Gerbil Vg10 Original Filipino Balisong butterfly Knife BF-49

The BF-49 Gerbil is a 175g VG10 balisong, and it is the only knife in our VG10 range built with stainless steel handles and bone inserts. Almost everything around it is brass with wood. A 12cm blade in a 24cm frame, and a handle that will look different in a year to the way it looks in the photograph. If you want the one that is not made of the same two materials as its neighbours, this is it.

Bone, and what it actually is

Bone has been used for knife handles for as long as there have been knife handles, and it is nothing like the modern materials that imitate it. It is not uniform. Every piece carries its own faint grain, tiny surface pores and small variations in tone from cream through to a light tan.

Two inserts cut from the same bone will not match perfectly. Two knives will not match at all. We say this on every page where a natural material is involved because it is the single most common surprise for a first-time buyer, and we would rather be tedious about it than deal with a disappointed customer later.

How a bone balisong handle behaves over time

• It warms up in colour. Handling deepens bone from cream towards honey over months. This is normal and, in our opinion, an improvement.
• It is harder than wood but more brittle. Bone will not dent the way a soft timber does, and it will chip if you throw the knife at concrete. So do not.
• It dislikes extremes. Long spells somewhere very hot and very dry are the one thing worth avoiding. A car dashboard in summer is the classic mistake.
• It stays grippy. Bone has a slightly chalky feel against skin that polished metal never manages, and that helps more than it sounds.

Stainless handles instead of brass

Three knives in the range wear stainless rather than brass: this one, the BF-26 Common Buzzard and the BF-28 Crab. The practical difference is that stainless does not patina. Brass goes brown from your hands within weeks and keeps going. Stainless looks the same in year three as it did the day it arrived.

Paired with bone, that matters more than usual. The bone is going to warm and darken with use, and against unchanging stainless that shift is far more visible than it would be against brass that is darkening at the same time. This knife ages in one direction only, which is a deliberate look rather than an accident.

Specification

175g in the hand

This sits in the heavier half of the range, twenty-five grams up on the 150g knives and a little under the 180g group. The mass carries rollovers through smoothly and holds a line well on aerials. Rapid changes of direction take more from you, and a long practice session will reach your forearm before a 150g knife would. It is a solid, deliberate feel rather than a quick one.

The VG10 steel on this balisong

VG10 is a Japanese stainless developed for kitchen knives, around 60 HRC with roughly 15% chromium. Fine edge, good retention, no rust. It is the cheapest steel band on this site, which surprises people given how the name gets used in marketing elsewhere. The honest limitation is that a fully dull VG10 edge takes more effort to restore than 440C does.

Trainer, sheath and shipping on this bone handle butterfly knife

Order it unsharpened using the option above the Add to Cart button. Fitted leather sheath included. Free US shipping, flat $49 to the rest of the world.

the VG10 comes out of the quench at 58-60 HRC. Harder than that and it chips; softer and you are sharpening it every fortnight.