Damascus Balisong Butterfly Knife with Beautiful Brass Handle Handmade Original Traditional Filipino Butterfly Batanga Knife Black Mamba Knives USA | DB-20

Description

A pocket-size Damascus balisong, 4.7 inches overall and 4.2 ounces, with brass bolsters, dark inserts and a raindrop pattern running the full width of a very short blade.

This one is for: the collector who wants the pattern and the mechanism in something that disappears into a coat pocket, and the flipper who finds a full-length balisong unwieldy.

What a short balisong actually feels like

At 4.2 ounces and 4.7 inches overall, this is roughly half the mass of a standard-length flipper. That changes the physics rather than just the scale. Rotations come round faster and need less swing, so aerials feel quick and forgiving, while the slow, weighted rollovers that big balisongs do well become harder because there is simply less momentum to carry the handle over. People coming from a full-size knife usually overshoot for the first hour. People with smaller hands often find this is the one that finally clicks.

The pattern on a small blade

Compressing 352 layers into a blade this short puts the rings very close together, which is why this one reads as concentric eyes rather than the long wandering bands you see on a bigger knife off the same billet. The brass bolsters are polished flat and left deliberately plain, with no engraving and no filework, so nothing on the handle competes with the blade for attention. If you want to know how the billet gets there in the first place, we set out how Damascus steel is made.

Keeping it right

1095 and 15N20 are both carbon steels, and a knife this size lives in a pocket next to keys and lint. Wipe it dry when you have been handling it, and put the thinnest possible film of oil on the blade before it goes away for any length of time. Pocket lint packs into the pivots on small balisongs faster than on large ones; blow it out or pick it clear rather than flooding the joint with oil, which only makes lint stick. The brass will dull to a warmer tone over months of pocket carry. That is expected and most owners prefer it to a fresh polish.

Worth asking

Is this a beginner’s knife? It is a fine first flipper for a smaller hand, but the speed is unforgiving. A trainer first is not a bad idea.

Why is there no blade length listed? The table gives overall and handle lengths only, so we quote those rather than guess at the rest.

What is the wooden-handled version? That is the DB-29 with a wooden handle, and where the pattern came from is covered separately.

Model: BMK-DB-20