Made a notch in the handle to make opening the blade easier, burned the handle, and gave the blade an artificial patina with lemon juice. It's an old knife I don't use much - just keep it in my bike backpack - but it's great for carving and food prep thanks to the thin blade.

The image is my current EDC, it is close to 30 years old. I cannot remember where or when I first got it. I do like the knife, but it is 100% right-handed. The image above shows how far I can open it one-handed before I have to place my thumb on the blade to finish opening it.

I am looking for a knife that is 100% left-handed, not ambidextrous. Those knives always have some part, typically the blade lock, that most be made for either left or right and right always wins.

I would like something with the same kind of blade, minus the serrations. I hate sharpening this thing because of them.

The handle is decently thick, I would like to stick with something like that. I have a Ken onion knife that has a really thin handle and I do not like it.

I would like to keep it under $150, but for the left blade that is negotiable.

I'm generally not a knife whore since I basically carry my Sebenza everyday unless there are reasons not to like camping. I picked this up late this winter when I went looking for something with a reasonable blade length that was also light for the more stretchy lighter weight pants I've been wearing.

This is one of the best knives I've ever purchased and have half a mind to pick up another just in case

Edit: Jokes aside, since it is indeed illegal in germany, i will destroy it asap.

---

I dont even know if they are legal where i live...

Tanto Zaan and a Benchmade Grip with AWT Hive scales

Sometimes you buy knives. Sometimes you have knives thrust upon you. But not, preferably, in the coming-from-a-dark-alley sense. So it was with this, which somebody gave to me a while ago and I've been putting off writing about it ever since.

This is the Hot Knives HKO1, which is very much a Chinese knife and thus in the tried and true Chinese tradition is also known as the Hightron Sharplyn, and possibly many other monikers besides. To tell you the truth I was originally just going to put this thing on the knife rack and skip telling you about it entirely, because there is nothing interesting to say about it. Except, as it turns out, there is.

Some say, he has a tattoo of his face... on his face.

All we know is, never before has an ostensibly commodity Chinese product included such a concise depiction of itself on the box. The rear also goes on to state...

...That it is "proudly" made in China. Among the words that have ever been printed in history, these are certainly some of them.

You have already heard my spiel on the general state of Chinese knives many times before. Despite their incredible manufacturing prowess and expertise, by and large it still seems that the only time the Chinese can be bothered to turn out a decent knife is if they're making it for someone else or, increasingly often these days, they're cranking out counterfeits or knockoffs of a stolen design. We're already familiar with the results of when the Chinese try to go it alone in all those wobbly and awful examples festooned with eagles and skulls and pot leaves on display at your friendly local truck stop, flea market, or bong shop. What inroads they could make, I have oft conjectured, if somebody in China could finally see their way clear to manufacturing a bespoke design but, critically, actually doing so with the same care and attention they already apply to ripping others off.

Well, in the case of the Sharplyn insofar as I can tell they have.

Of course you can never leap to conclusions about such a thing so easily. Any time you're handling what you thought was an original Chinese design it's often only because you haven't looked hard enough to discover what the pattern was actually stolen from. And so in what's now becoming tradition around here I went and plumbed the dusty, petrochemical smelling depths of the Internet once again to try to determine the exact origin of this thing and along the way found a few interesting tidbits.

"Hot Knives" appears to be a sub-brand of Hightron knives, the latter of which being a moniker only slightly less unfortunate than the former, because it gives the impression that rather than cutlery these guys ought to be selling cheap transistor radios and southeast Asian VCRs. Hot Knives seems to be the marquee intended for selling budget stuff on platforms like Amazon, which alas mostly just has the net effect of diverting prospective buyers away from their products and into something else entirely, even if you search for it verbatim.

You know how we usually only get those meaningless robotic search optimized word-salad tiles on these sorts of things? This is like the opposite of that. It's a bold strategy, maybe. Let's see if it pays off.

For some reason the Sharplyn is explicitly sold under both the Hightron and Hot Knives brands, with insofar as I can tell no actual difference between them other than how they're marked and, at least in their OD green incarnations, the shade of green being slightly different. They're both listed practically adjacent to each other on Hightron's website, and they're both even the same list price. But the Hightron version specifically is billed from some sellers as "the lite [sic] version of the Dark Feather by NOC Knives." That raised my eyebrow.

...The what from the who, now?

NOC Knives is another company that is very, very Chinese. If you hadn't gathered that from the type of things they sell, their mission statement at the bottom of their home page ought to be a clue:

FOUNDED IN 2017, NOCKNIVES IS A VERY POPULAR KNIFE SUPPLIES COMPANY. The company's mission is to integrate the design concept of "beyond oneself" into the life of every player. NOCKNIVES is mainly engaged in the design, research and development, manufacturing and sales of high-quality tactical folding knives, and has formed a perfect product layout such as the top mass production series S, the high-end mass production series MT, and the entry-level DG series over the years. At the same time, we also provide OEM services to other top brands in the industry.

Beyond oneself. Uh-huh.

Anyway, I can't find any hard evidence that NOC and Hightron are the same entity but it sure makes me suspicious. Several of their knives are rather similar to each other, only being significantly less fancy on the Hightron side. It's likely that Hightron are using NOC as their OEM at minimum, and the Sharplyn is allegedly — if you believe various sellers' blurbs about it at face value, anyway — a direct collaboration between the two having been designed by NOC in the first place. It even uses their homegrown crossbar lock design which they go so far as to name drop it as an "Axis" lock.

I wonder how Benchmade feels these days now that their innovation has been, ahem, finally fully Xeroxed.

NOC, for their part, display an interesting array of screwball models with a strong predilection for what I can only describe as purple cyberpunk regalia. I dig it. Quite a lot of them are also alarmingly expensive, tempting though they may be. We'll leave that for later, possibly after I've been made rich and famous.

Why anyone should care about this, winding our way circuitously all the way back to the Sharplyn, is because at the moment it's rather a good deal... provided if and only if you buy two of them.

At the time of writing the OD green version of the Sharplyn is $37.99 which is only a middling deal for an EDC knife from an unproven brand that doesn't do anything exceptionally novel or strange. But it's also apparently perpetually the subject of one of Amazon's buy two, get them 50% off schemes which means it'll cost you exactly as much for two of them as it'll cost you for one. So you really may as well. At $19 a pop these are well on their way to being an impulse purchase provided you can find a suitable use for the second one.

I'll give you three guesses why I wound up with mine, then.

This has evidently been the case for at least three or four months, because that's how long this thing has been gathering dust on my shelf and that was the deal back then, too. None of that is the real headline about the Sharplyn, though.

The lede I've buried is that it's got a blade made of Sandvik 14C28N, which is a rather good steel for the price. For this kind of money that very easily could have been pokey old 420-something, or 5cr or even 3cr, or AUS-6, or insert-the-name-of-your-least-favorite-steel here. And it isn't, which is very nearly astonishing. (It would be, if it weren't also for the existence of things like this.) Among all of the various other ghastly options we could have received, 14C28N is one of the steels specifically formulated to be used for knives, and also holds the distinction of being Larrin Thomas' self-professed favorite budget knife steel. Already this is shaping up to be a winner.

It's also got ceramic ball bearing pivots which you'll see in a moment, the aforementioned Axis-alike lock, and possesses a curiously good build quality. All of this also comes with only minimal obligatory Chinese design deficiencies attached.

This is, then, something that ought to give a lot of traditional knife makers some pause.

The crossbar or Axis lock is of course unmissable. The Sharplyn also has a pivot screw with a stylish driverless head on one side.

The back reveals the only major concession to ineptitude, which is the lack of reversibility on the deep carry pocket clip. Myself, I share the one thing in common with what everyone knows about Inigo Montoya so I don't particularly care. If you're a southpaw, however, you will. Everything else about the Sharplyn is ambidextrous including the thumb studs and of course the lock. Just, as usual we're two screw holes short of nirvana.

Two things stand out about the Sharplyn on the performance side. It's not that it's particularly thin'n'light overall, even though Hightron make a bunch of noise about how it ought to be. It's 80.4 grams or 2.84 ounces, constructed largely of G-10 and in a typically Benchmade-eque tradition lacking full length liners. It's curiously exactly 7/16" of an inch in thickness across the scales, or 11.12mm, not including the clip or any of the screw heads or anything. The upswept triangular blade is 3-5/8" or 92.08mm long and the sharp part measures up at 3-3/8" or 87.73mm.

None of that is particularly interesting. The blade's geometry is, though, starting with it being a very thin 1.6mm thick at the spine or about 1/16", and tapering down with a true full flat grind to an unexpectedly sharp cutting edge that certainly helps the thing live up to its name. It's very reminiscent of the thought process behind quite a few Spyderco models in that regard, only at a small fraction of the price. The spine is also pleasingly rounded off, but they took the time to integrate a thickened portion up near the tip for reinforcement.

We haven't seen our good friend the sharpness cutting force chart in a while, but here it is. As usual the gold line is my hand sharpened Benchmade Bugout, which serves as a decent enough control as any. The green line is the grams-force sharpness data from the Sharplyn's factory edge, which glides through paper even more effortlessly. Doubtless this is in some part due to the slender flat ground blade geometry, which provides excellent cutting ability with the tradeoff that you probably oughn't to twist the blade too much nor try to chop at any excessively sturdy objects with it.

A bushcraft knife this is not, but for the types of package opening, box flattening, rope cutting, fruit slicing tasks you're more likely to find outside of the woods it's going to be a stellar contender.

The second thing is the somewhat unique way in which the Sharplyn's edge hangs down below the lowermost edge of the handle noticeably. If you use just the right grip, this allows you to get the full length of the edge onto a flat surface like this fancy cutting board, here. That sounds humdrum, but it's actually a remarkably rare property and a difficult thing to do with the majority of pocketknives, which you'll probably find if you take out the one you've got in your pocket right now and try it.

All of this might just make the Sharplyn one of the better options for a field food prep knife if it weren't for that giant thumb hole in it, which turns out to be superfluous anyway because it's also got dual thumb studs right behind it.

The Sharplyn looks like it started off with your typical factory-ground edge, but close examination reveals that it seems to have been polished on top of this somehow right down at the very apex, which might explain why it's so damn sharp out of the box.

The edge is, alas, out of true noticeably in keeping with its ultra budget price point. 14C28N isn't terribly difficult to sharpen so this shouldn't be hard to fix, when the time comes. But fix it you shall, at least if you ever want to regain its original scalpel-like sharpness.

I also really could have done without the blade being black PVD coated. 14C28N also ought to be more than corrosion-proof enough for most people, as even Hightron themselves mention in their various blurbs. So it's undoubtedly there to hide the cheapness of the polishing job on the flat underneath rather than for any protective purpose. It'll inevitably get scuffed and gouged and get dirt ground into it over time and, as usual, all of that will be categorically impossible to repair or polish out. So cherish yours as it comes out of the box because that's as pretty as it'll ever be.

The Sharplyn's machined G-10 scales are quite nice, though. They're thick enough to provide plenty of rigidity for everyday use, and are attractive, grippy, and all the other adjectives us reviewers are supposed to use. The shape certainly doesn't do anything ergonomically special and everything's a bit angular, which if we're feeling unusually charitable we might say gives it a bit of a 1980s future punk sort of vibe. There's a finger notch there wide enough to get two fingers into, and really the only major wart on it is the rather dopey Hot Knives marquee carved into the side opposite the clip. If I were going to be completely cynical I might conjecture that the reason the clip isn't reversible is only because it would then cover the logo, and the manufacturer certainly couldn't have that, could they?

If you spring for the Hightron rather than the Hot Knives branded version this is absent and instead the logo is silkscreened onto the clip itself. It's still not reversible on that one, though. So there goes that theory.

The clip is not especially wide or fancy or even shiny, but it does have the right amount of retention and snap and it allows the Sharplyn to come off of your pocket cleanly and easily. Its mounted down far enough that about 3/8" of the tail of the knife is left sticking out from your pocket, either ruining your concealment or providing you something to grab depending on how you want to look at it. There is no lanyard hole. The mounting end of the clip isn't recessed, either, but the metal is thin enough that it doesn't seem to cause any hangup issues. The screws, at least, are countersunk and flush fitting with the clip.

Of all the nitpicks you could fault this thing for, the action is not one of them. Of wiggles, rattles, and creaks there are none. The Sharplyn is ceramic bearing equipped and glides open effortlessly, veritably leaping up as if you've just insulted its mother on a daytime talk show. This is regardless of whether you hold the Axis lock back and flip it, or just open with the thumb studs like a normal person.

You can just about see the ball bearings peeking out at you if you look down at the pivot from the end. These are the real deal, in brass carriers and recesses cut out for them and everything.

Inside there are a few things that will appeal to very select types of nerds which are... odd.

The Sharplyn's Axis/crossbar lock, for instance, is a three piece design which doesn't screw together but rather consists of a center bar that just sits in there loose and is retained by a shoulder in the hole of each of the nubbins on the sides. The springs hook up to said nubbins and not the crossbar itself.

There aren't liner plates for the Axis lock per se, but instead this assembly which I think can only be described as a cartridge. It puts one in mind of, say, one of those fancypants drop in trigger assemblies for an AR-15 or something.

The endstop pin is a very tight friction fit which, despite not being shouldered in any way, resolutely holds the entire assembly together such that you can just leave half of it hovering in midair like this. You can swivel it around on the pin and it stays there. I question the wisdom of trying to take it apart further, because it might be a hassle to get it back together again. Because I'm chicken I didn't try.

All of the screws came out of mine without incident save for two, which were two of the ones that go through the scales into the backspacer and thankfully both of them were on the same side. So I was still able to get the thing apart, but beware. The main pivot screw is very nice, but also curiously lacks an anti-rotation flat despite there being no driver head in the opposite side. Surprisingly it was not so gunked with threadlocker that nuclear weapons were required to undo it.

So the build quality is actually very good for what is at the end of the day a sub-$20 knife. There are a few quirks and foibles, but no showstoppers. And that's rare.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Axis lock with bearings inside

Sandvik blade, performance implied

Two for one with discounts applied

Hot knives on the loose

Hot knives on the loose

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/379789

You know, sometimes I think I might just know exactly how knife designers feel. Like, the pressure to complete something that not only has to be novel and entertaining, but also functional and appealing. Where I have the advantage, of course, is that whatever bullshit I come up with doesn't exactly have to be marketable. And as the designer of not one but four whole knives, I also get to come over all smug about it as if I'm not just talking out my ass all the time. (Well, okay, maybe more like three and a half.)

Do knife designers ever get the equivalent of writer's block? I'll bet you Tom Hitchcock doesn't.

No, not the footballer. The guy who designed this:

This here is the CRKT Daktyl and it is, without a doubt, slightly bonkers.

I imagine that's because with the best will in the world, by now pocket knives are kind of a solved problem. Just like wristwatches and handguns, we've achieved kind of a core competency in figuring out how such a thing ought to work. Thus in order to anything novel in the field a designer's major recourse is often to fall back on, well, doing it slightly wrong.

Uh, yeah. Kind of like that.

The Daktyl is thus another entry in the series of transverse folders that pivot the wrong way. I'm not sure what it says about the field as a whole that this is apparently a genre that exists now, nor what it says about me that I've now amassed three of the fucking things in various flavors.

At first I was prepared to dismiss the Daktyl as just another piece of hipster bohème nonsense that exists only for the sake of novelty, write something hyperbolic and sardonic about it, and move on. But in this case we really shouldn't do that, not least because Mr. Hitchcock maintains a sparse but fascinating website, and through it we can catch a glimpse of the design process of this knife which is a unique opportunity we don't have the luxury to enjoy with your typical faceless piece of off-the-wall novelty garbage.

Because garbage is what this isn't.

It turns out, for instance, that one prototype of this design incorporated a fully formed iteration of its mechanism in a frame that holds a standard utility knife blade. I've casually stolen a picture of this from Tom's web site and rehosted it here, just in case some day this jewel is lost from the internet forever. So it turns out that great minds think alike; damn if it doesn't feel good to vindicated sometimes. And Tom's a real professional designer of stuff with a career and everything. Much unlike myself, who's just some jackass on the internet. If we're not careful, I'll rub some of his credibility off.

This design seems to have progressed into the Hole In One which got built by CRKT and is now discontinued, thus mocking me forever and becoming yet another of my saved eBay searches, languishing in the vain hope of ever scoring a non-fucked example to complete my perpetual quest to amass a pile of all the damn silly knives I'm never going to use.

The Daktyl is more recent and, importantly, readily available. And cheap, too: Just $45 right now. So for not much outlay you too can be a proud owner of a funky knife with a big ninja finger hole in it and...

Design with a Capital "D"

CRKT's blurb about the Daktyl specifically calls out the "Slide Lock" mechanism, which if you ask me rather buries the lede on how this thing works.

Undoubtedly they're referring to this prominent crenelated dingus on the heel of it which, yes, does indeed slide back and forth. This comprises the sum total of the controls on this knife, and until you slide it outwards it locks the knife totally solid and no amount of mashing it up or down will release the blade. You'll have the devil of a time figuring this out, too, because the cursory instructions leaflet packaged with the thing doesn't explain the slightest bit about how the hell this is supposed to work.

It's not until you work it into this position that the Daktyl will give up the goods. With the thingamadoo correctly positioned, you can press down on it which cams against the springy loop of steel that forms the Daktyl's handle and spreads it apart just enough to release the blade and allow it to swing out sideways. Left or right, it's your choice; if nothing else the Daktyl is thoroughly ambidextrous.

This whole thing puts one rather in mind of the CRKT Van Hoy Snap-Lock, which we very briefly inspected going on for two years ago and holds the distinction of being only the fifth knife I've ever showcased in column. In fact, at a time when I hadn't even made this a column yet and was still taking janky photographs of things on my grubby mousepad with my phone. For fuck's sake, have I been doing this for that long? (Maybe some day we'll revisit that one in some better light.)

Anyway, the Daktyl is a little more confidence inspiring in the hand probably thanks to its generous index finger rest, plus that big old hole right around the pivot. It's also possible with a bit of practice, and if you hold the thing precisely right, to snap it open one handed in such a way that your index finger naturally falls into the ring.

This is immensely satisfying to get right.

And all this works. The Daktyl is impeccably machined such that the blade locks home in both positions perfectly, with nary a wiggle or rattle. Despite a key aspect of its operation relying wholly on the noodle quotient of its handle, it feels remarkably solid. Your grip on it naturally puts one finger through the hole, and the sideways action means that even if you manage to make this fold up on you somehow it won't be the sharp edge you wind up in contact with. If you need even more piece of mind — a concept that every brand loves to sell but nobody can quite seem to point to on the parts diagram — you can slide the lever into its locked position when the knife is open as well as closed, rendering the blade totally immobile.

Unlike the Snap-Lock, the Daktyl's svelte profile completely lacks any kind of clip and there isn't really even anywhere on it to put a lanyard. So you'd think the Daktyl doesn't give you any assistance towards actually carrying it.

But you see, that's where you're wrong. Because there's a carbiner gate built into the finger hole. Its spring motive is also provided by the handles and thus it can eschew the need for any type of tiny fiddly spring. This is clever, but in accordance with the ancient rites of inevitability there is also a notch in the nose of it designed to allow you to use it as a bottle opener, which serves to make it altogether too clever by half.

You can also use this to dangle the knife off of stuff. CRKT suggest that you ought to do this with a belt loop, where it will be plainly visible to all passers by and ought to be a sure fire panty-dropper in any social situation. Virtually guaranteed to not make you look like a colossal nerd in any capacity whatsoever.

The Daktyl has a highly ventilated design. If we were arteurs we would claim it has "a minimalistic aesthetic providing positive reinforcement of form via the exploration of negative spaces, with an implication of a unified whole in silhouette." But we aren't, so we won't.

But there was a time when getting your hands on a skeletonized Spyderco or CRKT was the height of cutlery chic, so here is at least your golden opportunity to reclaim those glory days. Or, more likely, actually get around to achieving them in the first place if you're anything like me.

All This Whiffling And I Still Haven't Talked About The Specs

The Daktyl is precisely 6-11/16" long open, and 4-3/8" closed provided you slide the manipulatory hoojadinger into its locked position. The blade is 3-1/4" long if you measure from the tip to the pivot axis, but the sharp part of it is only 2" long thanks to a significant portion of it being forward of the wasplike narrow waist. Thus it's a matter of interpretation as to whether or not this counts as above or below the mystical 3" figure. Either way, just looking at the thing it's unlikely the law will be able to label you a domestic terrorist for owning one of these and still be taken seriously afterwards.

The blade is a Wharncliffe profile, fully flat ground, and has three jelly bean voids machined into it. There's also a perfunctory round hole which appears to be a holdover from the Hole In One Design. The shape of the cutouts in the blade are the primary differentiators, but there may be other differences. Hell if I know, due to not owning one of the latter.

Despite being constructed entirely of steel of one flavor or another, the Daktyl isn't too heavy owing to a lot of it being just air. Just 67.4 grams or 2.38 ounces, which would make it a much more appealing EDC candidate if only its carry method weren't so damn silly. Even so it's a nice size, and if you can figure out a way to work it into your wardrobe without looking like a dweeb or, preferably, if nobody in your workplace cares this could make a nice light duty EDC piece.

The blade is made of 420J2 which has, let's just say, a high degree of sharpenability. Hey, they make surgical implements out of the stuff, right?

Edge retention notwithstanding, light duty is what the Daktyl is likely to see. What with those holes in the blade it's not bound to do anything but slowly drive you insane if you tried to use it for camp food prep. And thanks to the same it's probably unwise to apply much twisting, prying, or impact force to the blade. Which is a shame because it has an excellent factory grind and a slight upsweep to the edge with a gentle curve that'd otherwise make it highly usable.

The finish is bead blasted all over with a pleasing satiny vibe. This extends to the expertly machined and jimped lock lever, the carbiner gate, and even the cross pins.

The Daktyl's all riveted together and contains no screws, so I didn't brave taking it apart. It seems to consist of a sum total of only four parts, though, not including the pins. So it's not too tough to imagine how it goes together, nor grok how it works just by looking at it from the outside. It's elegant, I'll give it that.

Tom Hitchcock's designer's mark is laser engraved in one side, lest you forget that in your hands you hold an objet d'art from none other than the inventor of Bottle Blocks.

On the reverse is CRKT's logo, an ever-present reminder that sometimes your pure vision runs into the mundane tedium of having to enlist somebody to actually make it. And so it goes.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Did not Nietzsche say, "We have art in order not to die of the truth?"

Do I not say, if I got any more pretentious or used any more gratuitous French in this column I'd have to disembowel myself with a spoon?

The truth is, regardless of whatever else we should celebrate the path the Daktyl took from one designer's vision to a physical thing we can hold and appreciate. While we're quoting, I love the frank assessment on the mechanical design on Tom Hitchcock's web site, which is thus: "I began looking at the trend to knives with finger holes, and I also saw an interesting side-opener. I thought that I could integrate the two ideas, and make a much safer, friendlier utility knife in the process. But it wasn’t as simple or easy as I first thought."

I've been there, Tom.

So I can already hear it:

"Production Rockhopper when, Dorkus?"

I have a couple old pocket knives that belonged to my grandfather. I've looked at a lot of information about removing rust, polishing, etc. I used a gun cleaning solvent with wet/dry sandpaper to take off the heavy rust and brass wire brushes. I have polishing cloths and metal polish. I got them looking a lot better, but there is some damage to the metal itself on the oldest knife. It looks dimpled. Is there anything that can be done to help with the damage short of machinery to refinish the blade or something? I'm pretty new/inexperienced so I'm open to suggestions as long as it doesn't require buying expensive tools. The knife that is the worst was from my grandfather's tackle box so it was used hard.

You know, sometimes I almost miss the pre-Internet days. Or at least the early Internet era. Back then, the junk purveyors were all on late night television instead. In those pre-dawn hours, if you wanted to get your hands on the truly godawful and macabre you had to call the 1-800 number now, where operators were standing by, ready for your credit card and one easy payment. All of that took effort. Dedication, even. You had to be up at that hour, for a start, and even then you'd have to peel yourself out of your chair.

Nowadays it's just too easy. And some of us have a reputation to uphold and a show to keep going. So you scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and then you wind up with crap like this.

This is the NSOUR "Stainless Steel."

I'm serious. Its model designation is literally "Stainless Steel."

Or be precise, it's the "NSOUR New Stainless Steel Sharp Outdoor Camping Handle, Portable Meat Handle, Unboxing Fruit Knife for Self-defense."

I will let the record state that I am leaving the Portable Meat Handle completely unaddressed. At least this time they managed to get all the letters into "self-defense," and even in the right order. And NSOUR sounds like it ought to be the name of a Chinese knockoff boy band.

If a cigar cutter got drunk and fucked an out-the-front switchblade, the resulting crack baby would undoubtedly be this.

It's tough to miss the NSOUR's most prominent feature, which in fact isn't its silly name, but rather is this tantalizing trigger mechanism behind the big hole in the blade. At first blush it appears that sticking your finger in here ought to be an express ticket to amputation, but no part of the circular cutout is sharp nor contacts the edge in any way. This is a slide opening knife — not a side opening knife — and here's what that looks like:

The action is slightly gritty and drags noticeably. But it is not spring loaded and thus very emphatically, definitely and clearly, and by all legal precedent is absolutely not a switchblade. It just wishes it were.

The NSOUR weighs 57.8 grams or 2.04 ounces and is constructed entirely of steel of some description, most likely stainless per its blurb but with these things you can never really take anything at its face value. And it's not quite as compact as you'd think. It's nearly exactly 4" long when closed, call it 3-15/16". But thanks to a good chunk of its length being taken up by the finger hole the blade itself is actually a comically stubby 1-7/8". Open, then, it's 5-5/8" long overall. The heel of the blade ends in a short ricasso and somehow this knife manages to be the only one I think I've ever handled that actually has more length of sharpened edge than is actually presented to the user. Even with the blade fully extended there's about 1/8" of edge that doesn't come out far enough to ever actually make any contact with the outside world, instead preferring to hide in between the handle plates.

I guess that bit will never get dull, at least.

Because this sort of thing is contractually obligated to contain one on it somewhere, the front of it also serves as a bottle opener. Let it not be said that every part of this is useless, then. (And at this rate my collection of dumb bottle openers is nearly as large as my collection of dumb knives. Many of them are, in fact, one and the same.)

The NSOUR is nearly completely flat, made up of just two shiny polished handle plates made of sheet steel (also presumably stainless, or at least one would hope) separated by a springy backspacer. Only the screw heads protrude past this. Without them it's 0.217" thick. The designers probably could have countersunk the screw heads and made this much slicker, but they didn't. So with them, the total thickness is 0.304". That's still not much.

There's no clip. However, you do get a triangular lanyard/keyring cutout in the tail and a cheap split ring was included in the baggie with mine. For the paltry $10.25 this costs, perish the thought of actually getting a box. That's not how it works.

What It Do

Rather, here's how it works.

Opening this with one hand isn't quite impossible, but it's harder than you'd think. The blade doesn't lock in the retracted position, thankfully, because with only that trigger to work with unlocking it would probably take three hands. It simply detents there, but it does so just exactly too firmly to be convenient. The track the blade slides in isn't polished in the slightest, and despite the typical Chinese predilection to douse everything in petrochemical-smelling grease my example showed up entirely unlubricated. Matters improved a little bit once I dripped some machine oil in the track, but not much. Fidgeting with the thing a whole bunch helped, too. Even so, the amount you have to scooch the blade forward to get it locked open is too far to do in a single operation with one hand. You have to play this little game of push, scoot, push, scoot, regrip, and repeat which is not only inelegant but also makes to feel kind of like a twerp. Like you're doing it wrong. Every time you think if you choke up on it a little further, really reach for it, and contort your fingers like a sleight-of-hand magician, this time you'll get it in one smooth movement. And you can't. Not now, not ever. That's just how it is.

I think perhaps it would be best to ignore the purported self-defense application of this knife. I don't know about the fruit or the meat handling, either.

It might be better if there were some manner of grip greebles on the edges of it. But there aren't, and every face is polished smooth.

On the bright side, I thought for sure this would also be a self dulling knife with the edge raking across the bottom of the track every time you opened it. Surprisingly, it isn't and it doesn't, at least if you open it the usual way. Trust me, I'm just as shocked as you are. You can knock the edge into the bottom track if you deploy it halfway and deliberately push it down, but thanks to the spring action built into it, it won't want to stay there and it helpfully cams itself back up into a position where it won't damage itself. If you value what little edge this has from the factory, don't do that.

As a consolation prize, the frame totally does scratch up the mirror polished faces on the flat of the blade every time you open and close it. What, you didn't think we'd manage to skate by so easily without some crucial aspect of the mechanism being fucked up in such a way to perfectly annoy you, did you?

The trigger does indeed lock the blade in the open position. The lockup's not very solid and there's a great deal of rattle left in the blade in every direction you can think of even when it's ostensibly locked. But it won't close up on you until you deliberately pull the trigger back, which both unlocks it and retracts the blade back into the handle as you'd hope and expect. This brings your index finger with it so it's actually damn difficult to cut yourself with this even if you do accidentally cause it to fold up unexpectedly. So that's nice.

Obviously there's no real forward finger guard, but if you hold this the way it appears you're supposed to you'll have your index finger through the hole, which ought to do a good job of preventing your grip from sliding up onto the edge no matter how much of a muppet you are.

Since there's no externally visible mechanism on this thing whatsoever you're probably wondering, as was I, just how the hell it works. Well...

One. Moment. Please.

The NSOUR's external construction is superficially very simple, with just four Chicago screws in the corners holding it together. They're threadlockered and obviously they don't contain any anti-rotation flats, so getting the plates apart requires sticking a T6 driver in both sides and giving a hearty twist. Preferably without slipping out and stripping the screw heads, or stabbing yourself with your own screwdrivers.

Inside you can see the NSOUR's secrets, which are simultaneously brutally crude and ingeniously clever. It's just all dichotomous like that.

Which side you get off doesn't matter. Most of its mechanism is not only contained in, but also comprised of the backspacer. A selection of prongs carved into the spacer serve as both the detent and lock-open springs. A tiny ramp and notch carved into the top of the blade engage with these.

When the blade is retracted there's a pair of prongs that are just mashed against it and prevents the thing from just falling open in your pocket. It's not great but it works, in a broad sense. It's certainly better than nothing, and all this is what prevents the NSOUR from just being a gravity knife. I believe the lower one is also meant to assist in preventing the edge from riding against the lower surface of the spacer. There's a notch on the lower heel of the blade that I think is supposed to make the closed lockup a little more positive and less squidgy, but it doesn't quite accomplish that. Just by looking at it I have to figure that the assembly of one of these requires a fair amount of hand finishing and tuning with a file or more likely a tiny grinder. Expecting whoever-it-is to nail it perfectly every time is probably a reach. In my case they certainly didn't.

Out on the business end, another prong serves as an endstop and one more just barely falls into the notch on the back of the blade once you push it to its fully extended position, acting as a one way gate and preventing it from backing up. The trigger is very lightly spring loaded and pivots on its top screw, camming upwards when you pull it back to minutely push the locking prong out of the way so you can retract the blade.

The trigger itself is the most complicated part of the entire assembly. It's made of two plates held together with yet more Chicago screws, with a pin pressed into one of them. There's a hair-thin torsion spring around the lower screw which pokes into the little hole you see there and goes off "ping!" as soon as you take it apart. I couldn't get it to stay in place without putting the top plate back on, so I left it out for this shot. The interface with the prongs is a tiny lobe made out of what I presume is hardened steel, which is clearly the only precision machined part in the whole damn knife and rests in a dovetail notch on top of the blade.

Here are all the trigger components separated out, including the spring:

Reassembling the stupid tiny spring is exactly as annoying as you'd expect. The long arm of it doesn't go anywhere in particular and just rests against the back of the hole in the blade. Keen readers will have already spotted it in some of the other photos, but in the exceedingly unlikely event that you also own an NSOUR knife and have also unwisely it apart for some reason, here is where the other end of the spring is supposed to go when you finagle it back together:

And, the full spread of parts:

The left and right handle plates are identical, and you can swap them from one side to the other if you like. They're even polished on both sides.

All the internal bits, such as they are, in action:

It's always deeply satisfying once you get one of these weird knives apart and understand how its screwball action works. In some small part it represents a triumph over whichever dickhead designed it. It's even better when you can get the fucking thing back together without losing any parts, and it even still works. I'm happy to say I won this round, for whatever it's worth.

This knife's action is novel, but also really a stupid way to go about it. It's inevitable, though. The longer any mechanism exists, the closer the probability of some turkey trying to use it in a knife gets to 1:1.

And speaking of inevitable...

The Inevitable Conclusion

I have a friend who is an engineer. No, really. I do. For many years, he's told me he's kicked around the idea of writing a book. He wants to call it, "Why We Don't Do It This Way." I think I might have just found him a new chapter.

History is littered with dumb ideas that never caught on. How fortunate we are, perhaps, to have this opportunity to witness one of them unfolding right in front of us in real time. But the truth is, if nobody actually gave it a shot we would never discover what the next big thing might turn out to be.

Whatever that is, though, it probably isn't this.

It's easy to declare it's all been said already, everything's been done before, and there's nothing new under the sun. I don't think that's so, myself. But that doesn't mean that the next radical idea won't be a bloody stupid one.

With a name like "Chong Ming," you just know you're in for a good time.

We've touched on this sort of thing before, at this rate over a year ago. Yes, we've been at it with this nonsense for that long.

Anyway, as Darth Vader once said: Spinning's a good trick.

This is the Chong Ming CM78, and with it welcome to the current state of the art of the Chinese knockoff fidget spinner knife. I've scrolled by and passed up many of these over the last several months, but there was something about this one that I couldn't resist. I mean, just look at it.

That is some serious filigree. The CM78's vibe could probably best be described as, "overwrought." The fleur-de-lis styling even extends all the way down the blade.

For $13, you get 6-1/8" of ~~top quality~~ Chinese spring assisted stiletto-ish liner locking folding knife with a blade made of, er. Some manner of metal, surely.

Its product description goes on to propose that its intended purpose is "hunting," and describes its theme as... "sport?" But then, it also claims that it includes a pocket clip. Which it categorically does not. You really just can't believe everything you read these days.

As you can see, it's also sold as the "Ziekeer ZD00" and probably a myriad of other ridiculous and inscrutable monikers. If you see any of these anywhere you can rest assured that they're all probably the same.

But this one even bears an honest to goodness model descriptor, laser etched into its little aluminum backspacer. That's miles beyond how far we usually get with this sort of thing.

It's also singularly irritating to take a clean picture of when it's lying on a flat surface, because, well...

Yeah. That.

(If you'd like an infinitely looped version of the above, by the way, see here. You're welcome.)

The CM78 actually works as a fidget spinner, but not as well as you'd hope. It does have one thing going for it there, though: It's only 3-1/2" long closed, about half an inch shorter than our old spinner knife, which makes it significantly easier to use as such without whacking it against the web of your hand all the time. That means you don't need to have hands like a catcher's mitt to use it. With only thin steel liners and handle scales made of aluminum it's quite a bit less hefty, though. 73.5 grams by my scale, or 2.6 ounces. So it doesn't carry as much momentum as perhaps it could, which puts it in the curious position of being possibly the only object on Earth that could have been made better if more of it were constructed of some kind of potmetal. Its mass is also pretty evenly distributed throughout its length which is fine for a normal knife but not so much for something that's meant to be a fidget spinner. So the net result of all this is that it doesn't carry on spinning as easily or as long as you might like.

For comparison, my bog standard metal fidgeter I bought at the mall gods only know how long ago is 86.2 grams or 3.04 ounces, despite having a footprint of only around 2/3 of the size, and is correctly designed with the majority of its mass concentrated out at the tips of its arms. Despite both that and this being equipped with ball bearings, the former can easily remain spinning upwards of two minutes at a stretch while exhibiting a pleasing gyroscopic effect, whereas the CM78 runs out of steam after around eight seconds, even if you give it an unwisely vigorous flick to start it going.

Bummer.

The knife part is a downgrade from previous incarnations, as well. It has a good lockup, but a noticeable amount of wiggle in the pivot when it's open. The pivot washers are just plastic, not brass and alas not ball bearings, either. So it loses out there compared to our last foray, as well.

The blade triangular, ventillated, and short. Just 2-5/8" long and trying hard to look double edged, even though it isn't. I do like that it's spring assisted, though, because the assist mechanism also serves to hold the blade shut when it's at rest. It takes a concerted effort to get it over the hump and fire it off, which also serves to provide you a little peace of mind that the blade won't just spontaneously fling itself out when you've got the thing spinning away just half an inch from the palm of your hand.

...Probably.

It's totally symmetrical with one of the crossguard nubs serving as a kicker to push the blade open, whereas the other one resolutely doesn't. There's no real tactile indicator as to which side is which, and the spine of the blade doesn't even protrude past one side of the handle to give you a hint. Thus, opening this without looking at it carefully requires some trial and error, or an element of luck. A self-defense tool it is not.

The vaguely crucifix shaped profile is generally reminiscent of several other less ridiculous knives I can think of off the top of my head. Or, at least, ones that are ridiculous for different reasons. It's very Knights Templar, and the eagle-and-shaved-head crowd also tend to get all excited about things shaped like this for some reason. As you'd expect, it's not too tough to find a "Masonic" rendition of these, either. For "ceremonial" purposes, per the blurb.

The Chong Ming Branded version has this rather more tasteful logo on its injection molded neon green pair of center buttons instead, with an (R) registered trademark symbol and everything. I was certain at first that this had to be fake, just one of those nod's-as-good-as-a-wink japes we've come to expect from the Chinese to add a layer of superficial yet fictitious legitimacy to the proceedings. But blow me down, I was able to find a bonna fide US trademark registration for the "Yangjiang Guanfeng Industry and Trade Co., Ltd," who are the apparent force behind this thing. There's the C and sideways M marking listed right there, bold as brass, exactly as it appears (incessantly...) on the CM78's box. Go figure.

These guys have zero presence on the web other than their trademark registration, which makes you wonder if they're a front for somebody else. There's also the tantalizingly hilarious prospect that some other anonymous joker in China counterfeited the trademark of this shitty knife company and slapped it on a different shitty knife, for purposes completely unknown. There are a myriad of "Chong Ming" branded low end knives of various flavors all over the usual Chinese storefronts, so either these guys are a shadowy OEM of cheap novelty cutlery, or somebody's rebranding and reselling white box goods from elsewhere on the mainland under this name. We'll probably never find out for sure.

Anyway, you're probably just chomping at the bit to see me smash this to pieces and see what all's inside, so here you go.

First up, the fidget spinner portion of this totally does ride on ball bearings. They're press fit into the scales and recalcitrant to come out, so lest I break the thing I left them alone. One side also houses the zigzaggy spring that powers the assist mechanism, which rests in a pocket hogged out in one of the scales and seems to be a common way to go about it. It is, of course, absolutely slathered in Chinese axle grease.

Inside is nothing much surprising. The only odd thing is the driver sizes for the various screws. The pivot is a T8 screw head but for some reason the rest of the assembly screws are T7, which you almost never see. Otherwise there are no fancy construction tricks. There's no anti-rotation flat on the pivot screw, for instance, so you have to stick a driver in both sides simultaneously. Nothing I found was threadlockered, but at least nothing was stripped, either. Bor-ing.

The fidget spinner buttons are held on with little wood screws that are just reamed into the plastic. The back faces of the buttons aren't flat so they don't quite sit on there straight, which gives the net effect of making the knife exhibit a noticeable wiggle when you're spinning it. I cured this by giving both of them a short lash on one of my diamond sharpening stones. This may be putting pearls before swine but it did at least straighten the damn thing out.

Here's your shocker of the day. The edge actually isn't completely terrible out of the box. The grind out to the point is pretty good and it's acceptably sharp for a dime store novelty. This'd make a serviceable letter opener or, more realistically, bong bowl scraper. I've seen worse.

It's out of true, though. Imagine how disappointed we'd be in the state of the world if it weren't.

While we've got the microscope out, here's something interesting. Despite ostensibly being just black and white, the pattern printed on the handles and blade is actually in color. Check it out:

The red and blue dots are not an optical illusion, as superfluous as they may be. I imagine whatever they're using to print these is also capable of producing full color output and whenever they're not cranking out these is probably used to make containerloads of all those other horrid Joker/Trump/Skullybones/Pot Leaf/Camo/Anime Tiddies/etc. patterned knives you'll find festooning the plexiglass case in your local truck stop. And I'll bet you whoever is in charge of the graphic design is not paid enough to apply a lot of care or attention to what they're doing, so we wound up with these little color fringes. They're only really visible under magnification.

The gold bits are even printed with some kind of metallized ink. The overall effect is pretty damn swanky, but I'll bet you it won't hold up to wear very well.

The texture appears to be a bitmap graphic that's been stretched in a manner that included some kind of fuzzy interpolation, probably because the Chinese tend to treat image aspect ratios as a bourgeoisie Western plot, so when viewed very up close it appears a bit blurry and indistinct.

The Inevitable Conclusion

From arm's length, at least, the CM78 is a slick looking little number for sure.

It's just too bad for it these days that it's so far behind the times. 10 years ago, sure, it'd probably be a sterling recommendation for $13. Instead with this we seem to be regressing rather than progressing; the Wish fidget spinner knife I showed off previously was built better than this, and it was cheaper to boot. Nowadays $13 (or less!) can buy you a lot of knife if you're careful with your choices and don't just jump on the first shiny novelty you see.

But that's not how we do things around here.

Good is boring. Sometimes you can have more fun being dumb.

Scissors?

Scissors?

You thought this was a knife show and now I'm telling you I made you wait an entire week with no update and I'm showing you scissors?

You're damn skippy I am. Just wait until you get a load of this thing. These? These things.

Look, these are the "C5 Dismantling Chicken Bone Scissors." They're straight from China. The gods alone know who the hell the actual manufacturer is, but you can find similar things all over the Chinese market because apparently people over there are very keen on being able to dejoint chicken parts. I suspect, but can't prove, that the Chinese are probably the largest bloc of poultry consumers on the planet. This is Serious Business, so every pair of shears you see for sale from the Mainland makes a big deal about being able to cut up chicken bones.

But these aren't quite just like every other pair of random Chinese scissors.

Because you can break them apart into a bottle-opening-fish-scaly thing and...

...Yes, a knife.

"Big deal," you say. "My Faberware kitchen shears from Target come apart, too. That doesn't make 'em a knife."

Well, that's true for your common-or-garden loppers. One thing people don't realize until they try to use one as a letter opener is that your typical pair of shears has an edge on it that's not exactly sharp, per se, in the sense you're expecting. Scissors cut by way of having edges that are extremely square, usually shaped with a very steep angle in the order of 75 or 80 degrees. But you need two of those to tango — Without both halves coming together you're not cutting diddly squat.

So, uh, yeah. That's not how it works here.

One half of these shears has an honest to goodness knife edge ground onto it that's got an apex on it of exactly 30 degrees. I know this figure because that edge is so wide I'm actually able to firmly stick my Harbor Freight magnetic angle gauge doohickey to it, which is a feat you can't manage on most other cutlery.

It has a flat ground taper, too, albeit one that's extremely roughly machined. As is the edge.

Verily, it is capable of chopping things all on its lonesome without the aid of its other half. Although to be fair, this is far from a surgical slicer. Perish the thought of shaving tomatoes into paper-thin wafers. You're not shaving with this, either, at least without a significant effort in honing it. It's more for whacking indelicate foodstuffs into rough chunks. Or possibly chopping down a tree, in a pinch. It didn't quite make it cleanly through this Post-It, for instance, but it made a pretty respectable attempt nevertheless.

The blade is of course chisel ground by necessity, since its reverse side has to meet up squarely with the scissor edge on the other half, which has the typical 80-or-so degree steep and square angle on it. If you manage to ding up the knife edge this is also likely to adversely impact the scissoring performance dramatically, so try not to do that. The back side is dead flat, and you'll want to keep it that way as much as possible.

It doesn't come included with a sheath and its box is obviously designed for shipping and not for storage. The scissor handles are spring loaded and when not in use you can hold the ensemble shut with this little latch. The latch is spring loaded, too, and only the barest squeeze is required to make the thing pop open. Thus, handling the shears in the closed position is kind of annoying. Before just tossing them in your kitchen junk drawer all willy-nilly you might be advised to put a rubber band around the handles or something. Otherwise they'll be prone to pop open at random unexpectedly. Here's the latch action:

This is a complete multipurpose Ninja kitchen accessory. Thus, it has various tools and functions festooned all over.

For instance, there's this prybar end in the tip of one of the handles. The artwork on the box shows this being used for levering open clams, but it'd probably do a dandy job of opening a paint can or, if you whacked him smartly with the pommel, permanently embossing the enemy's forehead.

There's a lanyard hole in the other handle too for some reason.

You can dismount the halves by pressing on this little spring loaded pawl which allows the pivot to rotate beyond its usual endstop. Then, the knife portion and the fish scaler portion just slide apart from each other and you're ready for battle.

A torsion spring resides on the fish scaler side and is thankfully captive.

The scaler itself is very thick and does not posses any real edge anywhere on it. Cutting anything with it is out of the question.

I had something like this on one of my Swiss Army knives when I was a kid, too, and I've never successfully managed to descale anything with it. I'm not entirely certain anyone ever has, to be honest with you. All I ever managed to accomplish with the thing was debarking sticks, so maybe you could use this for a similar purpose if you could find somewhere to fit it within your culinary repertoire.

Never mind that, though. Because having both halves in hand lets you go all JTHM, thoroughly announcing to any passers-by that you are the goddamned boss motherfucker of this kitchen, thank you very much.

Not a single thing within your reach will go unstabbed, unpried, or unsnipped.

Special mention is due to the box.

Mine arrived just slightly crushed from its long trip from China. The front just shows off the article through a clear film window, but rear is considerably more interesting.

These are available in two colors, silver and "gray," the latter being notable as a color which this absolutely isn't. The handle scales are anodized aluminum and are really sort of mauve. It's not a trick of the light; they really are that color.

Note also the "scraping fish scale area," and that the knife can be separated... separately.

The feature list also calls out the slot in the back of the blade as a "peeler." And lo, on the spine of the box is depicted a bloke apparently using it just as such:

And a close inspection reveals that there is indeed an edge ground into the slot; here's yet another hidden function.

A hook on the ricasso of the fish scaler component also serves as a bottle opener. I tried the bottle opener and it works great. I can't speak for the efficacy of the peeler because I couldn't find an apple on short notice.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This is easily the best-worst kitchen gizmo I've ever owned. You've heard of a combat knife? Never that, these are combat scissors.

For when you have to chop the carrots at 5:00 and fend off Triad goons at 5:30, just make sure you've got a pair of these tucked into your apron pocket.

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

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

...

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

Surprise, motherfucker.

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

The release button is right here, on the side:

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

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

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

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

Stats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should we tell them?

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

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

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

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

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

~~Night~~ Operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inevitable Conclusion

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

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

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

And I love that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inevitable Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Style, folks.

Everyone wants it. This knife's got it.

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

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

But then, there's this.

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

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

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

This is its opener.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gideon is absolutely not one of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Inevitable Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The What?

Look, this is going to take some explaining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The How

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Parts

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

For instance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And reassembling it is quite tricky.

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

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

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

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

The Why

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

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

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