Magpie High Carbon Steel Original Filipino Balisong butterfly Knife BF-73

The BF-73 Magpie is a 24cm high carbon balisong, 12cm blade, 180g, brass and kamagong. High carbon is the steel this knife was originally made from, in a town called Taal, more than a century ago. That is worth a page.

Where the balisong actually comes from

Taal, in Batangas province, Philippines. Specifically a barangay so associated with the knife that it is called Barangay Balisong, and it is a real place with a real address rather than a marketing origin story.

Perfecto de Leon is the name most often credited with formalising the design in the early 1900s. He did not invent a folding knife, but the Batangas pattern as the world now knows it, larger and faster and built as a working blade rather than a toy, was settled there.

The word itself most likely comes from baling sungay: folding horn. Carabao horn was the handle material, and the phrase describes the handle and the mechanism at once. Everything since, brass, wood, micarta, titanium, is a substitute for that original horn.

Why the old knives were high carbon

Not because anyone preferred it philosophically. Because stainless steel was not commercially available in the Philippines in 1910, and because a village smith could work carbon steel with a forge, a hammer and a stone.

Which is the honest answer, and it turns out to be the interesting one. Carbon steel is what a person can sharpen without industrial equipment. A farmer with a river stone could keep a carbon blade working for thirty years. Hand him D2 and he would have a very durable, permanently blunt object.

The row that has not changed is the last one, and it is the whole reason to buy carbon steel today.

What we are not going to claim

That this knife is an antique reproduction. It is not. The heat treat is controlled where theirs was judged by eye, the tolerances are tighter, and the frame is a modern one.

We are also not going to claim that the old knives were better. Some were superb and some were rough, because they were made by different people with different skill in different decades, which is true of handmade things in every era including this one.

What we will say is that the material and the method are continuous, and that matters more than a certificate would.

The high carbon steel, plainly

Iron, around one percent carbon, essentially no chromium. Finer grain than any stainless at the same hardness, so it takes a keener edge, and it comes back on an ordinary stone in minutes with no diamond plate involved.

It rusts if left wet. Wipe the blade dry when you put it down, oil it lightly once a month, and it will darken into a grey patina that protects it. Ignored damp it pits orange, which is permanent. Heat treated to 58-60 HRC, which is where it rolls rather than chips when it meets a floor.

The frame of this high carbon balisong

Twenty-four centimetres at 180g, brass bolsters with kamagong inserts. Kamagong is Philippine ebony, dense enough to sink in water and stable enough to ignore a dry winter, and it needs no care whatsoever. The brass will go brown over a year or two, which is the same reaction that turned every old knife’s fittings the colour they are in museum photographs.

Ordering this high carbon butterfly knife

Unsharpened trainer, chosen above Add to Cart. Same steel, same 180g, no edge.

A fitted leather sheath is in the box. US shipping is free, everywhere else a flat $49 for the whole order. Balisong law varies by country and by US state, and it is worth reading the current rule for your own address rather than a page written in 2019.