Hare High Carbon Steel Original Filipino Balisong butterfly Knife BF-56

The BF-56 Hare is a full-size 24cm Filipino balisong with a 12cm high carbon steel blade and a brass frame carrying kamagong wood inserts, finished at 180 grams. It is a live-blade flipper for someone who wants a working knife with real momentum in it, and it can be ordered as an unsharpened trainer at the same price using the option above Add to Cart.

What 180 grams actually does to your flipping

A hare goes from standing to flat out in one stride, and that is the honest description of how this knife behaves once it starts moving. Weight is not a spec-sheet decoration on a balisong. It is the thing that decides whether the handle finishes the rotation for you or stops halfway and waits for your wrist to rescue it.

At 180g on a 24cm frame, the Hare finishes its rotations. New flippers usually read this as the knife being easy, and they are half right. What is actually happening is that the brass is doing the work your technique has not learned yet.

The other half is less flattering. A knife with momentum also punishes a bad grip more firmly than a light one. When you drop it, and you will, it lands with intent. That is the trade, and we would rather say it out loud than sell you a fantasy about a knife that flips itself and never bites.

High carbon steel on a butterfly knife, and who it is actually for

High carbon takes the keenest edge of anything we put on a balisong, and it comes back on a stone faster than any tool steel will. Ten minutes of unhurried work on a decent stone and the edge is back. No diamond plate, no argument.

We run the blade at 58-60 HRC. That is the window where high carbon still gives ground to a stone without argument but has stopped folding its edge over on the first hard cut, and it is the reason ten minutes is enough rather than forty.

The cost is corrosion. Leave this blade wet, or leave it in a sheath after a humid afternoon, and it will spot. Not catastrophically, and not immediately, but it will. If that sentence made you sigh, the D2 knives in this series are a better fit for you and we would rather point you there than take your money for the wrong knife.

Here is the split as we see it after five years of shipping both:

• High carbon suits the person who enjoys maintenance, keeps a stone in a drawer, and wants the sharpest possible edge available on demand.
• D2 suits the person who wants to sharpen the knife twice a year, leave it alone the rest of the time, and not think about humidity.
• Neither is better. They are answers to different questions about how much attention you plan to give the thing.

Brass and kamagong, and why we keep pairing them

The handle is brass with kamagong wood inserts. Brass supplies the mass, and it also patinas, which means the knife you own in two years will not look like the one in the photograph. That is not a defect. It is the only honest thing brass does.

Kamagong is Philippine ironwood, and it is dense enough that it barely reads as wood in the hand. It does not compress under the pivot the way softer timber does, and it does not swell in humidity enough to change how the handles close. It is also stubborn to work, which is a maker problem rather than yours.

The combination gives you a warm contact surface on a heavy metal frame. Solid brass alone is cold, slippery when your hands are damp, and unpleasant in a long session. The wood fixes all three.

The trainer version of this high carbon balisong

Every knife on this site, this one included, can be ordered as an unsharpened trainer for the same money. Same steel, same weight, same pivot, same handles. The only difference is that the edge is not there.

People assume the trainer is the cheaper starter option and get suspicious when the price does not drop. The price does not drop because the knife does not get cheaper to make. Grinding an edge is one step out of many, and skipping it saves us almost nothing. What it saves you is the six weeks of learning rollovers with a live blade against your knuckles.

If you are new, buy the trainer. If you already flip, buy the sharp one. If you cannot decide, buy the trainer, because you can always buy the sharp one later and you cannot un-cut a finger.

Ordering a high carbon balisong from us

Shipping inside the US is free. Everywhere else is a flat $49 regardless of how many knives are in the order, so if you are buying from outside the States it is worth buying more than one at a time. Balisongs are age restricted and location restricted in some places, and checking your own local law before ordering is your responsibility, not the courier’s.