Banded Sugar Ant 440c Original Filipino Balisong butterfly Knife BF-04

At 310g the BF-04 Banded Sugar Ant is the heaviest knife we make. Twenty-nine centimetres open, a 14cm 440C blade, brass bolsters with Philippine deer horn. This page is mostly a warning and partly a recommendation.

Three hundred and ten grams

For scale: most of our knives sit between 150g and 225g. A standard 24cm balisong is 175g. This one is nearly double that, and it does not feel like a heavier version of the same object. It feels like a different category of thing.

Pick it up and the first impression is that somebody has filled it with something. That is brass on a 29cm frame, and brass is dense.

What that weight does, honestly

Who should not buy this knife

Beginners, unless you buy the trainer version and mean it. Anyone who flips for an hour at a stretch. Anyone whose interest is fast chained work, because this is the wrong tool for it and you will spend the money and then be quietly disappointed.

We would rather write that paragraph than sell you a knife you put in a drawer.

Who should

People who have owned three or four balisongs and found them all slightly insubstantial. People with large hands and strong wrists. Collectors who want the extreme of the range in a cabinet. And anybody who has handled a 300g knife once and understood immediately why some people only want this.

There is a satisfaction to a heavy balisong that lighter knives simply do not offer. Every rotation is a physical event. It is the difference between a door closing and a door closing properly.

Where the weight comes from

Brass bolsters on a 29cm frame, and nothing hollowed out. We could have skeletonised the handles and taken sixty grams off, and on a knife whose entire character is mass that would have been a strange thing to do.

440C and a Philippine deer horn balisong handle

440C is an American high-carbon stainless: around one percent carbon, seventeen percent chromium. The chromium is why it ignores damp, the carbon is why it hardens properly, and the letter C is the part that matters because 440A and 440B do not have enough carbon to be worth grinding.

Ours run at 58-60 HRC. Easy to sharpen on any decent stone, good edge life for normal use, and completely untroubled by weather.

The deer horn is Philippine, cream through smoky brown with dark streaking that follows the growth of the animal. Every piece is different, none of them match the photograph, and that is what natural material means. Keep it out of long sunlight and do not put the knife away wet. Loose inserts or cracks are ours to fix.

Trainer, sheath and shipping on this 440C balisong

The unsharpened trainer is the same knife, chosen above Add to Cart. On a 310g knife with a 14cm blade this is genuinely the sensible purchase unless you already know exactly what you are doing.

A fitted leather sheath comes with it, cut for the 29cm frame. Sheaths sold separately are almost always cut for 24cm and will not close over this one. US shipping is free, flat $49 to anywhere else for the whole order.