Newt Handmade D2 Tool Steel Original Filipino Balisong Butterfly Knife with Brass and Jigged Bone Handle | 24cm EDC Flipper Gift for Him | BF-89

The BF-89 Newt is a 24cm Filipino balisong with a 12cm D2 tool steel blade and brass handles set with jigged bone. It is the grip-focused knife in this run, built for people whose hands sweat and who have got tired of pretending that polished handles are fine. Trainer version at the same price above Add to Cart.

Jigged bone, and why we cut a balisong handle that way

Jigging is the practice of cutting a texture into bone rather than leaving it smooth: shallow grooves, pits and ridges worked into the surface before it goes onto the handle.

It exists for one reason and it is not decoration, whatever the pocket knife industry has since done with it. Smooth bone is pleasant and, once your palm is damp, it is also slick. Jigging breaks up the surface so there is somewhere for a grip to bite and somewhere for moisture to go instead of sitting in a film between your skin and the handle.

The visual character is a side effect, and a nice one. Jigged bone catches light unevenly and reads as handmade in a way that a machined flat surface never will, because the cuts are not identical and were never going to be.

A knife named after an amphibian, for hands that behave like one

A newt spends its life somewhere between wet and slightly less wet, which is roughly the condition of everyone’s hands twenty minutes into a flipping session.

This is the least-discussed problem in balisong. People argue about steel for hours and then lose the knife out of their hand because the handles are glass-smooth and their palms are damp. Grip is not an advanced consideration, it is the first one, and the materials that address it are usually the least glamorous on the shelf.

Here is the ranking as we actually experience it in the workshop, damp hands, no marketing:

• Jigged bone. Best of the natural options. Texture plus a slight natural tooth.
• Micarta. Comparable, arguably better when genuinely wet, because it gets tackier rather than just textured.
• Smooth bone or horn. Warm, comfortable, and slippery once you are sweating.
• Kamagong. Dense and stable, moderate grip. Good all-rounder.
• Bare polished brass or steel. Cold and slick. This is why nearly every handle has an insert of something.

Bone is a natural material and yours will not match the photograph

Every set of bone scales is figured and coloured differently, and jigging exaggerates that rather than hiding it, because the cuts fall differently across a piece depending on the density where the tool went in.

Bone also yellows and deepens with years of handling, unevenly, in the places your hand actually touches. That is the material working correctly.

If you want two knives that look identical, do not order two of these. If a delivered knife that differs from its listing photo would irritate you, buy one with kamagong inserts instead, which vary far less.

D2 butterfly knife steel

That is worth saying because the price ladder on this site is about handle work and frame size, not about blade quality being quietly downgraded at the bottom.

D2 is a high-carbon, high-chromium tool steel around 60 HRC. It holds an edge several times longer than the high carbon blades in this series and resists corrosion considerably better. It is also stubborn to sharpen and wants a diamond plate rather than a ceramic stone, because the same hardness that kept the edge is now refusing to give it up.

Our high carbon knives take a finer edge than this and come back on an ordinary stone in minutes. They also spot with rust if you leave them wet. That is the entire trade and neither side of it is the wrong answer. Buy high carbon if maintenance is something you enjoy. Buy D2 if it is something you would like to do twice a year.

Trainer, shipping and legality for this D2 balisong

The unsharpened trainer is the same knife with no edge ground, at the same price, selected above Add to Cart. It is the same steel and the same 180 grams, so it teaches you the same timing. Grinding an edge is one step out of many, which is why removing it does not lower the price.

A fitted leather sheath is included. Bone and leather came off the same sort of animal and they behave the same way about damp, so if the knife went in wet, take it out and let both of them dry.

US shipping is free. Anywhere else is a flat $49 for the whole order. Balisong law differs by country and by US state, and it is worth checking what applies at your address before you place the order rather than after.

the D2 is taken to 58-60 HRC, the same hardness we use across the whole shelf.