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.