D2 Tool Steel Filipino Balisongs Butterfly Stainless Steel Walnut Burl Wood Inserts Black Mamba Knives World Class Knives | BMK-474

Description

Walnut inserts in a stainless channel, with a long clip point blade lightened by four drilled holes.

Good for: a first serious balisong. It is the plainest knife in this group, and plain is often the right answer when you are still deciding what you like.

Walnut is the sensible handle wood

Walnut sits in the middle of everything. It is hard enough to resist dents but soft enough not to feel like stone, it is dimensionally stable across seasons in a way that fruitwoods are not, and it takes a knock without splitting. Our listing describes the stock as burl. Burl figure is the swirled, knotted grain that comes from a growth on the trunk, and the panels on this knife show straight, quiet grain instead. We would rather say that plainly than sell you a promise of figure the photograph does not support. What you get is good walnut, evenly matched, and it will darken slowly toward chocolate with handling and light.

How the drilled blade behaves

Four holes through the forward half pull weight back toward the pivots, which makes the knife easier to bring over and slightly less stable at the end of a swing. For a beginner that is a genuine benefit, because a lighter tip is a more forgiving tip when your catch is imperfect. It also means you should not treat the blade as a pry bar; there is less steel across the middle than a solid blade has.

Keeping the edge

Most balisongs go blunt from being flipped, not from being used, because the edge kisses the inside of the channel a thousand times. A ceramic rod every few weeks does far more good here than a stone twice a year, and the difference between the two operations is explained in honing versus sharpening. If you want to understand why some handles are cut open and others are solid, read channel versus sandwich versus skeletonized. For the same knife with pale bone in place of wood, there is the bone insert version.

Two answers

Will the wood swell in humidity? Barely. Walnut is among the steadier handle woods, which is why it has been used for gun stocks for two centuries.

Can I tighten the pivots? No, the pins are peened rather than threaded.

What finish is on the walnut? An oil finish, buffed rather than built up. It can be topped up at home with any hardening oil once every year or two.

Model: BMK-474