Filipino Traditional D2 Steel Beautiful Blade Butterfly Balisong Knife USA Made Gift For Him With Rose Wood Handle Best Quality Knife BF-115

The BF-115 is a plain-bladed Filipino Traditional balisong: 24cm open, a 12cm D2 blade, 220g, brass with rose wood. Built the ordinary way, which is the hard way. This page is about what that phrase costs and what it actually buys you.

A machine would make this knife better in three ways

We are going to start with the case against us, because pretending otherwise insults your intelligence.

• Consistency. A CNC machine makes the ten thousandth handle exactly like the first. We do not. Our knives vary within a tolerance rather than matching a drawing.
• Precision on flat surfaces. A machined flat is flatter than a hand-worked one. That is simply true.
• Price. The same design produced in volume would cost a fraction of this, and a good production knife at $60 is a genuinely good knife.

Anybody who tells you handmade beats machined on those three points is selling you something.

What a machine cannot do

Judge. That is the whole of it, and it turns out to matter more than the list above.

The row that decides everything is pivot tension. It is not a specification, it is a feel, and no number captures the difference between a handle that falls freely and one that falls freely and stops where it should. A person flipping a knife knows in two seconds. A torque wrench never will.

The rejects you are paying for

A proportion of blanks never becomes a knife. Rose wood with a check that only shows once you start cutting. A blade that came out of heat treat with a warp. A handle where the insert seated a fraction proud and would not come right.

Those are paid for by the knives that ship, and that is a real part of this price. A factory has the same problem and solves it with volume. We solve it by charging what a small run actually costs, and we would rather explain that than dress it up as exclusivity.

So who should buy handmade

Somebody who wants an object with a person’s judgement in it, and who understands that the trade for that is variation. If your knife arriving with slightly different grain from the photograph would bother you, buy a production knife and be happy. That is not a criticism, it is a genuine preference and we are not going to talk you out of it.

If what you want is a knife where somebody stood there and decided it was right, this is what that costs.

The specification for this D2 butterfly knife

• Blade: D2 tool steel at 58-60 HRC. Air-hardening, about one and a half percent carbon, eleven to twelve percent chromium, which sits just under the threshold for stainless
• Handle: brass with hand-cut rose wood inserts
• Overall length: 24cm open
• Blade length: 12cm
• Weight: 220g
• Sharpened or unsharpened at the same price

Living with a rose wood balisong handle

D2 holds an edge longer than anything else we sell and is stubborn to sharpen, wanting a diamond plate about twice a year. The rose wood needs nothing at all and will darken quietly over the years. The brass will go brown, which is brass rather than neglect.

Two hundred and twenty grams on a 24cm frame carries itself through a rotation and gives you a moment to fix a mistake, at the cost of changing direction more slowly than our lighter knives.

Ordering this handmade D2 balisong

Unsharpened trainer, chosen above Add to Cart. A fitted leather sheath is in the box. US shipping is free, flat $49 to anywhere else for the whole order.