Cow Vg10 Original Filipino Balisong butterfly Knife BF-27

A 24cm VG10 balisong in brass and kamagong, 180g on the scale. It is the cheapest of the three heavy VG10 knives we build, and the weight is the reason to want it rather than a thing to put up with.

Thirty grams does not sound like anything

Most of our VG10 knives sit at 150g. This one is 180g. Written down, that difference is about the weight of a slice of bread. In the hand it is a different knife entirely.

A heavier balisong carries more rotational inertia. In plain terms it keeps going once you have started it and it resists being stopped, which is bad news for very fast chained sequences and good news for almost everything else. Rollovers feel like they are happening slightly slower than your hand is moving, and that gap is where you get to correct a mistake. Aerials come back to the palm with a definite arrival rather than a flutter.

If you have flipped a light knife and felt like it was constantly getting away from you, the problem was probably not your hands.

Where 180g sits in the VG10 range

Nothing in that table is a quality ranking. The 150g knives are not the budget version and this is not the upgrade. They are different tools and the price differences come from handle work, not from which one we think is better.

VG10, and the phrase in the spec box we keep having to explain

The spec box says Vg10 Super Steel because that is what the industry calls it, and we have given up fighting the term. VG10 is a Japanese stainless from Takefu, designed for kitchen cutlery: roughly one percent carbon, about fifteen percent chromium, with cobalt, vanadium and molybdenum in small amounts doing the fine work.

What that means at the edge is a steel that takes a genuinely fine apex, holds it for a long time, and shrugs off the damp that would spot a high carbon blade in a week. It is easier to sharpen than D2 and harder to sharpen than 440C. Ceramic will do it. A diamond plate does it faster.

Ours run at 58-60 HRC. That is a touch below where Japanese kitchen makers push VG10, and it is deliberate. A balisong gets dropped. A blade at 62 chips when it lands and a blade at 59 rolls, and a rolled edge is twenty minutes on a stone while a chipped one is a regrind.

Brass and kamagong on a VG10 balisong handle

Kamagong is Philippine ebony. It is dense enough to sink in water, close-grained to the point where it barely takes an oil finish, and it does not crack or shrink the way an open-grained timber will after two winters of central heating. It is also close to black, which is the point next to polished brass.

The brass will darken. Every brass-handled knife does this, polishing it back only resets the clock, and most owners stop bothering after the first year. Some of that 180g is the brass, so the weight and the patina are the same decision.

It is called Cow

We are not going to build a paragraph about strength and steady temperament around a cow. The animal series ran long, cows exist, and here we are. Buy it for the 180 grams.

Trainer, sheath and shipping on this VG10 butterfly knife

• Trainer: the same knife with no edge ground, selected above Add to Cart. Same steel, same 180g, same balance. Grinding an edge is one operation in a long build, so removing it does not make the knife cheaper to make and we are not going to pretend it does.
• Sheath: a fitted leather sheath is in the box, cut for this frame.
• Shipping: free inside the US, flat $49 to anywhere else for the whole order, so international buyers do better ordering more than one at a time.
• Legality: balisong law varies by country and by US state. Check what applies at your address before you order.