High Carbon Steel Filipino Balisongs Butterfly Razor Sharp Knife with Rose Wood Black Mamba Knives World Class Knives | BMK-407

Description

A plain hand-forged carbon blade in a brass frame, with kamagong inserts dark enough to read as black in most light.

Suits: a buyer who wants the traditional Filipino pattern without a figured blade. Nothing on this one is decorative. The steel is listed as hand-forged high-carbon and no hardness figure is given for it, so judge it on what it is: a simple forged edge in a handle built the old way, metal wrapped around wood.

Kamagong after a few thousand opens

Kamagong is Philippine persimmon and one of the densest timbers anybody puts on a knife. It arrives near-black with faint streaking and it does not lighten with age. Flipping polishes it instead of wearing it, because the grain is too tight to take a dent from an ordinary drop onto a desk. The change you will see is at the seam: the wood keeps its edge while the brass rounds off around it, and after a couple of years the inserts stand a hair proud of the frame. That is the handle telling you it has been used.

What the brass frame does to the swing

Brass is slightly denser than steel, so framing the handles in it puts mass at the outside of the arc rather than at the pivot. The handles measure 4.7 inches against a 4.4 inch blade, which means each one carries a fraction more length than the edge it closes over. Together those two things give you a slower, more deliberate rotation. If you learned on a light trainer, expect to slow your hands down.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone who wants a knife they can leave in a damp truck should not buy plain carbon steel. Anyone who wants pattern in the blade should be looking at a Damascus piece. If you want this same brass and kamagong pairing on a steel that shrugs off humidity, the D2 kamagong balisong is the direct swap, and the all-steel D2 balisong removes wood from the equation entirely.

Care: plain carbon steel is the least forgiving blade in the catalog. Dry it the moment it gets wet, and leave a thin film of oil on the flats before it goes in a drawer. If a red bloom appears, deal with it early using the method in our guide to removing rust from a knife. The kamagong wants nothing at all. It has plenty of oil of its own, and waxing it only leaves a film that greys the surface.

FAQs

Why is there no hardness figure? Because the spec sheet does not state one for this model. It lists the steel as hand-forged high-carbon and stops there, and we would rather leave the row blank than guess.

Will the brass go dark? Yes, first to a dull gold and then browner in the places your fingers never touch. Metal polish reverses it in about a minute if you would rather keep it bright.

Is kamagong the same thing as ebony? They are different trees. Kamagong is a Philippine persimmon that happens to run very dark, which is why it gets sold under the ebony name. What matters in a handle is that it is dense, tight-grained and stable in humidity.

Model: BMK-407