Philippine Visayan D2 Steel Blade Butterfly Balisong Knife USA Made Gift For Him With Stag Horn Handle BF-121

The Visayan islands developed their own reading of the balisong, and the BF-121 is it: 29cm open, a 14cm blade, and 200g, which is lighter in hand than the length leads you to expect. D2 tool steel, brass and stag horn. If you have only ever handled the short Batangas pattern, this will feel like a different knife, because in most of the ways that matter it is.

29cm is the classic balisong length

The traditional full size balisong is called the veinte y nueve, twenty nine, and it is called that because it measures 29cm open. That is this knife.

Most of what gets sold as a traditional Filipino balisong today, ours included, is the shorter 24cm proportion, because it is easier to carry and easier to sell. The full length version is the one the old name refers to, and picking one up for the first time explains a lot about why the knife was described the way it was.

Visayan against Batangas

Same knife, two regional readings, and the differences are real rather than a marketing distinction between two identical products.

Read those first three rows again

The Visayan is five centimetres longer than the Batangas knife and twenty grams lighter. That combination is the whole character of this knife and it catches people out.

The Batangas pattern packs 220g into 24cm, so the mass is concentrated and close in. Short handles turn quickly, so it is the nimbler knife despite weighing more. This one spreads 200g across 29cm, and mass sitting further from the pivot resists rotation much harder than the same mass sitting close to it.

The result is a knife that feels light when you hold it still and heavy when you turn it over. Nobody warns you about that, and it is the single most useful thing to know before ordering one.

Why the longer D2 blade matters

14cm is a serious cutting edge, two centimetres past the Batangas knives, and the extra length sits where the belly is. More edge in the curved section means more of the blade doing the work on a drawing cut, which is what a longer traditional pattern was for. Two extra centimetres is also two extra centimetres of stone work, and D2 held at 58-60 HRC is in no hurry at all, so budget the length in sharpening time as well as in reach.

It is also two more centimetres you are swinging around your fingers, so the sensible order of operations applies more here than anywhere else in the range.

Specification for this D2 stag horn balisong

• Blade: D2 tool steel
• Hardness: 58-60 HRC
• Handle: brass with stag horn
• Overall length: 29cm open
• Blade length: 14cm
• Weight: 200g

Stag horn, so the handle figure is unique to your knife and will not match the listing photograph. On a 29cm knife there is more handle to show it off, which is part of why we build the long pattern in horn rather than wood.

Where the pattern comes from

The balisong itself comes from Taal in Batangas, from Barangay Balisong specifically, and the old name baling sungay means folding horn, after the carabao horn the earliest handles were cut from. The name that survives from the early 1900s is Perfecto de Leon.

The Visayas took the same construction and drew it out longer. That is not a rival tradition, it is a regional variation on a knife that travelled, which is what happens to any good design in an archipelago.

Start with the blunt one

The trainer option is above Add to Cart. On the longest knife we make, with the widest swing and the most momentum at the ends, this is not a suggestion for beginners. It is the sensible way to meet a 29cm balisong. Same steel, same 200g, bevels left unsharpened. See the trainer guide.

A fitted leather sheath comes with it. US delivery costs nothing and everywhere else is a flat $49. The knife care guide covers pivot tension, and on a long knife a loose pivot shows up as play at the tip where you will feel it most.