Beetle Handmade 440C Stainless Steel Original Filipino Balisong Butterfly Knife with Brass and Kamagong Wood Handle | 24cm EDC Flipper Gift for Him | BF-14

The BF-14 Beetle is the knife we hand people who cannot decide. 440C blade, brass frame, kamagong inlays, 175g, 24cm. It sits in the middle of this series on weight, in the middle on price, and in the middle on everything else. That sounds like faint praise. It is not, and the rest of this page is about why the middle is where most people should actually be shopping.

Middle of the range is a real position, not a leftover one

Look at what surrounds it. The lightest knife in this run is 155g and the heaviest is 225g. The Beetle is 175g, which puts it close to the centre of both spreads.

People buy the extremes because the extremes have a story. Lightest, heaviest, most expensive. Then six months in they discover the thing they actually flip every day is the boring one in the middle, because it does not fight them at either end. We sell a lot of extremes. We get very few Beetles back.

Why the name fits better than it sounds

Beetles are not glamorous. What they are is armoured, in numbers, and extremely difficult to kill. The wing cases are a hardened shell over the working parts, which is roughly what a closed balisong is: two brass bars protecting an edge.

If you wanted a knife with a poetic name there are eleven others in this series and some of them are genuinely beautiful. This one is built to be used until the kamagong goes black.

440C at 58 HRC on a butterfly knife, and what that buys you

This is the part worth reading properly, because most knife listings say “stainless steel” and stop, and “stainless steel” is not a specification. It is a category with a hundred grades in it, some excellent and some not fit for a butter dish.

440C is high-carbon stainless. We run it around 58 HRC, and here is what those numbers actually mean at the bench:

• It takes a serious edge. High carbon content means it hardens properly. This is not soft stainless that goes dull looking at cardboard.
• It comes back fast. Four or five minutes on a basic stone and you are sharp again. You do not need diamond plates and a subscription to a sharpening philosophy.
• It survives being dropped. At 58 HRC the edge rolls instead of chipping. For a knife you deliberately throw around your hand, this is the single most important property and almost nobody lists it.
• It tolerates neglect. Sweat, humidity, a damp bag. It will spot eventually if you truly abandon it, but it is stainless for a reason.

What you give up is edge retention. D2 will stay sharp longer. D2 will also chip when the Beetle would have rolled, and it will rust while the Beetle sits there fine. That trade is the right way round for a flipper and we will argue about it with anyone.

Kamagong handle and the rest of the specifications

175g is the weight most people settle on

Heavy enough that the rotation carries through a slightly late wrist. Light enough that an hour of practice does not leave your forearm complaining the next morning. If you have no strong feeling about knife weight yet, you do not have one because you have not flipped enough to develop it, and 175g is the sensible place to find out.

Trainer, same price

Order the Beetle unsharpened from the option above the Add to Cart button. It costs.50 because it takes the same work, and it weighs the same 175g because it is the same knife with a blunt edge.

A trainer is not a lesser product and we get slightly tired of explaining that. It is the same knife without the part that opens you up while you are learning.

Getting this 440C balisong to you

Free shipping in the US, flat $49 worldwide however much you order. Fitted leather sheath cut for the BF-14 in the box.

the 440C is taken to 58-60 HRC, the same hardness we use across the whole shelf.