Black Widow Spider 440c Original Filipino Balisong butterfly Knife BF-17

The BF-17 Black Widow Spider is the only knife in this twelve with carabao horn handles, and carabao horn is where the word balisong comes from. 440C blade, brass frame, 165g, 24cm. If you want a knife from this series that is actually connected to the thing this whole craft grew out of, it is this one.

Baling sungay, or why the horn matters

The common reading of balisong is baling sungay: folding horn. Not folding steel, not folding knife. Horn. The handles on the knives that came out of Taal in Batangas at the start of the 1900s were carabao horn because carabao horn was what was there, sitting in the yard, on an animal that had finished working.

Barangay Balisong gave the town’s knives their name, Perfecto de Leon is the maker most often credited with formalising the pattern in the early 1900s, and the traditional full size was veinte y nueve, 29cm open. That is the lineage. The BF-17 is not 29cm, it is a 24cm knife, but the material in the handles is the original material and it behaves the way the original behaved.

What a carabao horn balisong handle is actually like to hold

• Warm. Horn takes your hand temperature faster than bone and much faster than brass. In cold weather this is a genuine difference, not a marketing sentence.
• Slightly grippy. Polished horn has a faint tack to it that polished bone does not. Good for a secure grip in a chief.
• Layered. Horn is keratin laid down in sheets, so you get translucent streaks and dark banding running through the panel. Hold it to a light and you can see into it.
• Alive to humidity. Horn moves a little with moisture. Very little, but it is not stone.

Care, which is short but not optional

Keep it out of prolonged sun and out of a hot car. Horn that dries hard can craze on the surface. A drop of mineral oil on a cloth once or twice a year is the entire maintenance routine, and handling the knife regularly does most of that job for you.

This is not fragile. Carabao horn handles from a hundred years ago are still on knives that still work. It just is not plastic and it does not want to be treated like plastic.

Specifications

The 58-60 HRC figure is the one worth reading twice. Run 440C softer than that and the edge folds over on the first serious cut. Run it harder and the tip chips instead of bending, which is the worse of the two failures because a bent edge comes back on a stone and a missing one does not.

165g, which is the light end here

This is one of the lighter knives in the series, tied with the BF-11 Barn Owl. Horn is considerably lighter than the brass it sits in, so the panels take mass out of the handle without taking it out of the frame. The result turns quickly and does not wear your forearm out over a long session.

A light knife asks for cleaner input. It will not carry a lazy rotation the way a 195g knife does. That is a fair trade for most people and a bad one for a few, and you probably already know which you are.

The name

Black widow: dark, and the banding in the horn tends to run black through amber. That is the whole reason. We are not going to construct a paragraph about danger and elegance around a spider that mostly wants to be left alone.

Trainer at the same price as the 440C balisong

Choose the unsharpened option above the Add to Cart button and this becomes a trainer. Identical horn, identical 165g, identical pivots, blunt edge. Given that the appeal of this knife is largely the handle material, a fair number of people order it as a trainer and never miss the edge at all.

Delivery of your 440C butterfly knife

Free US shipping. Flat $49 to anywhere else on earth, whatever the order size. Fitted leather sheath, cut for the BF-17, included.