of the handles are separated by these diabolo spacers, which are screwed into place. The entire rest of the thing is riveted together other than that, though, so I couldn't take it apart. That's of no consequence; we can see what's going on in there easily enough. It's got brass washers on all the pivots and, believe it or not, none of them wiggle very much.

It's also surprisingly small. Here it is next to my little Böker. You can tell it's the little one because its handle scales are now Flat Dark Earth and Olive Drab. It's pretty much exactly 6" long when open, with a 2-5/16" blade that's sharpened for about 2-3/16" of its length. Closed it's 3-5/8" long and it's 0.361" thick not including the rivets. Being all steel it weighs 63.2 grams or 2.23 ounces overall.

The astute among you will have noticed that the Interesting doesn't have a pocket clip or even a perfunctory hole through which to put a keyring. In fact, it sports no carrying provision at all.

Instead, you get this fittingly dinky nylon belt sheath with a button snap on it. It's 2% better than most, because this one goes so far as to include a plastic stiffener insert in it to help it keep its shape and resist being mashed flat instantly.

Everything you see here is as it comes. That row of spots on the spine, for instance, isn't a consequence of the lights in my photo box. You can just barely feel the divots there with your finger, and I don't know where they came from. I have no idea what the slot in the blade is for, either, since it's not accessible to grip when the Interesting is closed. Its edge is... there, certainly. Capable of slicing open an envelope at least. It's pretty toothy, and not very even. I've seen better. Believe it or not, I've also seen much worse. I still haven't found the "quick change" part alluded to in the product description. If you manage to spot it, do let me know.

I don't know what the blade is made out of. "Stainless steel" is all the specifications will tell you. The rest is useless, e.g. only claiming as usual that its blade angle is "≤60°," which is something specific that crops up so frequently it's got to be some code word, a nudge and a wink allusion to something, but I'll be damned if I know what. Its DIY Type is also Woodworking, as we've seen before. Oh, and the specs also state that its origin is mainland China as if you couldn't have guessed.

That is because the Gragi Interesting may just the single most Chinese thing I have ever seen in my life. Just look at that box. Look at that excuse for a logo. Look at that font.

That font right there tickles my penguin senses in some way that I can't quite put my flipper on. Something about it is just ineffably Chinese, and of the knockoff variety. It instantly screams, "The contents of this container is painted with lead and dusted with asbestos, is covered in grinder marks, and will smell like a communist petroleum refinery. You will be ripped off for purchasing it, but you'll do it anyway because it's 30% of the cost of a brand name one."

On the carton of a cheap Harbor Freight bench vise. The quality control sticker on your $30 pair of fake Jordans. The embossed legend on the back of your flea market LCD game, which reads "NOT DO LNSERT IN EAR."

This is one of those universally understood warnings from nature, like the rattling noise coming from the other end of that snake. We've all seen it and we all know what it means, but what is it?

This drove me to figure it out.

Every bit of the Gragi's pack-ins come festooned with it, like so many stripes on an amazonian poison dart frog. Even its gaudy and shoddily made microfiber cleaning cloth. The name of this font is "Sim Sun," or perhaps "SimSun," and it was the default for simplified Chinese in Windows for decades, from Windows 95 all the way through XP.

(A small selection of very specific people are now triggered. In which way, I couldn't tell you.)

And I'm sure its selection of various Chinese glyphs is perfectly cromulent for native consumption. But precisely like how us gweilo have no comprehension of how ridiculous our generic oriental tattoos look to people who can actually read them, its Latin alphabet rendition looks to Westerners totally out of proportion, shonky, and just slightly uncanny. But since it's been the default everywhere for so long, nobody seems to bother to change it. It's all just the perfunctory minimum — purest "that'll do."

The perfect metaphor, really.

You know how we like the Boker "tactical" balisongs 06EX227 and 06EX229, right? 'Course you do.

Well, the only thing that's ever really bothered me about these is that they only come in black.

Because I am crazy in the coconut, I have authoritatively rectified this situation. No more humorless Germanic aesthetics for you and your knife; just print these off in any damn fool color you can imagine and bask in the deep and abiding satisfaction that you're deliberately tweaking the noses of a bunch of Very Serious Knife Designers.

These are just print and install. All dimensions and features are accounted for, including the pocket in the back which accepts the head of the pivot screws and all of the front side screw holes being countersunk so the heads remain flush fitting.

One other minor point of order: If these look to be slightly wider than the OG scales, that's because they are. The originals are actually not a full overlay, and leave a noticeable perimeter of metal sticking out around all of the edges. Which I guess theoretically breaks up the silhouette of these so they don't just stand as featureless entirely black obelisks as they come from the factory. Or something. I mean, I'm sure there's some reason for it.

If you take a look at this photo I cribbed from my prior writeup, you'll see what I mean.

These, though, I did design to be a full overlay and they run right up to the edge of the liners. I think this looks and feels a little nicer, and when you're slathering your knife in a harlequin's raiments anyway all of that kind of gets lost in the noise.

All of this allows you to, as any right minded individual should, take into consideration the "tactical" moniker on these knives and then proceed to flagrantly miss the point.

Printables link: here.

It's the hip new show where I buy every knife again, but worse. So cerebral, because i r smert!

I've got a bit of a history with these two. Well, we have a history with the CRKT Provoke Zap, in any case. That's because it's the very second weird knife I ever posted here. That was two years, one month, and seven days ago. I know this because Lemmy tells me so.

The good times, don't they just roll.

All of that was back when I was just taking happy snaps of stuff at my desk on my mousepad. That didn't last long, but at least the upshot is that I didn't have to creatively name the folder for all the photography for this one, since I didn't bother to save the originals. Swings and roundabouts, and little silver linings.

The Provoke is a Joe Caswell design and not the H. R. Giger nightmare as you may have expected at first glance. It, and its now myriad derivatives, are mostly folding karambits, although there's now an "EDC" version with a more normal blade on it. And of course how they fold is deeply weird, because I wouldn't have it any other way. CRKT and indeed probably Mr. Caswell himself describe the Provoke's as having a "Kinematic(R) morphing" action, and the long and short of it is that the blade doesn't pivot on an axis, per se, but rather slews up, forward, then down on a pair of swinging arms.

Like this.

They bill it as staying "neatly tucked away in transit and comes to life when there’s trouble afoot." As a karambit the blade is distinctly hawkbilled and you're presumably meant to hold it in a reverse grip like this. It's a Special Purpose Operator's Tactical Device, and therefore more or less designed with doing unto fools in mind. This particular Grivory/FRN version is the budget model so it's the cheapest. Apparently its color is literally named "Zap," or maybe the model itself is depending on who you ask. The current aluminum bodied incarnations can get excitingly expensive these days, but I think I paid around $80 for this way back when. Obviously the neon yellow flavor is indeed the correct choice, as was rightly observed at the time, because no one can see this and later claim you were trying to sneak around with it.

But its clone and I have quite a history, because I've tried and failed to order one of these three times. This time it finally took.

I actually tried to buy one of these from Wish many years ago, long before I ever got my genuine Zap, and it never arrived. I ordered it again and I got something else in its stead which wasn't even a knife, plus a refund. I tried again on Alibaba some years later and my order was inexplicably cancelled. And not one of those fun inexplicable cancellations where your thing shows up in the mail for free months later anyhow. This was probably the universe giving me every chance there is to doge a bullet, but as usual I wouldn't listen.

So I gave up, held my nose, and ordered this one from Amazon since they seem to have finally turned up for sale there. It showed up in two days. Go figure.

This is the "Promithi Folding Morphing Knife, Retractable Pocket Outdoor Jungle Hunting Camping Survival Working Knife, EDC Multi-Function Tool, with Bottle Opener and Glass Breaker." Verily, it is possibly several of those things. What it's not, unlike our last outing, is an outright counterfeit of the Provoke.

This has actually been sloshing around my knife drawer for several months while I slept on writing this. The Provoke and its "Promithi" twin are satisfactorily mechanically absurd, but I'm sorry to say that I must report to you that the clone version is crap. One of these will only run you about $18 at the time of writing, but don't bother. I think one of the fancier combo meals from Taco Bell would be a better value, and would probably last you longer in the bargain. If you want one of these, there's no substitute. Dig deep in those couch cushions, spring the extra dough to buy the real thing, and that's our job done.

Except it isn't, because we still need to look at both of these. One of them in a manner quite askance. The latter of which because we've been handed a golden opportunity to do so again.

It's no wonder all of the marketing literature and website product shots invariably depict the Provoke in its open position. When it's folded it's just a hunchbacked little goblin, grinning at you licentiously. Your guess is as good as mine as to how you're supposed to measure it but I peg it at about 2-5/8 wide when it's closed, which proportionally is a bit like having an entire flattened lemon in your pocket.

The hawkbill blade is about 3-7/8" long in total if you measure the entire slug of metal it's made out of, but once you lock it out the effective portion is only 2-11/16" and the sharpened part is 2-5/8" if you measure it all in a straight line. The Provoke Zap version has a fiber reinforced Nylon handle and the armature widgets are the same, but there are metal reinforcement plates hidden on the back sides here presumably to add rigidity and prevent the whole thing from being a wet noodle.

There's a small but noticeable amount of rattle present in the armatures when you have the blade only partially deployed, but somehow once it's locked out it's as resolute as Gibraltar. Don't ask me how; it just is.

How it locks is nearly as bizarre as how it opens. It's via this sliding thingy towards the rear, which clicks towards the spine of the handle and takes a rather heroic effort to get to move. It makes it near as I can figure impossible to close this with one hand, even though opening it is so easy.

Apparently this version is made of 4116 stainless like a kitchen knife or an old Swiss Army. The others are made of D2. I like D2 better, but I like the price of this one more.

Even though it's altogether too clever, I really like the Provoke's clip. Despite how it may appear there totally is one, which is flush fitting and concealed on the back of the handle. When you press the textured part of it down, the whole thing flexes and the tip pops up. The back of it is utterly flat and thus snag free, and the Provoke draws effortlessly off of pretty much any fabric as far as I can tell, with your index finger falling naturally into the thumb hole.

So you actually could EDC the Provoke and occasionally I do, just for the perversity of it all. Never mind the slick draw and satisfying deployment, because all that winds up with you holding a reverse-grip karambit in a posture that leaves you no choice but to attempt to open boxes and mail by lashing out at them like an emu kicking a dingo in the face. To soften it up first, you should probably screech like a casuariiform at it, too.

Nobody's going to say anything about it. You're the one holding the knife.

Anyway, some part of the Provoke's lock also serves as a strong and clicky detent that keeps the blade from worming itself open in your pocket.

Let's start right there with the Promithi clone, because it hasn't got one of those. At all. Just put your finger in and your elbow out, and it falls right open if you wave it all about.

This is despite the lockup action being what amounts to an ordinary liner lock, with what appears to be a detent ball in the end and everything. Just, forget about it. It doesn't work. So never mind the clone's horrid and completely pedestrian clip, if you carry this and do anything other than sit stock still at a desk you'd better also make sure you're wearing chainmail underpants.

The Promithi's clip is neither flush fitting nor clever, nor is it positioned very well. It leaves a lot of the knife including the entirety of the finger ring sticking up above the hem of your trousers, whereas the real deal discreetly rides almost completely concealed. True to its specs, though, there is indeed what's ostensibly a glass breaker point down at the end which also doubles as a lanyard hole.

I have no idea what would happen if you actually tried to use it as such. It's just possible that the glass may win.

There's a bottle opener hook down below the nose, too. That bullet point wasn't a lie, either.

Unlike the genuine article, the Promithi version is all steel. The handle, the armatures, the presumably the blade. All of it. So it's heavier than the real thing: 152.8 grams (5.4 ounces) vs. 135.8 (4.79 ounces). It feels denser because it's quite a bit thinner, but otherwise the proportions are all pretty similar.

What the blade is made out of is anyone's guess. "Stainless steel," it says, and is otherwise silent on the matter. The online listing is just as nonsensical as ever, listing the blade profile as "clip point," the height as "0.01 inches," and claiming that it's "reusable." Okay, the last one I may begrudgingly grant them. But only just.

It has this gearsy vibe going on (no, definitely not her) which does it no good at all, sonny me lad, because it's all fake. The gear "teeth," such as they are, are simply inexpertly carved into the surfaces of the armature and don't turn or engage with anything.

It gets worse.

Once you add up the lash in all four pivots, there's more than enough rattle to allow the edge of the blade to clash with the handle if you're not careful when you're closing it. It's actually more easy to do so than not, since the liner lock is constantly pressing up on the rear arm all the time and making the blade want to obstinately cant in that direction.

There's a frankly disgusting amount of wiggle allowed in the blade. Hey, maybe that's another feature! It's not just a knife and a glass breaker and a bottle opener, but in a pinch you can use it as a pair of castanets.

Nevertheless, the action does work in a broad sort of sense.

If you were wishing this were some appreciable fraction of the quality of a real Provoke just to try it out, though, forget it.

As you've already guessed what with it being a cheap knife with a single sided handle and all, the Promithi's edge is chisel ground. It's cheap, it's nasty, it's 'orrible. It's likely to be dulled significantly towards its root as well, thanks to being routinely bashed into its own handle. It's not even remotely straight. Just look at it.

The real Provoke's blade actually isn't chisel ground, surprisingly enough, as evidenced with this back side shot showing off the rest of the markings. It, too, isn't really genuinely sharp from right out of the box but it's at least able to fairly reliably chop a Post-it in half whereas you'd have better luck whacking your stationery with a spoon than trying it with the Promithi.

One other point of order I should mention is that the genuine Provoke can't do the thing where its blade hits the handle. There's a small but unerringly enforced gap between the blade and the inner surface of the handle at all times, and no amount of twisting or cajoling seems to be able to cause the blade to crash into it regardless. Even if it did the blade is steel and the handle is just fancy plastic, so it's unlikely you'd deal any damage to the edge.

Let's rip this stupid clone to shreds the rest of the way.

Getting the Promithi apart wouldn't be an especially onerous task except the screw heads are All Weird (a technical knifemaking term) with some of them coming filled with paint, some accepting a T9 Torx bit, and others a T8 with no apparent rhyme or reason to it.

Inside are bar none the cheapest, flimsiest, most bullshit plastic pivot washers I've seen in my life. I'll bet they'd wish you think they're Teflon, but I'm positive they're not.

The Promithi's thickness is created by building it out of three distinct slabs of steel, shown here in their full and unctuous as-delivered glory with the gaps in between soaked in some manner of slimy lubricant. I threw caution to the wind and cleaned this off prior to the rest of the photography and didn't replace it with anything. Perhaps my Promithi will rust from within over the coming years as a result, but just see if I care if it does.

One of 'em has got the lock finger thingy on it. Calling it a "liner" seems wrong, since all that does is discredit the rest of the liner lockers in the world by association.

Here's the sum total of the mechanical components. Note the detent ball on the end of the lock finger which accomplishes nothing, and the fake gears engraved into the ends of the armatures.

The full kit and caboodle. Getting the Promithi apart in its entirety revealed at least one cause of its wonkiness: The lower pivot hole in the rear armature is drilled crooked, and causes the screw to kick off at an angle when it's installed. The pivots are all plain Chicago screws with those plastic washers as the only bearing surfaces. The ones in the upper pivots (in the blade, rather than the handle) are thinner than the other two for some reason.

The screws have no anti-rotation flats (although I'm not quite sure how it would work if they did) and the upper and lower ones are different lengths from each other.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Over the years there have been myriad attempts at compacting a karambit into some manner of folder, some more clever than others. The CRKT Provoke is one of the clever options.

Promithi... Isn't. For once I'm at a loss for words. Me, of all people. I know, right?

It's awful. All the nicks and gouges you see in it are exactly as it was delivered to me. I certainly didn't do anything with this knife to get it all banged up like this and it's uncertain if anyone else in history actually has. It takes everything pleasant about the Provoke and twists it until it's incomprehensible. The action is terrible. It's self-dulling. It's probably more dangerous to carry than it is to use.

I think the most interesting thing I can come up with to say about it at this point is that it won't sit flat on its rear surface, so in several of these photos I propped it up using this tiny knife as a kickstand, and even it is infinitely more competent and certainly more usable than the Promithi clone. So to this I award zero points, condemn it to straight back to whatever hell from whence it came, and may the gods have mercy on the soul of each and every asshole who assisted in its manufacture.

If you want a Provoke, buy a Provoke. There's no cheating it this time.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your […]