High Carbon Steel Filipino Balisongs Butterfly Stainless Steel Dye Bone Inserts Black Mamba Knives World Class Knives | BMK-576

Description

Dyed bone in amber and cream, perforated stainless handles, and a plain forged blade with a working heat treat behind it.

Fits: the flipper who wants some color without owning a knife that looks like a toy. The dye goes into the bone rather than onto it, so what you are looking at is grain, not paint.

How the bone is colored

Bone is porous, which is why it takes dye at all, and why every panel comes out slightly different. The dye follows the density of the material, so the darker streaks fall where the bone was tightest and the pale areas are where it was more open. That is also why the color cannot chip or flake the way a surface coating does — there is no layer to lose. Over years of handling it softens a shade rather than fading in patches.

Perforated handles

The drilled rows down the steel take weight out of the middle of each handle. Less mass between your fingers and the pivot means a faster reversal and a shorter swing, which is what most flippers are chasing when they compare two knives of the same length. The holes also give the channels somewhere to shed lint and grit rather than packing it against the blade, so the action degrades more slowly than it would in a closed handle.

The heat treat

The blade is oil tempered and runs between 58 and 60 on the Rockwell scale. That is a working hardness rather than a specification-sheet one: a couple of points below the maximum the alloy will take, and considerably tougher for it. On a knife that will get dropped on a hard floor while somebody learns an aerial, tough beats hard almost every time.

Care

This is a carbon blade and a gray patina will form on it. Let that happen. Dry the flats when you finish a session, wipe them over with a little oil, and keep the knife out of a closed pouch where damp collects. The bone panels want a dry cloth and nothing else; keep solvents, dishwater and household cleaners well away from them, since any of the three will pull color out over time.

Worth asking

Which oil should I actually use? Not all of them suit something you handle bare-handed. See which oil to use on a knife.

How do the pivots and pins work? Balisong construction explained walks through the whole assembly.

What is the plainer version? The BMK-407 carbon steel balisong drops the color entirely.

Model: BMK-452