Catfish 440c Original Filipino Balisong butterfly Knife BF-21

440C blade, 24cm, 185g. That combination confuses people, so let us deal with it directly rather than hiding behind the word premium.

Why the plainest knife here costs the most

Every other knife in this run has inserts. Inserts are lovely and they are also cover. A wood or bone panel sits in a channel and hides the inside of that channel, the file marks, the fit, the places where the metalwork got approximate.

Take the panels away and there is nowhere to put the mistakes. The whole handle is brass, inside and out, and every surface is a finished surface.

You are paying for absence. That is a strange thing to sell and we would rather explain it than let you assume there is exotic material in here that there is not.

What a solid brass balisong handle is like to own

• It patinas across the entire handle. No panels to interrupt it. The whole knife goes warm brown together, evenly, and it looks like one object rather than a knife with decoration on it.
• You can reset it. Brass polish and ten minutes and it is bright again. Try that on a bone-inlaid handle without making a mess.
• It shows fingerprints immediately. Genuinely. If that will annoy you, it will annoy you every day, and you should buy a different knife from this series.
• It is slick when clean. A freshly polished brass handle has less grip than horn or wood. It gains grip as it patinas and as skin oil builds in the surface.

Specifications for this brass handle balisong

185g, and where it sits

Solid brass with no lighter material set into it puts this at 185g, toward the heavy end of the 24cm knives here without reaching the 195g of the BF-10 Barb. The mass is spread evenly along the handle rather than concentrated at the frame edges, which gives a smooth, even rotation and very little of the wobble you get when panel material and frame material have different densities.

That evenness is the thing regular flippers notice first about this knife and it is difficult to describe until you have felt it.

The name

Catfish have no scales. Smooth skin, all the way along. A knife with no panels is the same idea and we are not going to pretend it is deeper than that.

Worth being straight about. The BF-21 uses the same 440C at roughly 58 HRC as every other knife in this series, including the ones costing a third as much. High-carbon stainless, easy to sharpen, tough when dropped, trades edge retention against D2.

The price is in the handle work. It is not in the blade, and any shop telling you a more expensive knife has better steel while listing the same steel is hoping you do not read carefully.

Trainer

The unsharpened option above Add to Cart applies here too, at no discount. That surprises people at this price. The answer is the same as everywhere else on the site: the edge is not where the cost is, the brasswork is, and the brasswork is identical.

Shipping your 440C butterfly knife

Free in the United States. Flat $49 worldwide, one knife or six. Fitted leather sheath cut for the BF-21, which on a polished brass knife earns its place immediately.

the 440C is taken to 58-60 HRC, the same hardness we use across the whole shelf.