dual_sport_dork

Our novelty cutlery train will now be departing according to its regular schedule. The conductor will come by to slice your tickets clean in half very shortly.

I admit I was absent last week, but that's because I was out perambulating upon my velocipede, whereupon I took this daguerreotype. (Knives carried on said expedition: My Leatherman Wave, Böker Rold, and HUAAO Bugout clone.)

But never mind that. Strap on those goggles, tie up that scarf, and doff your top hat for this.

I'm going to have to have a bit of a stretch and a warm up before I can rattle off its name. One moment please...

...

Roight. This is the "NLX 8'' Steampunk Design Lockback Pocket Folding Knife With Coated 420 Stainless Steel Blade. For Collection, Everyday Ccarry and Outdoor Activity Tool Knife (Damascus)." [sic]

It's obviously a novelty knife. But that probably doesn't matter much for the, shall we say, specific type of individual this is clearly meant to appeal to. You're already not listening to anything I say, are you? Ah, I see you've already put one in your cart.

The NLX Steampunker is tailor made to just complete that look for anyone who's already got a pair of brocade fingerless gloves, nine pocketwatches, and an impressive selection of waistcoats. It certainly has, to use the vernacular, an aesthetic.

Not an ᴀ ᴇ s ᴛ ʜ ᴇ ᴛ ɪ ᴄ, mind you. Although if anyone made a Vaporwave knife, unironically or no, I'd be the first to buy one.

No, this has an 𝖆𝖊𝖘𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖙𝖎𝖈, and it's one that's engraved on a brass plate in curly writing riveted to a mahogany door. An aesthetic that's wearing a tailcoat and smoking a pipe. It's a wonder it hasn't got anywhere to shovel the coal.

This is a lockback folding knife, and answers a question thus far unasked: "What if we put the lock springs on the outside?"

And so it does. Four highly visible extension springs are what power the lock bar.

This has the side effect -- no doubt intentional -- of leaving the lockback mechanism itself proudly displayed while you operate it. Right there out in the open, ready to get either packed full of lint or pinch an incautious fingertip, all in the true 18th century tradition. So if you've ever become overcome by burning curiosity about how a lockback knife works, well, here it is showcased and ready for inspection.

The springs are indeed fully functional and are not just visual frippery for the sheer joy of making the thing look like a Victorian light switch. They are truly what drives the action. They're easy enough to unhook with a small pair of pliers or nimble fingers, and when disconnected the lock bar is unrestrained and is free to flop around of its own accord. To help prevent this from happening without your input, each spring's eyelet rides in a small groove in its corresponding pin.

But if decorative frippery is what you want, the Steampunker has it in spades.

Clubs, hearts, and diamonds too, probably.

I am particularly fond of the shiny scrollwork medallion embellishing the middle of the handle. There's only one of those on one side, because there is indeed a clip on the reverse:

The Steampunker is all wood and "brass," and while there are a couple of variants of this knife mine is the "Damascus" version.

I'm having to use a lot of scare quotes here because a lot of things about the Steampunker are, that is to say, per se, in point of fact, actually fake.

None of the "brass" elements are actually brass, for instance. The bolsters, the clip, the liners, screws, and backspacer all have that brassy gold finish but a magnet sticks to them readily; they're steel underneath. And the filigree embellishment is definitely a casting and its done surprisingly well, but it appears to be made of zinc that's been electroplated with something.

We can, if you like, dredge up the old argument about whether or not modern pattern welded "Damascus" steels actually technically deserve to be called Damascus steel or not. (You're looking for the argument over whether or not a katana could cut a European sword in half? You're in the wrong room. That's three doors down the hall, to the left.)

But there's no question that the Steampunker's blade isn't regardless, because it's clearly just a painted-on pattern silkscreened over a plain steel blade. The dead giveaway is that the loops and whirls of the pattern fall into the fingernail nick and jimping notches and remain completely uninterrupted. Which they obviously wouldn't do if the steel were truly layered and these details were machined in afterwards.

Another clue might be that the "Damascus" pattern is exactly the same on every single example of these, just printed right on from the same template on each and every one. If you grab any random product photo of one of these off the internet, compare it to mine and you'll see the pattern is identical. The sole purpose of this sort of thing is precisely to look good in a catalog to anyone who doesn't know any better, in order to part them with their money.

The wood, at least, is genuine. That's not much of an impressive feature, though, because it is of exactly the same type of pedigree as the wooden scales on the souvenir pocketknife you'd find at a roadside gift shop right outside the National Park, the kind that's pre-engraved with every name in the world except yours. It's even stained in the same color, although to its credit it is nicely CNC routered with some grooves and scallops and a beveled finger notch on each side.

The clip is a traditional design and it is not repositionable. As above it is definitely steel and not brass, and it is mounted quite offset from the centerline. But its saving grace is that it's offset to the correct side for a right handed user, i.e. nearer to the rear seam of the pocket, and it pains me to say this but it actually draws very nicely with a pleasant feel and the right balance of tension and release.

I have a few knives worth hundreds of dollars with clips that I like less. So stick that in your mill and grind it, why don't you.

The Steampunker is definitely akin to a full sized knife. It's every bit of 8" long with a 3-1/2" drop pointed blade that's 0.110" thick and 1.041" across at its widest point which is at the root of the edge. There is a small almost-choil at the base of the edge followed by a ricasso that protrudes about 1/8". In total it weighs 128.7 grams or 4.54 ounces.

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a tactical knife. Towards that end there are no thumb studs, although there is a fingernail nick in the blade -- only on the side opposite the clip. But the lock springs are weak enough and despite its gimcrack appearance the Steampunker's action is smooth enough such that it actually is possible, with practice, to open it with one hand. Though only just.

The blade lockup is surprisingly solid both laterally and rotationally. Very little blade wiggle is present. In fact, the flexibility of the blade and very slight flexibility of the handles are the only notes I have to make. Despite these, there is no rattle within the actual mechanism.

The Steampunker's thickness measurement is compounded not only by the clip, but also by the springs. Without them the handles themselves are 0.465" in thickness. With the springs it bulks up to 0.779", and including both the springs and the clip adds up to 0.859" which was a measurement that was damn difficult to take.

There's very little else to say about the feature set. There is no spring assist or switchblade action; despite all the springs it's just a regular old folder. The backspacer does include a loop that can be used as a lanyard attachment point. The spine on the lock bar is very broadly jimped, and for some reason there's a superfluous hole in it, akin to the ones the spring mounting pins are pressed through but empty.

What with all springs and pins and greebles sticking out you'd expect the Steampunker to snag on every damn thing on the way out of your pocket but surprisingly, it doesn't. If you are truly incautious it's still possible to hook the springs on things inadvertently and if you're truly hopelessly uncoordinated it's not too difficult to knock of them off of their mounts in the process.

They're captive on the other end, though, each held in place with the head of a screw so it's not like they'll get lost if you do. And they're really not too tough to put back on, if it comes down to it. The lock will even still work with all but one of them disconnected, so you'd have to lose all four before anything dramatic happens.

The Steampunker shatters into what feels like about a hundred pieces when you take it apart. It's less complicated than it looks, although I do have one grievance to air out.

Here are both halves of the pivot screw. One is an ordinary Torx head (T8) but you'll notice the other side doesn't have a head at all; it's just a threaded tube with a tiny little lip around the end.

This sits nearly but not quite flush with the surface of the inner liner, and since there is no anti-rotation flat on it and every screw in this thing was threadlockered to hell and back, attempting to undo the pivot screw just causes the entire assemblage to spin in the hole. So getting the little blighter apart was a puzzle box I was not expecting to have to open today. You can see the aftermath of my grabbing it with pliers in the photo above. A soldering iron was also involved. I don't think it would have been too much of an ask for the manufacturer, whoever they are, to put a hex head or some wrench flats on it or something.

The Steampunker is largely held together with these three threaded barrels, which accept a screw on either side and once again do not have any anti-rotation features or engage with the liners in any mechanical sense. One of them is the pivot point for the lock bar and the other two go through the backspacer in the tail. All of them will merrily spin forever without fully releasing their screws unless you clamp them with something.

The clip has this little bit of scrollwork decoration on it, and on my example is already showing some rust spots. A visible indentation was left in the metal where it met the bending brake at the factory as well. It's easily the crudest part of the entire ensemble. I haven't decided yet if I'm motivated enough to pickle and re-electroplate it.

Earlier I said all the "brass" components on this knife weren't really brass. That's not actually true, as it happens, because the pivot washers actually genuinely are. Go figure. They're not ultra-refined or anything, but they get the job done and brass is a fair sight better than plastic. Or no washers at all, come to think of it.

Note also the "PRC" marking on the heel of the blade, which is the only inscription on the entire knife. Needless to say it is unequivocally made in China.

Here is the medallion from the handle. It's easily my favorite detail on the whole knife, which is why I keep harping on about it. The casting work is excellent and contrives somehow not to appear to be cheap, even though it unquestionably is. I don't doubt for a second that you could find this same part as a generic decorative finding somewhere, probably in purchase lots of a thousand units. The one curious thing about it is that it's mounted with the same M3 machine screws as used elsewhere in the knife, but they don't touch the steel liners and are just reamed straight into the wood.

It is deeply silly, with a $19 novelty piece like this, to enter into it with any kind of expectations whatsoever about the edge. My example arrived noticeably dull, with the crude edge grind illustrated here. Dull I can deal with, but those notches and chips in it are as it was delivered from the factory. I haven't used this knife to cut anything, and to be fair it's doubtful that I ever will.

The product description claims the blade is made out of "420" steel but does not specify which variant. It's possible, I suppose, to maintain some kind of whimsical faith that it might be as nice as 420J2, for instance. But I wouldn't hold your breath on that, because all you're liable to do is turn your face blue.

I would conjecture that the edge was ground by hand, given how it noticeably changes towards the tip.

Here's the essential truth of the matter, as it were.

As you can see, the edge angles are quite noticeably different from one side of the blade to the other. At this point I should quote some aphorism about price, but you've surely heard them all before.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I deeply respect the dedication that's caused you to read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age cover-to-cover seventeen times, I really do. But they still won't let you into the convention with any real edged weaponry about your person.

The NLX Steampunk knife may be silly, and it may be kind of impractical, but damned if it doesn't look cool. And that's what it's really all about, here. All the urchins and society ladies will see you strutting down the street and they'll say, "That chap right there, he is one anachronistic muthafucka."

You already know if you want one. You already know if you don't.

I was recently alerted to a new Wal Mart / Ozark Trail release by fellow user @[email protected], yet another in their line of Benchmade-eque crossbar locking folders. A mechanism which they've finally given a name, now calling it the "slide lock."

As you know, I'm pathologically drawn to this sort of thing like an idiotic moth to a bargain basement flame. Goodness knows I've already featured enough generic Chinese garbage on here to sink an entire container ship, and that's because I think inherent to these is a certain type of bent appeal. Plus, it's a lot easier (read: cheaper) for me to buy this kind of crap on a lark just to show you guys rather than whatever the latest big-ticket collectible du jour is.

So today.

Hmm...

There's been a minor scuttlebutt about this knife on the internet lately. Can you guess why?

Yes, it's because whoever Walmart is using as an OEM for these knives has come just about as close as you can get to ripping off the Benchmade Bugout as you can do without getting sued so hard your underpants spontaneously combust. At least for a stateside brick-and-mortar oriented retail product.

We've seen clones of this ilk before, of course, but they've always been the purview of nameless fly-by-night nonbrands relegated to grey market drop shipped online shopping; wretched hives of implicit mediocrity like Amazon, eBay, and Aliexpress.

But this isn't exactly anonymous. You can just walk into a major store and buy one. Easily, as it happens. Unlike the last few go-rounds with this type of thing, it seems Walmart has contracted whoever-it-is to make more than, like, twelve units of these. I didn't have to do any searching to lay my hands on my example because my local store had about 30 of them in stock. And Walmart's web site indicates it's the same story at all of their other locations just about everywhere, at least for now. And at the time of writing, these retail for a princely $9.97.

And whoever-it-is still remains a mystery, although historically Walmart's private label Ozark Trail knives have been made by Hangzhou Great Star Tools Co. Ltd., a Chinese OEM for low end cutlery who are also the force behind several other budget brands. And whose web site I'm not linking this time because it appears to currently be broken. I'm not sure what that forebodes. So I can't prove they were the ones who made this, but they've made similar knives before. It's as plausible a theory as any.

So, what do you get for ten bucks and is it any better than the previous Walmart crossbar folders?

Well, the answer to the first question is this. And the answer to the second one is yes.

As usual, this appears in generic Ozark Trail packaging on a hang card that doesn't provide much in the way of information or identification. It doesn't have any kind of name aside from the uselessly nondescriptive "7.5-Inch Folding Knife," although it does appear to have a SKU of T2203R1-11 as stickered on the back of the package. These are likely subject to change without notice, because Walmart is so noncommittal about this thing's designation that the SKU and UPC aren't even printed on the actual cardboard -- they're a sticker, ready to allow the packaging they've already cranked out a billion of to be reused for the next thing.

There is also a sticker that just contains the numeral "1" in the upper right corner on the back. I don't know what that's for. Maybe where it's supposed to hang in the planogram, or which slot it corresponds to in the glass case?

Why anyone cares about this is, of course, because it's a crossbar locking folding knife like unto Benchmade's Axis lock. This sort of thing has become increasingly popular recently since -- as I'm sure you're sick of me telling you -- Benchmade's patent for their Axis lock expired in 2016 which means now anyone can have a runup at the idea. This sort of thing excites us no end, but presumably the novelty will eventually wear off.

Walmart distributes a huge array of cheap and nasty folding knives under their Ozark Trail label that are plain liner lockers or lockbacks, of course, but none of those are especially... special. Nor much good. Which is why I'm not featuring yet another one of them every ten minutes. They're just commodity disposable low quality knives, so much so that the packaging never even bothers to indicate what kind of steel they're made out of and barely even contain a bullet list with a perfunctory set of standard features.

This time, however, there's something new. For a start, we actually get a named steel! This model is alleged to be made of D2 steel, which is printed right there on the back of the card. That's already a serious upgrade over the previous two models, which were made out of... Well, nobody actually knows, really.

D2 is no longer considered exotic (such as it even ever was) and nowadays is pretty much regarded as an entry level steel. But this wasn't always the case, and even so at least we can state with some degree of confidence what the heck this knife is made out of and thus possibly predict how it should perform.

D2 is a tool steel that is tougher than the typical standard for entry level knives, 440C, and also has superior edge retention compared to 420 or 440 series steels. It's not very corrosion resistant, though, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why this knife has a black epoxy coated blade. Knife people can probably be trusted to properly maintain a semistainless blade. Any average cross-section of Walmart shoppers you care to make, well. Probably not.

The coating is consistent and even looks pretty nice with a fine texture to it that prevents it from being completely shiny, and looks pretty thick. It'll wear and get scuffed up with use, of course, but at least it appears it ought to be a while before you'll work your way completely through it.

That said, I'm not a fan of coated blades in general -- D2 or not -- and I'd much prefer if this just had a bare blade. Corrosion be damned.

The rear tells us this was made in China, as if we didn't already know. The front is printed with the Ozark Trail logo but stops short of specifying who the actual manufacturer is.

The packaging further goes on to state that this knife has an "4.25-inch injection handle." It's injection molded out of glass filled nylon if I'm any judge, since it looks, feels, and sounds exactly like the stuff e.g. if you scratch at it with your fingernail.

Insofar as I can tell this knife comes in only one color, which is Ostentatious Orange. This will probably appeal to the Mossy Oak crowd whose custom it will undoubtedly attract; for the rest of us it means at least you'll be able to find it again if you drop it in the weeds.

The T2203R1-11 is fully ambidextrous as far as the controls go, but its deep carry pocket clip is not reversible. It carries tip up only with the clip on the left side when held with the blade deployed and the edge out. And that's your only option, short of taking it off.

Look, we may as well rip this Band-Aid off all in one go. There's no denying that this is manifestly meant to be a poor man's Bugout. The comparison to Benchmade's perennially dominant bantamweight folder just can't be avoided. The T2203R1-11's design clearly started by copying Benchmade's homework, and the details were shuffled around just enough to keep the men with briefcases and very somber ties from showing up at the door.

So the overall vibe of the deep carry clip, the molded fiber-nylon handles with checkered grip pattern, Axis/crossbar lock, the blade shape, and the lanyard hole worked into the scales on the top rear corner of the knife, it's all deeply reminiscent. Oh sure, the shape of every design element is just different enough to remain Legally Distinct. But you can see how it is.

Even the sizing is the same. Looking down on it flat from above, the Ozark's footprint is functionally identical to the Bugout. 7-1/2" long overall when open, 4-1/8" long closed, with a 3-1/4" drop pointed blade. The blade is 0.89" thick, which is basically the same as the Bugout's as well.

But you see, where it differs significantly is in construction methodology and thus the thickness. And it sort of solves what, er, bugs everyone about the Bugout. Benchmade are so confident in the strength of their fiber reinforced nylon handles that the Bugout eschews handle liners entirely. But I'll bet you whoever made this wasn't. So the Ozark has full length steel liners beneath its scales. As a consequence, then, it's thicker: 0.533" across its scales, not including the clip. So it's 0.144" more than the Bugout, which is enough to be noticeable. But it's also significantly more rigid than a Bugout and if you ask me more confidence inspiring in the hand.

Naturally this must mean that the Ozark is heavier than a Bugout, too. And it is, at 80.5 grams or 2.84 ounces. (That's 29.4 grams more, if this matters to you for the purposes of backpacking and/or being launched into space.)

The Ozark's blade is also hollow ground whereas the Bugout has a flat grind. That's to be expected, really, because doing a true flat grind is expensive and a hollow grind isn't. (In fact, if you're using a grinding wheel to create your blade's bevel it's very difficult not to naturally wind up with a hollow grind.) But all that notwithstanding, it's still got nice machined aluminum diabolo spacers separating the halves and everything.

The Ozark T2203R1-11's scales are a little more rounded and the texture molded into them is not as aggressive as the Bugout's. That makes it theoretically less grippy on paper, but in reality it's unlikely to matter. The Ozark has some jimping on the back of its handle right above the lock but it also has some at the base of the spine of the blade whereas the Bugout doesn't.

Oh, and the Ozark's draw from the pocket off of its clip is much nicer than the Bugout's. I imagine this is down to the smoother texture on the scales, but no matter how you come at it, it's noticeably easier to draw despite the clip still providing more than sufficient retention to keep it from just falling out of your shorts if it's inverted.

It also costs $170 less than a Bugout. Make of that what you will.

The previous Ozark crossbar lockers were cheap and cheerful, but really left a lot to be desired in the action department.

This doesn't.

I'm going to skip ahead a bit here, because the other update this knife got is a big one. It's got ball bearing pivots. And you know I am all about that.

Yeah, that's right. No more shitty plastic washers and no more dicking with your pivot screw tension to find the magical quarter of a degree where the blade neither locks solid nor wiggles like an extra on a Jason Derulo set.

The T2203R1-11's action kicks ass. It's not spring assisted, but it doesn't have to be. Give the thumb studs a little push and it flies open like you've got telekinesis. Hold the crossbar back and it'll Axis flick open and closed extremely readily. And its travel is basically completely silent until the lock clicks into place.

This puts the Benchmade original in the rather unfortunate and unenviable position of being outdone in both hand feel, draw, and action by an off brand $10 piece of shit that hangs on a peg right below the telescopic hot dog fork and just above the plastic whistle and compass carabiner. That's got to hurt.

Actually, all of this does raise one point of contention. I think this would have been even better if it were a Mini Bugout knockoff instead. See, at a 3-1/4" blade length this knife is slightly above the typical magical legal maximum of 3" which'll get it automatically Naughty Listed for carry in a lot of places. The Mini version's blade is 2-7/8" which cruises under that limit. It would be especially cheeky, not to mention beneficial for a lot of people, if this did the same. Oh well.

While we have it apart, here's what the liners look like. They are plain steel, not aluminum or anything else fancy, but they do have holes machined into them to at least make them somewhat lighter.

The full bill of materials.

All this is minus two screws compared to the OG Bugout, because the latter requires one screw in each scale to retain the little crossbar liner plates and this obviously doesn't need to resort to any such trickery.

For $10, it's not hard to guess that a Benchmade will certainly be put together much more nicely than this, and so it is. My example had inconsistent screw tension all around, and there are no anti-rotation features on the spacers which also had their screws threadlocked into place. Getting the spacer screws out on both sides is absolutely mandatory for disassembly of crossbar/Axis locking knives like these, because this allows for removal of the scales which is necessary for getting the lock crossbar out before you can fully separate both halves. I wound up having to grab one of the spacers on mine with some padded pliers -- with quite some force, as it happens -- to get both screws out.

I'll be damned if this thing doesn't have an honest to goodness fully functional anti-rotation flat on its pivot screw, though, complete with a matching D shaped hole in one of the liners. That also makes guessing which of the two liners the female end of the screw goes into completely idiot-proof.

As you can see here, the clip is under an alarming amount of tension at all times, based on how much of a bend there is in it. It still draws cleanly as described, though, so I guess I can't argue with results. Once again like the last two Walmart crossbar lockers the screws go inside the clip and are accessed via a hole in it, and are not placed to either side like on a Bugout. And once again they are not flush with the inner surface of the clip, but there's enough of a throat in it that I didn't find this to actually be a problem. Its width at its throat, where the U bend is at the end of it, is actually noticeably wider than on a Bugout. It's slightly wider than the last two Walmart crossbar knives, too.

My only other note on the clip is that despite ostensibly being "deep carry," it's mounted with its top end about 1/4" down from the tail end of the knife, which means that a noticeable portion of bright orange knife is left peeking out above the hem of your pocket like Kilroy at all times. Don't you think that kind of defeats the purpose?

Here's all the hardware. The only booby trap inside is the endstop pin, which is not shouldered nor retained in any way and can fall out as soon as you remove either of the scales. The rest is completely straightforward, and all the screws are even all the same as each other (although I separated out the two for the clip in this photo, that turned out to be unnecessary). That means there is no way to wind up with an Idiot Mark on your blade by fucking up and installing a too-long screw in the wrong position so it pokes out past the inside of your liners. So that's nice for retaining the finish on your $10 knife.

When all is said and done, a genuine Bugout is definitely more user-friendly to disassemble to fiddle with or to clean, and it provides you more options. The Bugout has a reversible clip and this doesn't. You can dismount the thumb stud easily on a Bugout by unscrewing it as well, whereas this one appears to either be press fit or very firmly glued into place with no evident screw heads into which to insert a tool.

Obviously you can't expect the edge on this knife to compare favorably to one that costs 18 times more, so the Ozark T2203R1-11 doesn't. A genuine Benchmade has a much finer edge and its grind is clearly superior, but I have to say the Ozark still isn't bad. The grind is acceptably fine for a working knife...

...And carries on pretty consistently all the way to the tip.

The edge is just slightly out of true, but should be well within reach of correcting by anyone with either a storebought guided sharpener or a stone and a modicum of skill. I'm not going to go so far as to say I'm impressed, but I'm definitely not disappointed.

The Inevitable Conclusion

It's been interesting to watch evolution in action with these Walmart knockoff knives. We've seen them develop from trash to broadly functional if a bit weird, with the previous run of crossbar lockers, to this model which is -- if I dare even say it -- actually pretty good.

You have to be careful where you tread with statements like that. I'll make a lot of people with expensive knives very angry indeed if I take it too far.

So all this isn't to say that the T2203R1-11 is as good as a Benchmade Bugout, because it isn't. A Benchmade is better built, more nicely machined, comes from the factory with a better edge, is easier to take apart, and is made of much fancier steel.

But the Ozark's action and clip are genuinely better than the Benchmade. And that's a hell of a thing, isn't it? The Benchmade is better quality, yes. But not, it must be said, 18 times better. Four, six, or maybe eight times better, sure. You'll get no argument from me there. But the price disparity between these two for the actual difference is quality is absurd.

For $10 I think this is a fantastic deal. And barring any unexpected surprises like finding out later that the entire batch had a uselessly bad heat treating job or something, that comes without all the usual qualifiers. It's not, oh, a good kinda-sorta okayish backup knife to leave in the glovebox, just in case, you know, better than nothing.

No. This is genuinely a decent knife. For $10. If I actually had to carry this knife exclusively for a month, for instance, I certainly wouldn't be mad about it.

I just wish I didn't know what I already know about this knife and others of its kind. Things like how it doesn't even have a name. I mean, two decades from now, nobody's going to remember this thing. Nobody's going to say, "Yeah, the T2203R1-11, back in 2024? That was where it was at."

Fucking "T2203R1-11?" Come on.

It'll be a flash in the pan, here today and gone tomorrow, and nobody upstairs will care. To Walmart it's just another faceless commodity product, one of a million, and if they're actually turning a profit on this at $9.97 then I shudder to think of what it actually costs to produce... and by who. The sad truth of it is, it's probably only any good by accident. They probably think they're ripping us off with this, same as they do with everything else. I'll bet you neither Walmart nor their OEM set out to build a knife at this price point and as decent as this on purpose. And sooner or later some bean counter somewhere will figure that out, he'll get ordered to widen the margins on it, and it'll be ruined and that's the end of that.

You can never win a race to the bottom.

But every now and again you can get lucky, jump on, and enjoy a damn good ride for just a little while.

Today's feature is brought to you by the color black.

This is the Elite Tactical Guardsman, and when you see all three of those words together you know you're about to see a Very Serious Combat Knife. Or, perhaps, something that just takes itself a little too seriously.

The Guardsman answers a question that I think very few people have actually asked: Why don't folding knives ever have crossguards on them?

Actually, I think it doesn't quite ask "why" but rather skips right to answering "how."

It is written, for some damn reason, that a "fighting" knife should have a crossguard. So of course there have been oodles of attempts to incorporate a daggerlike crossguard into a folder in the past, some solutions being more awkward than others. This is a perennial contender, for instance. Or the likes of the CRKT M-16. Et. cetera. This sort of thing has been going on one way or another for a very long time.

What most of these have in common is that they're just as wide and doofy when they're closed as when they're open, either incorporating the crossguard into the heel of the blade so it's always sticking out, or building it into the handle in some way.

The Guardsman, however, takes a different approach. To maintain a sleek overall profile when it's closed, its crossguard folds flat against the handle.

But when you open it, the guard pivots out with the blade.

This idea is neither new, nor unique. The SOG Quake leaps to mind, and the internet is just rife with those goddamn "Russian NKVD" folders these days. This is the "Italian swing guard" design and has occasionally (and probably also originally) been found on various stilettos over the years. I don't know who actually invented it or when. If you want to know that sort of thing, ask a historian. I just take pictures of silly knives.

The Guardsman is like unto one of those but it takes its protein powder every morning so it's got a distinct added beefiness. Out of all those among this breed I think it's probably the least ridiculous and among the more functional. Not least of which because unlike the others it's got an Axis or crossbar lock, and you know how I do enjoy a good one of those. Plus it's made of D2 which is a steel I like, and it purports to have ball bearing pivots. All of those are plusses in my book.

Oh, and it also helps that it's only about $27.

Let's check off the rest of the list.

The Guardsman has modern and trendy a deep carry pocket clip.

To add to its fighting knife pretensions, the Guardsman has a rather militaristic, Ka-Bar like drop point profile blade with a partial flat grind and a black powdercoat or epoxy finish. There's even a fuller in it.

Although, curiously, only on one side.

It's pretty long, 8-9/16" overall when open and 4-3/4" closed. It's 1-5/8" across if you count the crossguard or about 15/16" if you don't. The blade is 3-7/8" long. Altogether it weighs in at 126.9 grams or 4.48 ounces, part of that weight doubtlessly contributed to by its full length steel liners. The blade is 0.120" thick across and the entire knife, not including the clip as usual, is 0.616" across its handles at the thickest point. Needless to say, it's made in China and marked as such on the blade. Beneath the crossguard, curiously. More on that in a sec.

All the pictures of this knife online seem to depict it with some kind of charcoal-on-black 3D machined Micarta scales or similar. But my example hasn't got those, and instead has scales that appear to be made out of some kind of injection molded something. Probably glass filled nylon. They are quite heavily textured, though. Maybe this is some kind of rolling change. Maybe mine's a counterfeit. Who knows.

It must be said that the Guardsman's pivoting action is quite satisfactory. I'm not going to claim revelatory or anything, although it's damn good for the price. It'll Axis flick readily, and in fact will fall open or shut easily via gravity if you hold its locking crossbar back. That's just as well, because while it does have a thumb stud for opening it's only got it on one side. The clip isn't reversible, either. At least it'll ride tip up in its one and only carry position.

The crossguard does indeed fold out automatically with the blade via a very simple mechanism. While it works, that part of it is on shakier mechanical ground.

I'm not 100% sold on the whole crossguard thing as it works here, truth be told. It doesn't lock into place and there's a fair bit of free play left in it when the knife is locked open, as illustrated above. You can push it forward pretty far which doesn't inspire much confidence in saving your fingers at first blush, although closer inspection reveals that there's a pretty generous ricasso at the base of the blade and the crossguard can't in fact be pushed past that point.

So you're ultimately saved from giving yourself the mother of all papercuts. But the overall feeling is... incomplete, if that makes sense? It feels more natural that the crossguard should lock solid when the knife is open like the blade itself does, but it doesn't. It could have, via the addition of maybe a little nub on the spine right at the forward end. But that'd sully the square, businesslike looks, I guess.

The guard can't be pushed backwards towards the wielder, though. So obviously it's more for, what, blocking incoming strikes or something? Against your sub 4" folding pocketknife? I'm not buying it. I'll freely admit that I've never had to drop and give anyone 20, soldier, nor have I spent much time on my elbows in the battlefield. But if I were going to make a habit of it, I have to say I'd probably pack something a bit less... foldy.

You could argue instead that the Guardsman is intended more as a self-defense knife, maybe. That's fair, and the crossguard probably would protect you from yourself pretty effectively if you got a little too enthusiastic rendering undo Caesar -- rocking horse action aside. But then, a humble Kershaw CQC-6K is still faster to draw.

The Guardsman will be more discreet to carry despite being longer, though, thanks to its deep carry clip.

A CQC won't broadcast to the world that you're Elite, either.

The Guardsman has one more thing going for it, at least on paper. It claims to have ball bearing pivots. Well, as you know I like to keep knife makers honest. So, does it?

Yep, it sure does.

Inside, the Guardsman has exactly the Axis/crossbar componentry you'd expect. Complete with two omega hair springs, the crossbar itself, and the familiar quarter-note slots for the same in the liners. Overall it's pretty easy to take apart, although do take care that the liners can be reinstalled backwards which will prevent you from mounting the clip, since its screws thread into a pair of holes present only on one of them.

I have to say, despite my complaints about it that crossguard is definitely engineered. You can break it down further into these components and it contains no less than four tiny plastic washers, a pair of threaded aluminum spacers, and these screws. One of them is the thumb stud and you can with care take it out and reverse it -- although you still can't reverse the clip if you do.

The halves are separated by this rather nice machined aluminum backspacer, which has threaded brass inserts in it. It has slots milled into it to provide enough flex to install the inserts, which is an unusual and certainly interesting way to do it.

Here are the mechanical gubbins. The crossbar has a unique design with what appear to be a pair of independent washers to hold the hooks on the springs, and they're swaged onto it or something. Search me how these were installed, since they're an interference fit and don't move, but the crossbar doesn't unscrew or otherwise come apart in any way I can figure out.

The bearings have ten balls each in plastic carriers. Neither the blade nor the liners are pocketed to accept the bearings, so upon reassembly you have to line everything up manually. Holding the crossbar back helps. It's kind of a fiddle but otherwise not too difficult.

Also for some reason the pivot screw has an anti-rotation flat on it, but the holes in the liners and scales have no corresponding flat spot and are just round. So you need two T8 Torx drivers to take it apart. As usual for a bearing knife, the Guardsman is pretty insensitive to pivot screw tension and because of that it can be locked down firmly to have no blade wiggle in any direction.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Look past the weird crossguard thing and the Elite Tactical Guardsman has all the fixings of an underrated gem of an inexpensive little knife -- or rather a big one. It's tough to argue with an Axis locking, bearing pivot, D2 folder for only $27. And it's also built pretty well on top of it. Okay, the guard is a little hinky but other than that nothing about it manages to come off as feeling very cheap.

I could surely come up with a lot more interesting to say about it if it were a piece of crap. But it isn't. Go fuckin' figure.

And you can own it without looking like a goomba, a skinhead, or a tankie. That's gotta count for something, right?

Forsooth, I hath made the journey down to yon local smithee, and picked up this.

I think no discussion of cutlery is complete without eventually, at some level, touching upon the Svörd Peasant series. To label this knife as a "classic" probably doesn't quite go far enough. The Peasant is a crocodile; a veritable relic, unchanged in its design since antiquity and yet still here today filling its particular niche. In a certain sense this is The Pocketknife, with the capital T and capital P being important.

The Peasant is a tang grip folding knife. It is brutally simple, and its design is a deliberate throwback to what is quite possibly -- no hyperbole -- one of the oldest known folding knife designs in the world.

The Peasant's included pamphlet specifies that it's based on a design observed in Bavaria and Bohemia around the 1600's. However, there are documented examples of folding knives with similar albeit not identical tang grip designs dating back as far as the time of the Roman empire. The Romans did indeed have folding pocketknives and some of them were quite complex, even including one notable example not too dissimilar from our modern Swiss Army knife, as displayed here. Simple friction folders were obviously where it all began and were exceedingly common for hundreds and hundreds of years. But by 300 AD or so it is purported that examples were appearing with a familiar extended tang design along the lines of what we have here.

The Peasant is intentionally made out of low tech materials using low tech equipment, mostly by hand, by B.W. Baker's Svörd knife company in New Zealand. It comes in multiple sizes and multiple handle materials, most visibly polypropylene in various colors and also wood. You can get kit versions, too, if you want to have the satisfaction of assembling yours yourself. This is the "Micro" variant, the smallest version on offer, and strap on those goggles and don your top hat -- I just had to get the brass version. I mean, of course I did. Come on.

Modern knives have a seemingly endless of supply tricks and mechanisms, and of course we've had a grand old time inspecting, dissecting, and discussing many of them in this very column.

The Peasant, however, doesn't. Its mechanism is purely that it has no mechanism. Only a single pivot point through a hole in the blade, and that's all. It's the absolute king of vintagecore. You might think your fountain pen and your pocketwatch and your waistcoat are anachronistic chic, but I'm telling you all that stuff is kindergarten playground time compared to how ancient this thing is.

The Peasant's extended tang serves both as its opener and what holds it open. You'll note the method is extremely reminiscent of how a classic straight razor works and the lineage between those and this is no doubt shared.

The knife is held together with just three screws, which are literally just commodity brass machine screws that are cut to length after screwing them through the handle and then peened on the ends. One acts as the fulcrum point for the pivot, one serves as the open position endstop, and another one holds the handle together at the tail end. And that's it. Job done, that's the whole system completely described.

The Peasant stays open by way of you gripping the tag against the spine of the handle. This method is exceedingly simple but also remarkably secure. As long as you're holding it firmly the knife won't close up on you. The tang ends with a little hole which comes with a small split ring in it, via which you could dangle it from your keys or tie on your own lanyard if you were so inclined.

The Peasant's blade is made of simple 15N20 steel which is not stainless, and takes on this dark patina for maximum medieval cred. You should probably keep it lightly oiled. It has a mildly drop pointed blade with a deep edge grind that's got no secondary bevel whatsoever. It's a convex grind a little under a quarter inch deep, and that helps the Peasant with cutting performance and allows it to perform well above its weight class provided the shortness of the blade is not an impediment to what you're doing.

What, you thought Fällkniven and Bark River developed the convex grind as the hot new ticket? New doesn't enter into it. All they did was nick it from history.

This Micro variant is quite diminutive, although the tang sticks out by necessity even when it's shut. That brings the overall closed length to 4-1/16" not including the split ring on the end which flaps around freely in any case. It's precisely 5" long when open, and its little blade is 1-7/8" long. There is no ricasso so the entire length is a usable edge. There's a V shaped choil of sorts at the base which is where the endstop screw slots into when the blade is closed.

The blade on mine is 0.057" thick at the spine, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn there is some variance from piece to piece. Across the handle scales the Micro Peasant is just 0.180" thick not including the heads of the screws. With them, it's still just about 0.265". You want to talk thin and light? Modern knives wish they could be as little as this. My brass variant is probably the heaviest model of the bunch, but even it is only 41.9 grams or 1.48 ounces, and that includes the keyring because I was too lazy to take it off.

Modern knives may have fancy composite backspacers, or anodized aluminum diabolo barrels, or maybe precision machined washers. These are decadent fripperies. Mere lace and frills. The Peasant, for its part, has no handle spacers whatsoever. That means the blade rubs against the insides of the brass handle plates. And so what if it does? You got a problem with that or something? It turns out, it still works just fine even so. And the brass is softer than the steel, so the handles are absolutely incapable of scratching the blade in any case. Rather, the reverse happens.

The entire bill of materials consists of just seven components, and that's if you count the split ring. The screws, as mentioned, are just ordinary brass machine screws. Like, from the hardware store. One of the handle plates is threaded and the other one isn't, and the screws are proof against backing out by having the ends peened into place. This is evidenced by the flat spots on the heads, for instance.

This means the Peasant is actually not quite so simple to take apart as it appears, because backing the screws out ultimately involves overcoming their smashed tips. As you can see, I broke one of the screws getting mine apart for this picture. But it wasn't a big deal; I had some suitable #6-32 machine screws just lying around on my workbench already. I believe the stock screws were actually originally fine thread #6-40, but it was the work of a few seconds to ream the threads out to 32 pitch with a tap. No harm done, and keep on keeping on.

Rather than hammer my new screws and annoy myself further in the future, I instead fabricated these brass jam nuts. In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, I turned them freehand on my bench grinder. The brass Peasant's handle plates also shine up very nicely with the application of a little Flitz. Although admittedly, probably not for long unless you clearcoated it or something.

I also found a trio of random brass washers in my odds and ends, which make the perfect tail spacer. This is completely unnecessary, but the beauty of it is you can customize your Peasant like this with just any old trifles and junk you have lying around and it works.

Here's a very modern knife next to it. This HUAAO Bugout clone may look simple by today's standards, but its elegance is peanuts compared to the Svörd. The HUAAO is all titanium, anodized aluminum, and stainless steel. Wonder materials. Black magic! The Peasant has, and needs, none of the above. You could hand one to your hypothetical time traveling medieval friend and he would experience no future shock; he'd tell you how it could be made, precisely what out of, and he'd probably even be able to make another one just like it.

Oh yes. And I would be remiss if I did not mention the pamphlet it comes with.

If I haven't played up the historicity of the Svörd Peasant enough, the pamphlet does it some more. Simplicity is the Peasant's selling point, and this as well as the knife's inherent cheapness are driven home all throughout. True to form, the documentation is just printed on regular old paper. Nothing glossy, no bond, not even in color. For your entertainment I've scanned both the front and reverse, which are available here and here, respectively.

The bloke with the wedge of cheese is a nice touch. He's very Phil Foglio.

For his part, B.W. Baker guarantees your Svörd for life. There are some included care tips as well, the highlight of which being the sharpening tips which boil down to basically, "Use a stone on it or something." There's no way you can't respect that.

For the the price of admission you also get this leather sheath. And it is genuinely leather, albeit split grain. I have no doubt that it's just as handmade as the knife is.

It's a bit of a squeeze but it'll conform to the shape of your knife over time. The tang is left sticking out along with its ring, if you leave it installed.

It's not much, but it'd absolutely complete the ensemble along with your canvas messenger bag, designer beard wax, hemp beanie, and vintage flannel shirt.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I think there's a place for a Svörd Peasant in every knife person's collection. It's not exactly cheap in this brass guise at about $32, but nor is it really unreasonably expensive for what you get. Especially considering its hand made nature, plus the sheath and all.

I have used the phrase probably one too many times referring to something as a warning from history. The Peasant is anything but. It's not a warning; it's a celebration. It's the closest thing you'll probably ever get your hands on absolute genesis without owning a museum. It's a chance to hold a fragment of the thing from which, ultimately, everything else in this hobby sprung forth.

Maybe its two handle slabs aren't quite technically identically shaped to each other. Maybe it's got grinder marks on it, and it shows up with an uneven patina, and its blade will rub scuffs into the insides of the handles as you use it. For any cheap mass produced knife we'd decry this sort of thing to no end. We'd label it crap, and to hell with it, and declare it Temu garbage of the worst kind.

But what makes the Peasant different is that all of that is the point. Therein lies the charm; that's what makes it special. It's flawed, but intentionally so. And thus every one of them is in some tiny way unique compared to all the others as well. I would not at all be surprised to find, for example, that the parts from this one wouldn't quite interchange with the parts of any others. And that's something you never see anymore.

Maybe the Svörd Peasant's real value is making you stop and look at every manufactured thing in a different way. Someone made this. Some one. A person. Not a factory, not a country, not a conglomerate, and if you choose to look at it hard enough, maybe not even a brand.

In more ways than one, then, it comes from a different time. And that's where the magic is.

So see you later, alligator. Never change.

Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.

Here's another one of those knife-esqe, but not-a-knife objects.

This is the Artisan Cutlery Kinetic Tool, and it's a balisong trainer sporting a bottle opener instead of an edge, along the lines of the various BBarfly models and Squid Industries Mako. So it's perfect for safely practicing balisong flip tricks and similar, while still providing a modicum of functionality over a normal trainer knife.

The Kinetic tool measures uͧрⷬ aͣᴛⷮ aͣвⷡoͦuͧᴛⷮ 9-̄1/2"៉ loͦng whͪeͤn oͦрⷬeͤn, ₐₙd ₅₋₁/₂" 𝄴ₗₒₛₑd, w̠͇i͕̙̺t̫͕̼h͎̫̝ i̫͙͎t̪͚̻s͕͎ u͕͕̝n̝̻s̢͓̘h̠̻͍a͔̪̪r͍̙p̫͙̟e̺͓͜n͓̫̘e̡͇͔d̢͇̠,̪̟͜ n̝͎̘o̪̼̠n͔͓͚-̦͚͜b̺͙l͕͓a͚̺͜d̻͉̻e͇͙͓ b̡͇̦o̦̞t͚̞̞t̪͔̫l̦͉̞e͔͔͎ o̵̠͕͚͋̒̚p̴̼͉̞̽͐͠e̴̠̘̝͑͆̕n̴̫̦̔̾͆e̸̝̺̞̿̔r̸̪̦͌̓̀ t̴̡̝͉͐͌̔ḧ̵̟̝̻́͒̓i̴͇̞̿̾̀n̴̟͖̐̒͘g̸̻̺͛́̚͜y̸̡̦̦͆̚͝ ~c̵̡͓͍͊͊͊o̸͍̦̿̿m̸̡͓͉͛̚͝i̴͉͚̾̒n̸͔̼͊̿͘g̸̫͕̝̀͊~ ~o̸̠̻̻͛͒͠u̵͚͍̦̔͌̓ẗ̸̡̫̟́̓͌~ ~t̵̪̼̺́͛̓o̴͕͓͊̕͠~ ~á̸̘̪̝̿̽b̵̪̠̙͋͆o̵͚̠̘̐͑͝ú̴̘͎͒̕͜ț̵͍͎̓͆͛~

...

...

This is the Artisan Cutlery Kinetic Tool, and it's a world-legal "switchblade" because, as you can see, it's not actually a blade. Instead, it's got an unsharpened bottle opener that provides a modicum of functionality while not really being a knife. Therefore, despite its automatic opening action it ought to remain legal just about --

...?

Hang on just a damn minute.

There's some kind of Mandela effect shit going on, here. Is the Kinetic Tool a balisong knife or is it a switchblade?

Well, it's both. And it's neither.

You see, down at the tail end it has a mildly unusual but otherwise mechanically familiar balisong T latch. It hooks over the spacer pin on that end of the knife rather than the typical method of engaging with either of the handles, but otherwise works as you'd expect and you can flick it undone easily enough to find that the Kinetic Tool functions as a serviceable, if a bit heavy, unsharpened balisong trainer knife.

And on the other end is a conspicuous shiny button that, when pressed, sends the unsharpened "blade" rocketing out exactly as you'd expect from a side opening automatic.

This is, needless to say, mechanically bizarre. The question of "why," of course, is a stupid one. If we sat around here asking why all day we'd never get anything done.

But either way, you can't exactly call it a knife.

Artisan actually make a small range of these things in a few different variants, including one under their cheaper CJRB brand. Various handle and tool blade styles are available, but this is the original one with the rearward mounted bottle opener, slotted screwdriver tip nose, and the typical perfunctory but otherwise useless hex nut "wrench" cutouts in the middle. It comes in a few versions wherein the G-10 scales are swapped for different colors but this olive drab green one is as usual the superior choice.

So the Kinetic Tool's headline feature is that is does indeed function as both a balisong and an automatic, all in the same package. And it works. Although this involves some compromises and inherently engenders some weirdness.

I mean, beyond the obvious one in just how strange the idea is on its face.

For a start, as a knife with two opening mechanisms it thusly has two open states. And then it follows that it has two closed states as well, of course. If you compare the image above you'll see the handles are in a different position than in the headline photo at the beginning of this post, despite the tool self-evidently being open in both pictures. You'll wind up with the handles reversed relative to each other if you open it in balisong mode rather than in switchblade mode. You can latch it open or shut in either position.

Both mechanisms are also always in play, so to speak. So there's nothing stopping you from opening the tool as a switchblade, and then closing it as a balisong. Or the opposite of opening it as a balisong, and then pressing the switchblade button afterwards. And then...

...What happens is this.

Yes, the Kinetic Tool can switchblade itself closed if you already have it open. Only once, of course, until you manually reload it against its spring -- Artisan unfortunately haven't figured out how to violate the laws of thermodynamics. But in light of that, this may have something to do with why it isn't sharpened. By default, what it would whack you with in this case would be the "spine" of the blade anyway, but being able to snap the thing shut on your own fingers accidentally is still a bit disconcerting.

But this means you can combine either opening or closing method as you see fit. Another wrinkle caused by this is that when you open it normally in balisong mode, the blade is "backwards", so to speak, and presents you with the edge containing the bottle opener against the safe handle and not the straight spine. That's because it opens in the expected orientation from this position when you open it in switchblade mode, but since the pivot direction of either method is reversed from the other, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

The Kinetic Tool's latch also doesn't have any endstops.

In addition to adding another element of Fiddle Factor to the proceedings, it also means you can with some dexterity spin the latch around backwards and latch the tool together from the inside.

This has the amusing side effect of making the Kinetic Tool one of the few physical objects I can think of that's capable of softlocking itself.

Really. Watch this.

Did you catch it? Here's what you do: Open the Kinetic Tool in balisong mode, then flip the latch around to latch it from the inside. Then press the switchblade button to make it close itself.

Since you engaged the latch backwards it is not in the path of the blade's closing travel. But you can't undo the latch, because the tip of the blade is in the way, and the blade is already at the end of its travel. You can't use the latch to push the blade out of the way, and you can't use the blade to undo the latch. And you can't undo the latch through the blade. And so on, and so forth; it's a mechanical catch-22.

Thankfully this conundrum isn't permanent, since you can use a suitable poking object to pivot the blade out and reset the switchblade mechanism, and then undo the latch. But it'd be great for one of those, "I'll bet you a dollar you can't open this knife in 30 seconds" sorts of bar bets.

What all of this adds up to is that the Kinetic Tool is a fantastic deskside fidget toy despite -- or perhaps because of -- all of these oddities. It's just shame it isn't actually useful for much else.

Other than its thin handle scales, it's constructed entirely of steel of one kind or another. So for a balisong, it's actually kind of heavy: 158.8 grams or 5.6 ounces. A lot of compromises had to be made with the pivots, essentially shrinking them down to dollhouse size, to accommodate also stuffing the entire switchblade mechanism in between them. Thus the pivot feel is serviceable but not great, and then it also likes to hook your finger with the bottle opener notch while you're manipulating it which is obviously suboptimal. Relocating the bottle opener to the tip would have solved this at the expense of making it much harder to use to actually open bottles. Pick your battles, I guess.

It's not terribly useful as any other tool, either. The aforementioned bottle opener will probably be the most often used feature for most people. For instance, I don't think anyone in the history of mankind has actually undone a bolt in such a manner that resulted in meaningful work being done with one of those stupid stairstepped hex notch thingies. This despite their popularity in showing up on those dumb wallet cards and oodles of other gifts-for-dad sort of tripe, seemingly just so another bullet point could be put on the package. I guess you could use the screwdriver tip as advertised, although only on rather large slotted screws, and only those that are not down any kind of blind hole. Artisan claim the tip can be also used as a prybar, but do so at your own peril due to how thin the pivots are. I think putting any real amount of torsion on the mechanism would probably tear the tips right off of the handles. There's a slot in the blade, too, but I have no idea what that's for. You can fit a piece of 1" webbing through it, but towards what end I can't fathom.

Oh, and in deference to tradition it has the totally expected but largely useless ruler markings along the back edge. There are no numbers but the little tick marks are indeed fractional inches: Halves, quarters, and eighths.

The front shows Artisan's logo, and the reverse has the model number of the variant in question as well as Artisan's "patent pending." Nowhere is it mentioned where it's made; not on the article itself or in the blurb. If I had to guess, I'd say China or Taiwain. And nor is the blade steel specified on the tool itself, but Artisan's web page claims it is made of 8Cr13MoV which might actually be useful to know if it had, you know, an edge.

Inherent dangers aside, it'd probably be slightly more useful if it did. But then it'd surely be double illegal in most locales, so the fidget toy version is what we got.

Actually, they did once make a sharpened version -- sort of. Model 1823PO is a similar scheme to this, but it included the ability to insert a standard utility knife blade. (That seems kind of familiar, come to think of it.) It's now discontinued, though, and jury's out on whether or not that was due to hordes of owners complaining about shaving their knuckles off with it. Either way you can't buy it anymore and I've never been able to lay my hands on one.

Oh well.

Artisan call the flipping action "silky smooth," which is a bit optimistic. The Kinetic Tool's balisong pivots are, as mentioned, tiny. They do ride of brass washers but they're not especially refined, and leave a fair amount of slop in the mechanism as pictured here. They don't feel particularly robust.

You can see the washers plainly by looking at it down the edge:

It does spin freely enough but once again, just like the Mantis knife we looked at last week, it suffers from the problem of the "blade" being heavier than either of the handles individually which necessitates the flipping action to be a bit slow.

You can see the teeny tiny pivots and their attendant washers here. I did not bother to take the switchblade mechanism apart because I know how annoying it'll be to put back together. I know what we'd see in there anyway: A torsion spring, a hole for it in the heel of the blade, and a machined mushroom shaped lock button. I'd doubt there are too many other surprises.

One unusual point of note is that the Kinetic Tool's G-10 scales are screwed to the liners from the inside. I'm not sure why, though, because if the intent was to not have exposed screw heads there are still the four screws at the tail end that go through and hold the spacers on, which are visible right there and bold as brass on the scales at the tail end of the knife.

I guess one other oddity is that the two pivots for the balisong handles are actually constructed slightly differently, and use different screws from each other. That's because one of them also serves as the endstop for the blade's travel in switchblade mode, whereas the blade has to be able to pass through the other. So one pivot is a full length threaded barrel with a screw in each end, and the other is comprised of two escutcheons machined into the puck around the switchblade mechanism with a gap in between. None of the barrels or spacers have anti-rotation mechanisms on them so to fully undo everything you'll have to grab them with pliers or something.

Its forward kicker pins are permanently machined in place into that same puck around the switchblade mechanism. A raised boss around the button acts as one massive rear kicker pin, which is kind of clever.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Kinetic Tool certainly does one thing it sets out to do, which is to be a really strange Knifelike Object with two fully functional opening mechanisms all in the same package. Obviously I think the "tool" aspect of it is highly dubious and I think it'd have been better off as an actual knife.

Its design results in some mechanical oddities that are thus far exclusive to Artisan's/CJRB's range, so if you want something like that just so you can say you have it, it's in a field with no competitors other than itself and its siblings. If I were you I might try the cheaper CJRB version, since it's bound to be no more or less useful but has the same mechanism, is sure to retain all of the same quirks, but costs half as much.

And then, there probably aren't many fidget toys in the world with the possibility of leaving your onlookers wondering if they walked away in the same timeline they arrived in. Surely that thing you're playing with was a butterfly knife just a minute ago.

...Wasn't it?

▄▀█ █▀▀ █░█ █ █▀▀ █░█ █▀▀ █▀▄▀█ █▀▀ █▄░█ ▀█▀   █░█ █▄░█ █░░ █▀█ █▀▀ █▄▀ █▀▀ █▀▄ █ █ █
█▀█ █▄▄ █▀█ █ ██▄ ▀▄▀ ██▄ █░▀░█ ██▄ █░▀█ ░█░   █▄█ █░▀█ █▄▄ █▄█ █▄▄ █░█ ██▄ █▄▀ ▄ ▄ ▄

I'm going to 3D print a badge and pin it to my wall, or something. Right after I finish rolling on the floor and laughing. Just give me a few minutes.

1. Context: This guy creates an "angry" sub to bitch about things. Cool, cool.
2. Same guy posts a couple of troll-level ranty screeds filled with nonsense and bad faith "arguments," such as they can even be considered arguments at all. W/e, that's his prerogative. However...
3. Doing this in public means that this makes it to the .world front page as these things do, which invites people to comment on this silliness. Myself included.
4. Jabroni gets butthurt about his opinions actually having to withstand scrutiny and then, of course, hilarity ensues.

5. ...But bro is also under the impression you can't say "fuck" on the internet for some reason?

But that's not the actual headline, here. What's bats is, he actually went through and deleted pretty much every comment in that thread. Here it is.

He's, uh, really racking up the popularity.

TL;DR: User openly calls out a specific demographic (one that is prevalent on this instance, no less), is shocked when said demographic shows up, responds by throwing a tantrum and bans everyone from his playpen. Comedy gold!

"Oh, look. Another stupid balisong. Why don't you get a new shtick, granddad?"

...

No.

This is the Mantis Mothra. In the category of knives named after Toho movie monsters, it is probably in a class all by itself.

The Mothra is a full sized aluminum handled balisong, measuring up at 9-3/4" long when locked open, and about 5-11/16" closed. It has a 4-1/2" long spear pointed blade which is, despite its appearances, only single edged. The manufacturer calls it a "drop point" which I suppose is technically correct in the same sense that a stromboli could be called a "sandwich."

The blade is made of 154CM and is very thick: About 7/32". That's pretty unusual for a balisong. Not including any protuberances like the latch head or the ears of the blade sticking out the sides, the Mothra is a girthy 1-1/8" across and about 1/2" thick in total. All of this adds up to a weight of 157.5 grams or 5.55 ounces. So, ephemerality is one attribute this knife definitely hasn't got.

(Project Farm Voice) The Mantis Mothra is made in Taiwan.

It also sports some very intense design.

The handles have this craggy, stonelike appearance on their edges that looks like it ought to be a wall texture in Quake or something. Then the blade has a deep fuller in it that's got several holes drilled through. Suffice to say the looks are certainly unique, possibly even divisive.

The Mothra's handles are clearly cast and not machined. If I am any judge, those blemishes down on the tail end are definitely air pockets from the casting process. The surfaces are bead blasted and anodized, so then one can only assume that all the spots on the edges and corners that've been rubbed through and the bare aluminum peeks through are intentional. Probably so that when the surface inevitably gets scratched or otherwise patinas, Mantis can say it's "supposed" to look that way.

On the bright side, showing up the way it does for an MSRP (but certainly not street price) of around $300 makes me feel a lot better about the finish on that $20 Exo knockoff I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. Although, on the matter of price -- hold that thought.

I've talked probably one too many times before about knives with "impossible" pivot screws, which present no mechanism of screwdriver engagement on their heads. This looks slick but isn't much of a trick, of course. There's always a flat spot on the shank of the screw or some other manner of anti-rotation feature, or failing that on a balisong specifically you can just flip it over to the side that's got the screw heads and undo them with the knife in it's latched position, because the tension against the shanks of the screws will hold them in place while you work. The other side always contains the screw heads.

So you see, just flip the Mothra over and...

...Oh.

Uh.

So it's impossible to take apart, then.

Strike that, reverse it.

If you haven't guessed, the Mothra's trick is that it's part of Mantis' "BladeXchange™" series. The pivot screws are not screws; they're buttons, which work in a manner identical to those found on a button lock folding knife. Except rather than lock and unlock the knife, they allow you to slide the blade out of the handles entirely via a channel milled into the heel of the blade that meets up with the pivot holes.

That's visible here. And these are the easiest disassembly photos I've ever taken for you guys.

So the Mothra's deal is that it's actually incredibly easy to take apart. But why would you ever want to? Well, other than the obvious cleaning and lubrication chores...

...Mantis also sell a variety of different blade styles as you would expect, which you can replace -- sorry "eXchange" -- with whatever you've already got. One knife into many, if that's a void that needs filling in your life. And in addition to various edge profiles they also offer a blunt trainer blade you can swap in. The one pictured there is the "Dexter" blade which has a Wharncliffe profile and loses the false edge on the back.

And the straight spine on it reveals just how ludicrously thick the blades for this thing are.

So here it is being a Dexter. Mantis seems to just name their variants based on whatever blade they come preinstalled with; insofar as I can tell, the handles are the same between their various models. So you can be like Katy Perry and change your mind; reinvent yourself (or at least your knife) as freely as you like and you'd probably have valid grounds for changing the name right along with. Swapping takes mere seconds, although the reasons for doing so are left as an exercise for the reader.

The release mechanism for the blade looks like this:

There's a fat part and a skinny part, and a spring behind it. When you push the button the fat part sinks into the opposite side of the handle until it's flush, and the channel in the blade is wide enough to clear the skinny part, so once you get it lined it up just slides apart.

Apropos of nothing, this also means that it is trivial to succumb to the temptation to assemble the Mothra backwards. Here it is as such. And if you do this, how it's pictured above is as closed as it can ever get. It's mildly amusing the first time. You probably won't do it twice.

Anyway, the astute among you have probably already figured out two glaring asterisks hovering just above and to the right of this entire getup.

First and foremost, balisong makers go to great lengths to improve the mechanical precision of their pivots to create finer, smoother, more solid, less rattly, and generally more pleasant mechanisms for their knives. I've waxed poetic at great length about this sort of thing many times. Bushings, precision washers made of fancy low coefficient of friction materials like sintered bronze, ball bearings, the works. Some of this stuff costs big bucks, and balisong nerds get very excited about it.

Well, I just showed you a photo of the Mothra taken apart and it sure didn't include any of those. That's because it hasn't got 'em. All the effort was apparently spent on the release mechanism and for the rest, well, we're just banging rocks together. Literally, in fact. The pivot surfaces are just the blade steel riding directly on the inner surfaces of the handles. The bead blasted and textured aluminum oxide anodized surfaces of the handles. You know, that stuff they make sandpaper out of? So you'd predict that it scuffs up the pivot area something fierce.

And you'd be right. Give that reader a cigar. No washers, no nothing. Not even a pair of perfunctory plastic ones.

The other part is, all of this needs to have a generous clearance so that you can actually slide the pieces apart without them getting all jammed up. So with no bearings or bushings in there either, this thing must rattle like a telegraph office.

Right again.

I will hasten to point out that the pivot play on this knife is so bad that if you look carefully, you can see that the only thing stopping it from getting even more off-axis is the fact that it's stopped by the inner face of one of the handles hitting the flat of the blade. Oof.

(I hue shifted that photo, by the way, because the gripper-stuff on those gloves I was wearing happens to be red and I just know the types of comments that would garner. The original, unaltered photo is here, you weirdos.)

You absolutely cannot tune this knife. Not in any way, shape, or form. There is no screw tension to adjust, no washers to swap, no bushings to shave. It is what it is, now and forever. And part of the problem is that the "pins," for lack of a better word, that make up the pivot and release mechanism don't even engage with the holes in the blade all the way through. The solid part only rises up a little less than halfway through the thickness of the blade so the top half is always left freely floating and able to wiggle around.

Mantis probably could have cured that by making the blade a little thinner. But they didn't. And lo, here we are.

So that leaves the question of the Mothra's balisong action hanging in air. Like a particular metaphor. One that I'm not going to make.

The answer is that it's distinctly weird. The enormous rattle and play in the blade notwithstanding -- that doesn't actually impact the moment-to-moment usage any. The Mothra's rebound action is also pretty okay, probably owing to its trendy but now common "zen" pin design which locates the rebound pins inside the handles rather than having them press fit through the blade. But other than that, since we're on the topic, there are no other fancy features. No spring latch, no weights, no interchangeable scales. Heck, no scales at all.

The Mothra's downfall is presented in two acts. Neither of them, surprisingly, are the weird handle texture. And rest assured that it is weird, but you can get used to that sort of thing easily enough. No, there's another uncanny feeling to its action that's tough to put you finger on until you really think about it. Eventually you'll realize that it's caused by the blade (64.6 grams) weighting significantly more than the handles (44.5 grams each) which is the opposite of most balisongs.

Beyond its pivot mechanism, a balisong knife's flipping feel is normally pretty much exclusively generated by its handles, which should weigh the same or more as the blade. Often they have thin blades that are carefully tuned to achieve this effect. Not so with the Mothra. As previously noted, its blade(s) are enormous, thick, and above all very heavy. So that leaves the point of balance not in the handles or even hanging around the pivot point but swinging around wildly somewhere out in space. And because of that, where it is also changes relative to where in its arc the blade happens to be at any given moment.

This causes the Mothra to feel a lot less like a competition balisong and a lot more like a medieval flail. Its spins are by necessity long and slow, and if you try to apply any kind of speed to any trick and break concentration even for a split second it will positively leap out of your hand and away, seemingly of its own accord. The action is epicyclic, with its center shifting around in an unintuitive manner; circles within circles. Again, this could have been remedied by a just using a thinner blade so it'd weigh less. Indeed, the monstrously fat blade is cool and all just in and of itself, but if Mantis wanted to do something like that'd it'd probably have been a better idea to put it on an ordinary folder or similar and not their flagship balisong. Just saying.

And here's the other thing. Have you spotted it?

The Mothra's clip is in the wrong place.

No, I don't mean on the wrong side of its handle because my objectively correct opinion is to prefer it to be rearward towards your pocket seam when clipped and I always complain about that, nerrr. No, it's on the fucking safe handle. The one you hold, and have to spin and roll over in your hand when you're manipulating the knife. That's not where it belongs. There's a reason it always goes on the bite handle, at least on other knives, and also why that's the side with the latch. But here it isn't, and there are no mounting holes on that handle so it can't be put there. So it's in the way. Always. And it's massively disconcerting.

The only cure for that is to just take it off.

Okay, yes, there's nothing stopping you from just popping the knife apart and flipping the blade over so the edge slots into the other handle instead. But now the latch is on what has become the safe handle, and that absolutely will come back to bite you (literally) if do that and then switch between this and a different knife.

I have no idea why this is. Do you hear me, Mantis? Fix it. Put the stupid holes on the other handle. There's plenty of room for them there; it'll be easy.

So yeah. It looks cool, it definitely has a gimmick, but it's all talk and nothing in the sack.

Look, here's the Mothra with a pair of other full sized balis. That's a Kershaw Moonsault on the left, and a Benchmade 42 on the right. The Mothra's about the width of a Moonsault (although it's thinner in profile), but about the same length as the Model 42. Monkey in the middle, there you go.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The entire Mantis BladeXchange series is one of those situations where there's a solution desperately in search of a problem. I mean, sure, you can theoretically use this to arrange your life so that your trainer balisong and your real balisong are the same knife. But so many compromises and sacrifices need to be made to get there that you have to ultimately ask yourself, is it worth it? A nice live balisong can be had for $200 (or a lot less), and trainer versions of various knives even from major manufacturers are basically free by comparison. I'm feeling like a two-knife solution is probably a better strategy overall.

That brings us back to that point I stuck a pin in earlier, actually. Riddle me this:

Where, precisely, is the value found in a balisong knife?

I mean, physically, not philosophically. Dollars and cents. What part of it makes it cost what it costs, $40 or $100 or $300 or whatever it is? Half of the world will say it is in the mechanicals: in the precision machine work, the design, the pivot mechanism, tuning the balance, and all of those tactile but ultimately conceptual things that take time and care to get right. That's why a flea market knife costs $20 and is crap, and why a Benchmade costs $300 and it isn't. Right?

The other half of the world will say it's obviously in the blade, dummy, with whatever fancy alloy steel it is plus all that heat treating and cryo quenching and sharpening and polish work. Which is clearly why, say, a live blade Flytanium FlyOne costs $500 but a Flytanium Zenith trainer is only $60. You dig?

Well, a whole Mothra costs you $180 real world dollars or so, but you can buy its blade loose for $35. And there ain't much precision machine work in the handles, which is all that's left over. Hell, they're even cast to reduce cost, and not very well at that. And as we saw there isn't a single washer, bushing, or bearing in the entire damn assemblage. Somehow here, one plus one comes out equaling five.

So where, exactly, is fancy bred? Is it in the heart, or in the head?

G'day.

This little beaut is the Cold Steel Bush Ranger.

Come to think of it, "little" is an... imprecise... way to describe it. Completely wrong, in fact.

"Bloody enormous" is more appropriate.

It's 8-3/8" long when open, for a start. That's including its 3-1/2" clip pointed blade, which is an impressive 0.156" thick and made of very fancy, very tough S35VN crucible steel. The Bush Ranger is 4-7/8" long when closed, and weighs every bit of 164.8 grams or 5.84 ounces. It's also a very sturdy 0.673 thick not including its clip, and 1.787" in breadth at its widest point which is at the peak of blade right at the knurled thumb-opening plate doohickey.

With its remarkable bulk and Bowie-esque shape, this might just be the only folding knife Paul Hogan would ever approve of. And all this for around $100? Crikey. (For what it's worth, Cold Steel tries to MSRP this at $224.99 at the time of writing. Nobody actually has it listed for that price, nor I suspect would anyone actually be willing to pay it. So there are meaningless numbers in the world, and then there's that one.)

Actually, speaking of said thumb-opener doohickey. Its design is shared with Cold Steel's "AK-47" model, and the tiny gap between this horizontal plate and the spine of the blade means this has the unique property of theoretically being capable of hooking your pocket hem for automatic opening, similar to the Emerson "Wave^tm^" mechanism. But, notably, without stepping on Emerson's trademark.

I say theoretically because, alas, it doesn't actually work very well. The added breadth sticking out of the sides tends to cause it to snag rather than cleanly come off of your pocket, which leaves you with a half opened knife still clinging to your pants. And then there's you, standing there looking stupid. The gap between the plate and the spine isn't very big, either, which you'd think would preclude it from working with thicker fabrics but I actually found the opposite to be so. You probably don't want your pants fabric to actually fit in there, because that tends to lead to even more severe snagging.

So as a pocket-hook-opener, the Bush Ranger is kind of, shall we say, pants. Oh well. You can still open it one handed via a thumb easily enough.

Unlike practically every other presumptive hook-opener (well, not every one, but you know what I mean) the Bush Ranger is a lockback mechanism.

Oh, sorry, that's Cold Steel's "Tri-Ad Lock." Sure, whatever you say, guys. Mechanically, it's really a regular lockback. It's just that Cold Steel must pathologically invent a trade name for everything, even if whatever it is has already been invented. They seem to think that their mechanism is the strongest out of all lockbacks and, if you squint a bit when you read the literature, they sort of insinuate that it might be the strongest locking mechanism, period. I'm not entirely sure I believe that. But the Bush Ranger at least does lock up solidly with a very loud clack, and no perceptible lash in any direction.

This is a half length lockback system, with the cutout where you press about midway down the spine of the knife. Just like everything else about this thing, the lock bar is very thick. The handle slabs are very thick, too, being made completely of sculpted G-10 without liners underneath. Cold Steel does not actually specify the color, but it is a sightly greeny earthy brown. So don't drop it into any dry brush or you'll never see it again.

This is a Mike Wallace design, and Cold Steel spend some words describing how comfort was one of the design goals, aiming for long term use without hand fatigue. Towards that end there is a generous finger notch and the fat handles are very rounded on the edges. The finger notch carries through across the face of the handles as well. Unusually, there is also an additional trough towards the tail of the knife where the heel of your thumb might naturally rest.

It's got a reversible clip that is comically dinky compared to the rest of the knife, too tightly sprung, too short, and honestly just not very good. It's there, but it presents yet another impediment to hook-opening this knife. The too-tight clip and very grippy handle texture conspire to bite your pocket hem like an outback crocodile.

The star of the show is really the Bush Ranger's blade. While its finish work isn't impressive, its robustness certainly is. There's no two ways around it, this is a serious chunk of steel. Cold Steel seem to think that heavy duty usage is the Bush Ranger's raison d'être and it's tough to argue with them on that point. Spearing sharks or fighting Mulga snakes or fending off drop bears or whatever it is you do -- The Bush Ranger is probably equipped to handle it. Well, outside of urban civilization, anyway. It's very likely to attract comment if you draw it to clean your fingernails while, say, standing in line at the post office.

Think of this as the diametric opposite of a Benchmade Bugout. Yes, both knives are made of very fancy steel sandwiched between linerless composite handles. But other than that they couldn't be any more different, and serve needs found as far apart from each other on the spectrum as I think anyone could possibly manage without trading either knife for a machete or possibly a battle axe.

If you've ever wondered what the hell all the fuss is about Cold Steel's Tri-Ad lock, here you go. All of the components are suitably beefy but there is no mechanical difference between this and a lockback.

The Bush Ranger's halves are separated by a backspacer made of some kind of composite. I think it is also G-10, and has a similar sort of structure and texture as the handle slabs. As you can see, the lock bar is sprung by a hefty leaf spring and this also serves as the closed position detent. A quintet (that's five) of shouldered threaded barrels accept screws that hold on the clip as well as secure the backspacer to the tail end of the knife. The lock bar pivots on a plain shouldered pin that sinks into both handle halves, and another one serves as the endstop for when you open the knife. Notably, these don't press out from the sides, so don't try that if you're taking yours apart.

Because apparently nothing about the Bush Ranger can possibly not be oversized, the pivot screw is enormous. Most knives can be disassembled with a T6 Torx driver, and the pivot screw might be a T8 or T10.

That's for paintywaist girly men. The Bush Ranger's pivot screw is a T15. You'd better hope you have one of those in your bit kit.

The pivot washers are PFTE and both the pivot screw and its hole have an anti-rotation flat on them. Accordingly, there is no screw head on the female side:

The thumb opener plate is held on with a single T6 Torx screw and is removable, e.g. for cleaning or to get it out of your way when sharpening.

All five of the threaded spacer barrels also have anti-rotation flats, so they must be placed in precisely the correct position to get the knife back together. It's not that hard, but for some reason they all face in different directions.

The Bush Ranger is cartoonishly huge.

I mean, just look at it. The CQC-6K up at the top there is not a small knife, but it's handily overshadowed by the Bush Ranger.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Don't buy this knife if you want a non-Emerson hook-opener on a budget. If you want one of those, and you want it to be huge and bushcrafty, consider a Kershaw CQC-11K instead.

But there is something to be said for the Bush Ranger's gargantuan slab of high end steel, if you have a use for such a thing -- especially for the price. Probably not if you have small hands, though. Or if you're planning on going to town today.

Fair go, mate, she's a whopper. No worries.

Big whoop, right?

Well. Apparently I, uh, have "merch" now.

The Microtech Halo VI is stupid, and that's precisely why I love it.

Normally this is the part where I would say, "The Microtech Halo VI T/E is an unassuming aluminum bodied knife that..." and so on, and so forth, until I make you try to guess what its quirk is.

But that's wrong. Because it isn't unassuming in any way. Not even a little bit.

First of all, it's massive: 10-1/2" long open, 6-1/8" closed, with a 4-1/4" long tanto pointed blade that's got a devil-may-care rakishness to its point. It's not light either, at 141.6 grams or 5 ounces. And carrying it? Pfah! Who cares about such trivial details? It has no clip and no lanyard hole. Nothing. Suffice it to say, no one is going to discreetly tuck this into a shirt pocket.

You see, the Halo VI is a single action out-the-front automatic knife. Not -- and this is a very important distinction -- your typical dual action in-out mechanism. Those are for losers. Losers who are concerned with stuff like safety and practicality. Losers who didn't have to go completely bonkers designing a solution the very problem that they deliberately created for themselves, because they can and who the fuck is going to stop them?

I can only imagine what the design process for the Halo VI must have looked like, but I'll bet you it started with doing a massive line of coke right off of the boardroom table.

The Halo VI has this fat obvious fire button on it. It's big and chunky and has a fascinating sawtooth texture on it, and you really, really want to press it. The oblong dingus in the middle is a sliding safety, a button within a button, much like the safety on a Glock trigger. It's there because as a single action knife, the blade is always spring loaded, positively quivering with tension. Ready to launch out and ventilate your shorts, put a hole right through your dick, deliver you an express vasectomy.

A typical switchblade's dinky spring only pushes the blade for a tiny fraction of its travel and inertia does the rest. Not so with the Halo VI. Its blade is full-time under power, all the way throughout its range of travel, and its spring pushes hard. It absolutely will not be stopped by such puny inconveniences as any part of your personage being in its way. Everyone who's ever owned an in-out switchblade has at some time, most likely while giggling, fired it at a solid surface like the top of a desk and found that the end result is that no real damage was done to the presumptive target and you're now just a chump holding a flaccid, unlocked blade flapping loosely in its track.

That is not how the Halo VI works. You absolutely do not want it going off in your pocket. If the blade hits something during its travel it will do its level best to puncture it, and then once the unfortunate obstacle is removed it will instantly carry on the rest of its merry way, without fail.

Hence the safety.

So you light the thing off, and the blade rockets out the front and slams open with an thunderous cacophony, and locks there. It's glorious. Everyone in the room knows when you've triggered it. Even when they know what's coming, it makes people jump. Watching such an enormous length of steel spring into your hand with such viciousness would surely take the fight out of anybody. There's pumping a 12 gauge shotgun, and then there's this.

But, uh. Then what?

On a normal limp-wristed switchblade you could flick the switch the other way, and the blade will slither back into the handle aided by its wimpy little excuse for a spring. But the Halo VI is a single action auto, remember, so retracting it requires stuffing the blade back into the housing somehow, against the spring. And that seems... safe?

Ah.

So on the other end, the Halo VI has what can only be described as a goddamn AR-15 charging handle on it.

You pinch the two little spring loaded grabber tabs to unlock them, and yank this aluminum bar...

...all the way back, which pulls in the blade.

There's no getting around it. The verb you're looking for is "rack." This is a knife you reload.

Here's a complete demonstration of the action.

And the upshot of this is, aside from all the machine work and fine tolerances in the latches on the tailcap and its fitment against the handle body and so forth, the Halo VI's mechanism is actually caveman levels of simple. It consists of a big spring, a button, a little spring for the button, and a blade with two notches bitten into it. And that's it. Unlike a double action auto which requires a multilayered sandwich of sliding plates and extension springs and little latches and ramps and all. There is very little in there to go wrong.

All those people who are annoyed by the fact that every single double action auto in the world has an off-centered blade in it will thus be pleased to note that another side effect of the mechanical design is that the Halo VI's blade dispensing port is exactly in the middle.

And it's an attractive thing in its own weird way. It's flawlessly anodized and held together with Microtech's stylish but baffling triangular headed screws. Clearly much care went into the design of the ergonomic yet alien curvature of the handle and the diamond pattern on the trigger button. Never mind that you have to buy a special tool to take it apart, and the warranty will be voided if you do. Who has time to care about that?

It's massive. Gargantuan. Vulgar, even. I'm running out of words for it.

I told you a lie earlier. It actually comes with this Kydex holster thing. It's cool, though; the holster is also wildly impractical. It does offer just a soupçon of retention, and it also holds the knife proudly erect and high on your belt, clearly visible at all times so people can see what a cool guy you are. Probably from space.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I don't think there's any way to fully -- let alone succinctly -- sum up the completely bonkers nature of this knife. It is an entire gallon of moonshine, a four wheel burnout in a billowing cloud of tire smoke all the way down the street, Hendrix blaring on the stereo unironically, on fire, wearing shades.

You can't carry this knife anywhere because it'd be illegal. You can't hand it to anybody, lest they unavoidably find a way to injure themselves with it. You can't keep it around your desk, because you'll always be playing with it and never get any work done. Its design is so purposeful, and yet it can have no purpose. It's too weird to live, but too rare to die.

It's terrible. It's perfect.

A fixed blade today, and it's not even Friday. Luxury.

This is Böker's PSK, or "Personal Survival Knife." So think of it like a personal pan pizza but, you know, made of steel and different in every possible way.

This diminutive, now discontinued knife is a Tom Krein design and Böker seem to want you to think of it as a fixed blade version of their Krein designed Pocket Bowie. I think it's better described as a smaller version of the Böker Vox Rold, but that's just my take on it. And it would be a funny old world if we were all the same.

The original run of these are made of 12C27, but the later ones got downgraded to 440C. If you find one of these, the 12C27 version is the one you probably want; it's a tougher steel, which for a knife like this is exactly what the doctor ordered. 440C is fine and all, but I think the 12C one is better. Mine seems to be from pretty early on, since its serial number is 0315. I've never been able to nail down exactly when the changeover happened, but by at least serial 0780 they'd already switched steels. So if you've ever wondered why half of all online retailers listed this as one steel and the other half as the other, now you know.

The PSK is a little 6-5/16" long jobbie with a 2-3/4" long drop pointed blade. But it is ridiculously stout for its size, with a blade that's 0.185" thick at the spine or 4.71mm. Böker themselves call it 4.7, so you get a whole 0.01mm more than what you paid for, gratis. Shrinkflation ain't got nothing on this.

The other headline feature is that the handle is a massive 0.786" thick (near as makes no difference to 20mm) so this combined with the thick blade means despite its compact footprint the PSK is, to use the vernacular, not fucking around.

It weighs 159.4 grams in total or 5.62 ounces, so "ephemeral" is precisely the wrong word to describe it. This is not a bantam weight holdout knife destined to spend its entire life unused and quietly rusting under your shirt. Besides, if you tried to use it as a neck knife you'd probably wind up looking like Rubiel Mosquera by the end of the week.

The handle is made of two thick slabs of sculpted G-10 with red fiber/rubber spacers beneath. The PSK presents a pleasantly ergonomic grip that is a far cry from the flat, barely-there perfunctory handle scales or dinky cord wrapping of most compact fixed blade knives. This is especially important if you plan to actually seriously use your knife for an extended period for any serious task. That is, beyond opening packages, cleaning your fingernails, and showing off to your buddies at the camp site. In the tail, the rearmost handle pin is hollow and also serves as a lanyard hole in case you're one of those lanyard people.

The spine contains an interrupted section of very square and precise jimping which is really my only gripe with the PSK's design. Not from an ergonomic sense, but rather because the cuts are so square and closely spaced that they tend to accumulate crap in them, which is a minor league irritation to pick out afterwards.

The PSK has a full flat grind and a relatively shallow factory edge angle, which gives it surprising cutting performance for its size and the thickness of its blade. Thickness is what it's got, too, in abundance. Böker's blurb for this describes its design as "nearly indestructible" and I believe it.

And let's be honest, the 2-1/2" blade length is all most outdoors people actually need -- despite any mumbling they might do to the contrary about bears or mountain lions or whatever else. The reduced length mainly means it is much easier to carry without swinging around all over the place or knocking against everything all the damn fool time. If you need a fucking machete, carry a machete. Otherwise, don't.

To assist with this, it comes with an injection molded sheath patterned very much to look like Kydex, but it isn't. The pictured Tek-Lok clip comes with it in the box, too, which was a nice surprise. Usually if the manufacturer provides a hard sheath they just leave you to your own devices to figure out how to carry it or mount it to anything. But in this case that's probably because the Tek-Lok is basically mandatory. The PSK is very handle heavy -- the balance point is about 3/4 of an inch rearward of the front handle pin -- which is great for ergonomics but means that without a very solid attachment mechanism you'll wind up with your knife wanting to do a backflip off your belt. And that's only funny the first time.

The sheath does not have adjustable tension and its retention is achieved by a pair of round nubs molded into it that go just behind the knife's finger guard. The retention is positive, but only just. It doesn't take much of a tug to draw it which is a mixed blessing depending on how you prefer to carry your knife. If you're one of those cool guys who likes to go handle-down, you might want to revise that strategy with the PSK. Contemporary reviews mentioned the loosey-goosey sheath also, though I have to say that even shaking mine vigorously I can't get it to drop out of the sheath of its own accord. But if you hang it upside down and anything so much as brushes against it while you're pressing through the bush, it'll probably get pulled out and you'll wind up with bruised toes.

And for all you low-drag tactical operators out there, yes, the blade can audibly rattle in the sheath laterally. Give it a rest; You're not Solid Snake. If this really annoys you, you'll have to pry the sheath apart and line it with felt yourself, or something. Or just press your own sheath out of actual Kydex.

Böker is proud enough of their association with Tom Krein that they put his logo right here on the reverse of the blade. The steel descriptor is on that side as well, so if you wind up handling a used one of these remember to look for it there. Pay no attention to the "China" marking in the finger notch. This knife cost $45 when it was new. What do you want?

If you haven't gotten a handle on the PSK's proportions yet, this ought to shed some light on it. (I don't know if you noticed, but that was a "pune," or a play on words.) The PSK is shorter than the Usual Article, my CQC-6K that I carry nearly every day, both in overall length and length of the blade.

The Inevitable Conclusion

History is just littered with knife designs that tried hard to be folders with fixed blade performance. If you ask me, that sort of thing will always be a fool's errand. If you want fixed blade toughness with folder-like convenience, just go on and get yourself one of these instead.

Needless to say, I think the PSK is boss as hell, with only the minor letdown of its factory sheath. That's easy enough to rectify, though, for anyone with access to some foam and a blowdryer. Or failing that, there's room enough to drill your own hole for a tensioning screw on the stock sheath. Swings and roudabouts; nothing is ever perfect.

So I have no idea why Böker discontinued it other than the usual relentless march of capitalism. What a drag.