Frog Handmade VG10 Super Steel Original Filipino Balisong Butterfly Knife with Brass and Kamagong Wood Handle | 24cm EDC Flipper Gift for Him | BF-47

The BF-47 Frog is a 24cm VG10 balisong at 180g in brass and kamagong. Frogs sit still and then go, which is roughly how this knife behaves. It is also the page where we explain how to actually look after one, because nobody else seems willing to.

A balisong needs servicing and yours will not tell you

Every folding knife collects material in the pivot. A balisong collects more than most, because the handles swing through a full arc twice per flip and the channels are open at both ends. Pocket lint, dust, wood shavings if you work with wood, and a fine grey paste of old oil and brass particles that builds up over months.

The symptom is not a jam. It is a slow, gradual stiffening that you adapt to without noticing, until one day you handle a new knife and wonder why yours feels like it is moving through treacle.

The whole routine, twice a year

1. Blow the channels out with compressed air, or a bicycle pump if that is what you have. Do this before anything wet.
2. Work a cotton bud along the inside of each channel. It will come out grey. That is normal and that is the point.
3. One drop of light oil on each pivot. One drop. People use ten and then wonder why the knife collects lint faster than before.
4. Flip it thirty or forty times to distribute it, then wipe off whatever comes back out.
5. Wipe the blade down while you are there. VG10 does not rust easily, but easily is not never.

That is the entire maintenance requirement for a knife that should outlive you. It takes about ten minutes.

Pivot tension, and when to leave it alone

What 180 grams does

It is the heavy end of the 24cm frame. The knife carries through a rollover on its own momentum, which gives you a fraction longer to correct a mistake, and it lands in the palm with a definite arrival rather than a flutter. Against that, it changes direction more slowly, so very fast chained sequences are easier on our 150g knives.

The VG10 steel in this butterfly knife

VG10 is a Japanese stainless from Takefu, designed for kitchen cutlery: roughly one percent carbon, fifteen percent chromium, plus cobalt, molybdenum and vanadium in small amounts keeping the grain fine.

Ours run at 58-60 HRC. Sharpening wants ceramic or diamond and a consistent angle, and you will be doing it once or twice a year at most. If it has gone properly dull and you are new to sharpening, take it slowly and keep the angle we ground rather than chasing a thinner one.

Brass and kamagong balisong handles

Kamagong is Philippine ebony. Dense, near black, close-grained enough that it needs no oiling and stable enough that it will not crack through a dry winter. The brass will darken over a year or two into a brown that most owners end up preferring, and polishing it back only restarts the process.

Trainer, sheath and shipping on this butterfly knife

The unsharpened trainer is the same knife, chosen above Add to Cart. Same steel, same 180g, same balance, no edge, and the same price because grinding an edge is one operation in a long build.

A fitted leather sheath is in the box. Take the knife out of it for storage rather than leaving it in there for months, because leather holds moisture and that is the one way you could give VG10 a rust problem. US shipping is free, flat $49 everywhere else for the whole order.