John Burridge

About John Burridge

John Burridge is a Los Angeles-based lover of knives and other dangerous toys. He spends his days trying to make the world a better place by slipping subversive humor into reality TV shows. And playing with cats. He can be found on Instagram as @bunrudge.

Magpul Rigger Review

by John Burridge Leave a Comment

The Magpul Rigger is the Gray Man of knives. It’s yet another titanium framelock with average EDC knife dimensions and a forgettable-looking design, but like the literary character the Gray Man, it kicks major ass.

Before I get into the review, here’s a little background info on Magpul and the Gray Man: Magpul Industries is a giant in the world of firearms accessories, with contracts to supply ammunition magazines to multiple branches of the US and UK armed forces.

Magpul also manufactures a remarkable variety of outdoorsy gear for the civilian market, and have earned a very good reputation for making innovative, durable, and competitively priced products, all with a minimalist design aesthetic.

The Gray Man is a conceptual term for a person who is prepared for any dangerous situation, but is inconspicuous to the point of being forgettable.

It’s also the name of an extremely fun (and violent) series of books written by Mark Greaney, who is better known as the co-author the last three “Jack Ryan” books with Tom Clancy, and who has continued writing the series after Clancy’s death in 2013. I’ve read the entire 11-book Gray Man series, and highly recommend them to anyone who reads in-depth knife reviews, AKA you. The Gray Man will also be a motion picture starring Ryan Gosling, and is slated for release in 2022.

And a Gray Man knife isn’t necessarily gray- my Microtech Ultratech (pictured below) is gray in color but is extremely aggressive looking and makes a loud, sharp click when opening and closing – there’s no subtlety in this OTF switchblade.

The Ultratech makes the Rigger look like a utility knife, and most people would never suspect that the Magpul Rigger is an extremely well made, expensive, hard use knife.

I try to never read internet comments, but in the case of online posts about the Rigger, I couldn’t help myself. What I saw was basically 10% of people dying to get one, and 90% of people bitching about the $425 price tag. Well, now there’s a significantly less expensive production version about to come out for $239.95, and people are still going to bitch about the price. However, I don’t think the criticism will be just about the price, because that’s a decent MSRP for a knife of this caliber. I think it’s because the Rigger doesn’t look like an expensive knife.

It really doesn’t look like much- it’s an extremely sparse, utilitarian design. It doesn’t look bombproof like a Rick Hinderer Knives XM-18, and it doesn’t magically emanate high-quality vibes like a Chris Reeve Knives Sebenza. I like to show people the folders that I’m carrying for review, and no one even gave the Rigger a second look other than two friends of mine who have been dual-diagnosed as both knife and gun nerds. So unless you know its pedigree, it’s not even interesting to most people. So why did I drop $425 on one? Because I’m one of the relatively few people who’ve actually handled one. I pestered the nice people staffing Magpul’s booth at SHOT Show 2020 (as documented in this BladeReviews article) until they dug out a Rigger prototype they didn’t even have on display. The moment I got my hands on it, I knew the build quality, mechanical action, balance, and blade shape were exactly what I like in a knife.

General Dimensions and Blade Details

The Rigger is a little under 7-1/2” (18.7 cm) open, with a 3.25” (8.25 cm) long blade made of S35VN steel. The Titanium handle is relatively thin and flat, and is 1-1/4” (30 mm) wide at the pivot, tapering to 3/4” (20 mm) at the bottom. The flipper tab adds another quarter inch (5 mm) to either the dorsal or ventral width, depending on whether the blade is open, or folded into its generally symmetrical handle.

Every Magpul product is 100% American made, and they chose a high-end American blade steel for their high-end knife: Crucible Industries powdered metallurgy S35VN. Steel, like life, is a series of tradeoffs, and in the tradeoff between hardness (resistance to bending) and toughness (resistance to breaking) S35VN chooses hardness. This translates to excellent edge retention, which I personally prefer because I like it when my stuff stays sharp.

The blade style is described by Magpul as a modified wharncliffe with a tapered dual bevel grind, “modified” meaning that the cutting edge is slightly rounded. I don’t know if giving the wharncliffe blade a belly was an ergonomic or an aesthetic decision, but it cuts very well and looks great. From a design philosophy point of view, putting a curved blade on a knife dominated by straight lines seems weird, but I think it really ties the room together, Dude.

I prefer the ergonomics of wharncliffe style blades because most of the cutting I do is with the tip. If I’m slicing open a box on a table in front of me, the Rigger’s blade tip is nearly parallel to the top of the box, and I can slice packing tape without bending my wrist or sticking my elbow up in the air more than about 10 degrees. A traditional drop point blade shape (such as on the excellent Kombou-designed Bestech Knives Samari, pictured above) requires angling the knife to a nearly vertical 70 degrees to make the same cut.

Handle, Ergonomics, and Pocket Clip

I admittedly have a lot of pocketknives (25 or so) but I do not self-identify as a collector- I’m a user who like variety. And when it comes to knives that are destined to be used relatively hard, I definitely have a “type”, and the Rigger is it.

I obviously like titanium framelock flipper-opening knives with wharncliffe blades, and if they have a pronounced cutout for my index finger like the Rigger does, that’s even better. Last year in my review of the WE Knife Scoppio, I performed a slippery-ness test with ten of my folding knives, and learned that the single most important factor in grip retention on a wet knife is an index finger groove.

I also like my knives well-balanced, and using the Rigger’s finger groove, I can effortlessly balance the open knife on one finger. This is possible because the insides of the handle scales have been lightened by machining away excess material. You can kind of see the hollowed-out inside of the handle in the picture below. The Rigger has perfect 50/50 front/rear weight distribution like a sports car- Magpul was really paying attention to details here, which I appreciate.

The handle and pocket clip are 6AL4V titanium, held together with only two large, steel screws, which have a wide slot for use with a standard screwdriver or a coin as thick as a US or Canadian quarter, or a 5 cent Euro coin. The front screw doubles as the blade’s pivot. The rear screw doubles as the pocket clip attachment. and triples as a lanyard attachment point, because it has a hollow pass-through big enough for a paracord lanyard. I personally don’t get the appeal of adding lanyards to knives with pocket clips, so I did a little research and found this little tidbit on the internet: “Lanyard comes from the French word “laniere” which means strap or thong.” I personally don’t get the appeal of wearing a thong either, but to each their own.

Nonetheless, this is the simplest, cleanest folding knife design I’ve ever seen, yet it manages to slip in a few features that are actually useful. The first useful feature is the Rigger’s reversible pocket clip- It can be switched between left or right handed tip-up carry. Magpul managed to ambi this knife up without leaving two or three little empty screw holes in the handle scales like on many Spydercos, and nearly every Benchmade, such as the Adamas, pictured below.

The pocket clip is wide, flat, and centered, and has a slight downward angle, meaning it’s taller towards the butt. This bellbottom shape is probably intended to aid in grip retention (I have a pistol with bellbottom-ey grips and they definitely help keep my grip properly high) but I see this feature as yet another example of the subtle, nearly un-noticeable details that make this an excellent knife. The clip’s width and placement make it melt into my hand, and I never noticed it as a “hotspot” during hard use. The pocket clip’s usability is also optimal- it slides easily over thick denim pants pockets, and stays put in thinner material as well. The titanium has the perfect amount of flex- it’s not too loose, and it’s not an inflexible pants-destroyer like the clip on my Microtech Sigil (below, right).

The Rigger’s spartan design is further evident in that it has machined jimping in the only two places it’s absolutely needed: the flipper tab and the spine of the blade, where it gives excellent traction to my thumb when used in a traditional overhand grip.

The only ergonomic gripe I have with the Rigger is that, during my more vigorous testing (mainly slicing thick cardboard furniture boxes into pieces that fit into my recycling bin) the handle was a little too short for me to get a comfortable four-finger grip. The handle is already longer than it strictly needs to be to hold the blade, and I appreciate the extra real estate for my fingers, but it’s a little tight for my medium-large hands.

Deployment and Lockup

There’s no way to open the Rigger without using the flipper tab, but when I want to avoid the satisfying, crisp finger snap sound effect of the Rigger locking open, I can deliberately short-stroke the flipper and quietly ease the blade open on its caged ceramic bearings. The lockbar has a steel insert to avoid titanium-on-titanium stickiness, and is 3 mm wide. My well worn in Rigger locks securely with zero blade wiggle, using about 60% of its surface area, and I can muscle it to about 80% if I want. But I never do, because if it’s a secure lock I’m craving, I can use another useful feature of the Rigger: its secondary locking mechanism.

I appreciate that Magpul has mercifully not given it a tough-sounding name like Deadbolt, Axis Lock, RotoBlock or Shark Lock, which are already taken. The secondary lock engages with a crisp little snick like a 1911 pistol safety, which it was designed to emulate. I’ve used it just to see if it worked, and it functions as intended, which is to lock the framelock in its open position. It might be an unnecessary gimmick, but I’m not complaining- I applaud innovation and understand the need to stand out in a crowded commercial marketplace.

The Rigger really hits the sweet spot for me- it has the stabby blade tip of the Microtech Sigil (top), the deep and far-forward finger groove of the GiantMouse GM1 (2nd from top), the simple harmonious design of the Chris Reeve Knives Sebenza Insingo (3rd from top), and it has a better pocket clip than any of them and takes up less pocket space.

Magpul Rigger Review – Final Thoughts

At the time of writing, I’ve had my Limited Edition Rigger for over eight months,
but during the COVID lockdown months of 2020-2021 I was way too busy being depressed to review it. Now that Magpul is poised to release the Rigger EDC, a lower-cost, production version of the Rigger, I figured I’d better start sharing my knowledge of the Rigger with the world so people can make an informed decision about getting one.

Magpul says the only physical difference between the Rigger EDC and the Limited Edition models is that the handle scales and pocket clip are aluminum instead of titanium. I noticed in a promotional picture provided by Magpul (below) that the Rigger EDC’s aluminum pocket clip looks a little chunkier than my titanium version, but I’m guessing that shouldn’t negatively affect the good ergonomics of the knife.

The most significant difference is in price and availability. The EDC will cost $239.95, which is $185 less than the Limited Edition. If I hadn’t already obsessively stalked and bagged one of the 800 Limited Riggers currently in the wild (I had it in my cart literally one second after it dropped), I’d definitely buy one of the Rigger EDC’s.

I think the following sums up my experience with the Magpul Rigger: Over the last couple of months, I’ve been carrying this Benchmade Adamas (pictured below) for an upcoming review.

After having thoroughly used and abused the Adamas, I can confidently say that the little titanium Rigger can do everything this huge, steel and G-10 tactical knife can do, but without looking like you’re about to storm an ISIS safehouse. That’s the essence of the Gray Man, and that’s why I recommend this knife.

Big thanks to Sara O’Neil for the use of her painting.

Microtech Dirac Review

by John Burridge 1 Comment

Buy the Microtech Dirac at BladeHQ

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Arthur C. Clarke, 1962)

Every time I use my Microtech Dirac, I feel like I’m doing a magic trick. The Dirac is an out-the-front (OTF) switchblade, and its 2 7/8” (74 mm) blade snaps out and back in so fast that my eye can’t perceive the movement of the blade springing out of the handle- there’s no blur of motion, the blade just appears where there was previously nothing. I’ve been carrying the Dirac on and off for several months and I never get tired of watching it. I’ve also come to some conclusions about it as an EDC knife.

General Dimensions and Blade Details

The Dirac is a light, compact, stabby little knife. The blade is just over an inch shorter than the handle, which is 4” (102 mm) long, not counting its 9/32” (7 mm) glassbreaker. May I just add that the Imperial measurement system is antiquated and absurd, and I refuse to use it any more. The rest of the review will be using Cubits, notated as “cu”, with handy conversions into Biblical Cubits (Bcu) and Ancient Egyptian Royal Cubits (AERcu). The Dirac’s blade is a pretty handy EDC length of 0.162 cu (0.128 Bcu / 0.141 AERcu) and is quite thin at 0.0054 cu (0.0043 Bcu / 0.0047 AERcu) and the knife weighs a scant 0.00193 bushels. It’s obviously a thin, light knife that you barely notice in your tunic.

My Dirac has a double edge dagger-shaped blade made of Bohler M390 steel. M390 is a “super steel” made using a process called powder metallurgy. After reading a couple of very well-written articles on KnifeSteelNerds.com (thank you!) I think I can explain why M390 is so desirable for knife blades: small carbides. Powder metallurgy steel is made by heating iron, chromium, vanadium, etc. to a liquid form and thoroughly mixing it together. How finely ground the individual ingredients are affects how thoroughly it can be mixed together, and the goal is to eliminate big chunks. Have you ever not stirred pancake batter enough and gotten a lump of grainy batter in your pancake? Powder metallurgy pancakes would never have lumps like that. M390’s tight, homogenous grain structure makes it extremely hard (for sharpened edge retention) and pretty tough (resistant to chipping). Its tiny grain structure also enables it to be sharpened to a very fine edge. To sum it up, M390 is just about as good as it gets for blade steel in 2021.

The Dirac’s blade has a black DLC (Diamond Like Carbon) coating, which I scratched cutting a cardboard box in the first week I had the knife. I have a few other non-Microtech knives with DLC coatings, and I never managed to scratch any of them. Maybe my DLC coated knives by Reate, WE, and Bestech and would have gotten scratched under the same circumstances, but I doubt it. Microtech’s DLC coatings are known to The Internet to get scratches and edge wear easily, and I can personally verify that. My Microtech Ultratech (aka my favorite knife in the world) looked just as worn-in after a few months of EDC as my Dirac does now.

The aluminum handles on both knives are scratched, the steel pocket clips have shiny edges, and the sliders (Microtech, like White Castle, calls ‘em sliders), have shiny raw metal showing where my thumb has rubbed the DLC off. I certainly don’t mind- I’m not a knife collector, I’m an enthusiast (aka knife nerd) and I think Jeeps and Microtech knives both look better with some dents and scratches. Microtech clearly agree with me that their knives still look good after some use, so they’ve done limited runs of most of their knives with a “distressed” finish. Microtech really took the distressed concept to the next level with their “Bounty Hunter” series, which are designed to look like knives that Boba Fett (a bounty hunter from the Star Wars films) would use.

I’m sure these Bounty Hunter models were popular when they were initially released in 2016, but since the premiere of the Star Wars Universe TV series “The Mandalorian” in 2019, these little suckers have become nearly impossible to come by. This one was snagged through a combination of Instagram stalking and checking several Microtech reseller websites ten times a day. The knife pictured is a UTX-85 Bounty Hunter, and it’s about the size of the Dirac, which I consider to be a good, small-ish EDC knife size. There’s also a much larger version of the Dirac, named the Dirac Delta. The Delta’s overall length of 9.4” (235 mm) makes it nearly as big as the Microtech Cypher seen dwarfing the regular Dirac in the picture below.

I personally find huge knives like the Microtech Cypher, Dirac Delta, and Combat Troodon to be unnecessarily large for anyone who doesn’t have giant sausage fingers, but what does necessary have to do with expensive switchblades? That’s my Cypher in the picture below, and I love that thing despite the fact that it makes me look like I have baby hands.

I’m always interested in the origins of names, and Microtech specializes in badass aggressive ones: The HALO, named after the US special forces High Altitude Low Opening skydiving technique, the now-discontinued Nemesis, named after the Greek mythological spirit of divine retribution, and the Troodon, named after an 11 foot tall bird-like dinosaur. I therefore naturally assumed that the Dirac and its larger variant, the Dirac Delta, were named after a bareknuckle boxer or something. I emailed Microtech customer service and was told this: “As far as the name DIRAC goes, it is actually a mathematical term. Dirac Delta is the “function”… represents an impulse.” It’s named after a math equation. WTF? I then actually did some research, and the aforementioned theory is by Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984) who predicted the existence of antimatter. Antimatter is definitely badass, so Dirac is still a cool Microtech name, but it’s a thinker…

Handle, Ergonomics, and Pocket Clip

The ergonomics are what initially attracted me to the Dirac. Before I bought my Dirac I had the opportunity to handle a Benchmade Infidel at SHOT Show 2020 and in the context of fiddling with it at Benchmade’s booth, I knew I intuitively liked the ergonomics of its top-mounted slider, but couldn’t quite explain why. When I got my Dirac and started EDC-ing it, I discovered the huge advantage of a top-mounted slider vs. a standard OTF spine-mounted slider:

When pulling the Dirac out of my pocket, I pinch the knife between my thumb, which slides into my pocket, and the middle joint of my index finger, which is below the tip of the pocket clip. It’s a pretty deep grip- my thumb is on the top slider, and my index finger is just as far forward on the back side. This deep drawstroke allows me to open the blade and use the knife without adjusting my grip. I can’t think of any other style of folding knife that allows for instant use right out of the pocket. Spine-mounted sliders require a grip adjustment to get your thumb on the switch, and any non-OTF knife (even ones with the Emerson Wave opening feature) require your fingers to get out of the way when the blade swings out.

As I was figuring out the mechanics of this draw, it felt a little un-natural using a knife with my thumb on the flat side of the knife instead of the spine. I realized the awkwardness was because I had extensively used single edged knives- I hold single edge knives with my thumb on the spine in a “forehand” style when cutting left to right, or I flip my hand over into a “backhand” style when cutting right to left. With a double edged knife, there’s no need to flip my wrist over to change cutting direction- there’s blade on either side, and my thumb can just sit in the middle and drive the knife left or right with equal ease.

I used this grip style to destroy a large stack of cardboard boxes, and the only problem I had was that the “shoulder” of the pocket clip (see circle on pic below) created an uncomfortable hot spot on my hand fat.

The most comfortable grip of all was with the slider facing my palm, which further reinforces the utility of double-edged knives: it doubles the practical grip options.

The Dirac is Microtech’s first new OTF design in several years, and although it’s clearly in the Microtech in-house design style, there are some subtle improvements to the handle and slider that I noticed in my obsessive examination of the knife.

The top and bottom of the handle are convex instead of flat, which adds to the Dirac’s pleasant feel in the hand. It’s hard to see in the picture, but it’s easy to feel.

The Dirac’s jimping pattern is less sharp. On every other OTF except the Combat Troodon, the jimping pattern is two or three little narrow close-together scoops, then a little plateau, then more close-together scoops. The Dirac’s jimping pattern more spaced out. It’s a little less grippy than other Microtechs, but more comfortable when I have a tight grasp on the handle.

The slider now has angled sides instead of the classic flat sides like the Ultratech and Cypher in the picture, providing more contact surface area with fewer sharp edges, which makes it noticeably more comfortable to use.

The Dirac’s pocket clip is similar to Microtech’s normal bent steel double-dip clip, but there are small improvements here as well.

The simple genius of the double-dip clip is a higher section at the base of the clip near the glassbreaker that’s designed to loosely sit over the thick, folded seam at the top of a pants pocket, but still have good retention due to the lower, tighter section below it. Compared to the Ultratech clip (left) the Dirac can ride lower in the pocket because it doesn’t have a useless little tight section between the glassbreaker and the high section of the double dip. The clip works very well on the Dirac, which is rather light at 2.27 oz (64.4 g). My copper Ultratech, which weighs more than twice as much at 4.95 oz (140.5 g) has a similar clip, but due to it’s heavy copper top, I feel like the clip barely keeps it in place when I’m horizontal or upside-down. My Chris Reeve Knives Sebenza (another somewhat heavy knife) came with a similar double-dip style clip, and I had the same retention problem with it. I was so afraid of losing my fancy Large Sebenza that I went to the Chris Reeve Knives website and ordered a Hawk Pocket Clip (pictured below), which requires the user to pinch the little lever with the hole in it to open the tip of the clip, resulting in a very secure grip.

In case any of my hard-core knife nerd brothers are wondering, my Sebenza is technically a Chris Reeve/Wilson Combat collaboration knife called the “Star-Benza 21” with the optional Insingo blade shape. The only way this differs from a regular CRK Sebenza (besides costing $50 more) is the groovy Wilson Combat machined starburst pattern on the scales and the Wilson Combat logo on the clip, which I swapped out for the Hawk clip.

One other difference between the Dirac and most other Microtech knives is the clip doesn’t have the little lanyard hole that virtually no one uses.

I did a Google image search for “Microtech OTF” and found 19 million pictures of Microtech OTF knives, but not a single one with a lanyard attached. I then did a search for “Microtech OTF lanyard” and of the 19 billion pictures, I found 6 knives with lanyards. That’s 6 out of 19 trillion. My scientific research indicates it was a smart move by Microtech to remove a feature that was used by only 6 out of 19 gazillion people.

Deployment and Lockup

The deployment is the reason I bought this knife- it’s magically delicious. The lockup, which has wiggly blade play in two directions, is the price you pay for the awesome deployment. If this were a manual folding knife, I wouldn’t accept this much blade play in a $10 gas station folder, much less one that cost $270 like my Dirac. Unless you drop $2,500 for a G&G Hawk Deadlock OTF (made by the designers of the CRK Hawk clip on my Sebenza, by the way) your OTF is going to have lots of blade wiggle. Therefore, the only fair lockup comparison I can make is is against other OTF knives, and I don’t have any non-Microtechs to compare to the Dirac.

The other three Microtechs I have on hand also all have blade wiggle in one vertical direction (up) and one horizontal direction (right). My memories of handling a few Benchmade Infidel and Autocrat OTFs 11 months ago aren’t super sharp, other than noting that they had blade wiggle too and that the Benchmade switches were significantly easier to actuate than any Microtech I’ve handled. I personally prefer the heavier Microtech trigger weight because I don’t want any auto knife unintentionally opening in my pocket.

The Dirac, like all other Microtech OTF knives other than the HALO, are designed to basically fall off their coiled spring train tracks if the knife encounters resistance during deployment. Launching the blade into something as soft as a piece of thick paper is enough to stop the blade from fully extending, and the blade has to be manually pulled out to get back to its normal functioning state. The HALO has no such safety feature, and is meant to be carried in a sheath. It deliberately doesn’t have a pocket clip to try to discourage people like my friend Shaun from pocket carrying it. Shaun’s HALO opened in his pocket and luckily it just ripped a hole in his pants instead of in his femoral artery.

I don’t have a way to measure the pounds-per-inch of force to move the slider on my Dirac, but it’s heavy enough to require deliberate effort to deploy or retract, and it’s not so stiff that I can’t easily manipulate it. My Cypher’s spring is so strong (perhaps because it’s a significantly longer and thicker blade) that I can barely close it with one hand, and it leaves a dent in my thumb. Microtech seems to have a lot of variation in their slider tension and whether the slider rattles.

My Dirac’s slider doesn’t make a sound, my Ultratech’s slider rattles when the blade is out but not when it’s in, and the UTX-85’s slider rattles all the time. I know that the coiled spring that powers the action is at rest in both the open and closed positions, but why the slider would be loose on some individual knives is beyond my understanding. I do know that it doesn’t seem to affect mechanical performance.

Regarding mechanical performance, The Dirac is my least expensive, still-in-production (AKA replaceable) OTF knife, so I really worked this knife hard, using it for tasks I wouldn’t ordinarily touch with any of my other OTF knives. While cutting cardboard and plastic, I put so much pressure on the blade edges that several times I thought the blade might snap out of the handle. It held up perfectly and the deployment is unchanged after months of use.

Microtech Dirac Review – Final Thoughts

I’ve had a few side-opening switchblades over the years (in fact I just got the Kershaw Launch 13 side-opening switchblade for an upcoming review) and I used to think their level of convenience and ease of use was unmatched. But after carrying and really using the Dirac, I found the form factor of this small OTF knife to be ideal in almost every way. I absolutely love the one-handed ease of use of an OTF knife- the instant it clears the top of my pocket it’s ready for use, and it’s just as easy to put away. The Dirac’s size and shape are well-suited to most tasks I encounter in my life, the M390 blade steel keeps a sharp edge for a very long time, and I consider the handle length of four inches (0.22 Biblical Cubits) to be the minimum usable length for my medium-large hands. By the way, the Microtech UTX-85, which is comparable in size to the Dirac, is generally thought of as an 85% size version of the Ultratech (thus the 85 in its name) but that 85% number only refers to blade length, since the UTX-85 is dimensionally nearly identical to the Ultratech in everything except length. The Microtech UTX-70, however, is actually smaller in all dimensions than an Ultratech. Fun fact? It’s fun for me at least.

I’ve only found three real downsides to carrying the Dirac:

There’s no quiet way to open the knife, other than fake coughing to cover the sound of the addictive in-out-in-out-in-out (until your significant other tells you to stop it with the fuckin’ clicking!)
If the blade has food or tape residue on it, I try to not retract the blade until I clean it because there are parts inside the handle that don’t like sticky goo.
OTF knives seem to be extra scary to non-knife people, at least in my beloved Los Angeles. The other day I was picking up a big bag of vegan fast food at Veggie Grill, where they tape up the takeout bags (to keep the COVID out I guess) and out came the Dirac to cut the tape and check my order. I am not a person who derives pleasure from other peoples pain, but I must say that the looks of shock I saw on the faces of the two employees behind the counter was… satisfying. Sorry not sorry.

Oh yeah, and switchblades are illegal in a bunch of places, so that’s another thing to keep in mind. What I primarily keep in mind however, is that I never, ever, ever, get tired of doing the Dirac’s magic trick.

Thank you to Sara O’Neil for the use of her painting.

Microtech Dirac – From $280.00
From: BladeHQ

Editor: I recommend purchasing the Microtech Exocet at BladeHQ. Thank you for reading.

We Knife Co. Mini Buster Review

by John Burridge Leave a Comment

Snecx! If you haven’t heard of him yet, Snecx Tan is a Malaysian knife and tool maker who is, in my opinion, currently the most mechanically innovative knife designer in the world. His Instagram profile says “Just a hobbyist working on knives. Not a knifemaker.” That’s a bit of an understatement for someone who recently held an auction on Instagram for the one-of-a-kind prototype of his upcoming “Vision S” knife. It sold for $18,900.00 USD. That’s a pretty well-funded hobby.

Buy the Mini Buster at BladeHQ or GP Knives

There are a lot of knife enthusiasts like myself who have been eager to get our hands on a reasonably priced Snecx knife, and WE Knife Co. has delivered with the Mini Buster, which goes for $289. I’ve been using it every day for the last month, and here’s what I’ve learned: it’s a nearly perfect large-ish EDC knife with one major design flaw.

General Dimensions and Blade Details

The Mini Buster is 4.5” (115 mm) closed, 7.8” (198 mm) open, and has a 3.4” (86 mm) blade made of CPM-20CV steel. The blade stock is 4 mm thick at its widest point, and the handle is about half an inch thick (13 mm) not counting the clip, which adds another 4.5 mm. So it’s no slim little Brad Zinker disappear-in-your-pocket folder, but it’s also no Cold Steel supersized monster knife either.

The blade is a very slightly curved sheepsfoot style, which I consider to be the ideal do-everything EDC blade shape. Its tip is pointy enough to pierce tough materials, and the blade is wide enough to use as a butter knife. I prefer the ergonomics of a
sheepsfoot (or wharncliffe) blade over a traditional drop point blade because, when holding the knife with my index finger on the spine of the blade to open a box, the low tip of the sheepsfoot blade keeps my wrist and arm at a more comfortable angle than when using a drop point blade.

The picture above illustrates how the Mini Buster’s sheepsfoot blade tip can cut while nearly parallel to a surface, while the drop point blade on the RealSteel Rokot needs to be at a much higher angle to utilize the tip of the blade.

The WE Mini Buster’s blade stock is Crucible CPM-20CV steel, which is a premium American-made blade steel with extremely high hardness and above-average toughness. To avoid taking an unnecessarily deep dive into metallurgy, I will just say the Mini Buster’s blade has excellent edge retention, but is more likely to chip than bend.

CPM-20CV is nearly identical to the European-made Bohler M390 steel, and these powdered-metallurgy “super steels” are THE go-to blade steels for high-end knives lately. In fact, of the 14 folding knife reviews BladeReviews.com has published so far in 2020, 35% of them had CPM-20CV or M390 blades. They’re great knife steels, and I’ve noticed that I need to sharpen my D2, CPM-154, and RWL34 knives more often than my harder steel M390 or 20CV knives.

Over the past month, I’ve been hacking away at everything in my vicinity that can be hacked at, including thick plastic packing straps, cardboard, annoying clamshell packaging, stray tangerine tree branches, and, when trying to cut a piece of baklava in half, I sliced up a metal catering pan. Despite all that, I have yet to scratch the blade’s black DLC coating or the handle’s anodizing. That’s quite impressive considering that I normally scratch my DLC coated steel blades and anodized titanium handles almost immediately.

The blade’s primary grind angle is known as a “flat” grind, which looks like a narrow symmetrical “V”.

In the kitchen, the blade’s uninterrupted “V” shape had no contours or additional angles to disrupt its slicing path through a bunch of tomatoes and cucumbers. As with nearly every folding knife, the Buster’s blade/handle configuration doesn’t allow food dicing without rapping my knuckles on the cutting board with every downstroke. Snecx tested the durability of his original Buster knife by slashing the tops off of green coconuts- I think the Mini Buster could handle that task, but it would definitely be easier with a non-Mini Buster…

I’m a pretty frugal guy, but I’m impulsive when it comes to my steel and/or gunpowder-related hobbies. It also usually takes me making the same mistake two or three times before I learn my lesson. For example, I’ve watched myself compulsively click the “buy” button on some limited-edition knives that I thought looked cool: a Dervish Knives Alchemy midtech ($395) and a Prometheus Design Werx/Strider Knives SMF “Frogskin” ($635). But my biggest impulse buy of all was in 2018 when I bought a Snecx/Jake Hoback Knives collaboration Buster ($775), which is the most I have ever spent (or ever will spend) on a knife.

Like my first marriage, I always knew I was making a mistake but went ahead with it anyway. I immediately regretted my decision- I didn’t really like them, I wanted to sell them (the marriage analogy definitely no longer applies from this point on), and so I never carried or even enjoyed them. I managed to sell the Dervish and the Strider at a loss, and I’ve tried to sell the Snecx/Hoback Buster twice with no takers. In early 2020 I saw one in the BladeHQ closeout section for $499. Maddening! I’m done with buying expensive knives.

A brief history of the Snecx/Jake Hoback Knives Buster: Snecx is indeed a knifemaker (despite his claims to the contrary) but is not a knife manufacturer, so in 2018 he launched two collaboration projects. The first was the Custom Knife Factory Terra, and the second was the Hoback Buster. According to what I’ve read on Snecx’s Instagram and Hoback’s website, Snecx’s core visual design was minimally modified, but a lot of details were changed, most notably the addition of a honeycomb pattern in the handle.

I definitely appreciate innovation and unique aesthetics, but (sorry Mr. Hoback!) I think it ended up looking like a mashup of two contrasting, not complimentary, design styles. Plus it’s huge. I give zero fucks about what the general public considers an “office-friendly” or non-scary looking knife, but the Hoback Buster is so big and heavy that it’s unwieldy.

I was surprised to see that the Hoback Buster isn’t much bigger or heavier than my Chris Reeve Knives Large Sebenza 21 (an expensive knife that I’ve never regretted buying) but in the hand, the Hoback Buster is a big manly beast knife. OK- out of the shame spiral and back to the review.

Handle, Ergonomics, and Pocket Clip

The Mini Buster feels great in use, even though I can’t quite get a full four-finger grip with my medium-large hands. The handle is long enough overall, but the upswept end of the bottom of the handle (see arrow in picture above) removes some finger gripping space. The pad of my pinky finger ends up on the handle screw near the lanyard loop, and that’s enough for me to achieve a secure grip with all four fingers.

When held in a regular grip with my thumb on the spine, my thumb naturally rests in a little indentation where the backspacer ends above the pivot, but I can also comfortably shift my thumb forward onto a section of jimping on the blade spine if I want more precise control of the blade.

The jimping ends in a stylish little dip for the tip of my thumb, which is one of four places (see arrows in picture above) on the Mini Buster where Snecx used this dip-in-a-straight(ish)-line design cue.

The Mini Buster also has a number of subtle angular details, which are definitely accentuated by the artificial edge wear of the “antique bronze” finish version I bought. There are almost no straight lines on this knife. There’s an almost subliminal curve to every part of the Mini Buster, including the blade, which has a very slight belly. Another interesting design choice on the WE Mini Buster is how the angular front tip of the handle crosses the plunge line of the blade. This is a carryover from the original Snecx Buster design.

According to Snecx, he allowed Jake Hoback to “fix” the handle angle and plunge line so they’re parallel. You can see this difference between the two knives in the picture above. But when WE Knife Co. did the same “fix” to an early Mini Buster prototype, Snecx made them retain his original Buster handle/plunge line design.

Deployment and Lockup

The Mini Buster is a framelock with a unique Snecx twist: the H.D.P.S. system. That stands for Hybrid Detent Pin System, and my admittedly limited understanding of it boils down to this: the shiny round steel pin on the lockbar (see picture below) acts as both the stop pin, which keeps the blade locked into its open position, and as the detent ball, which keeps the blade in place in its closed position.

I can’t be sure if this is a function of the HDPS system, but the Mini Buster does a far better job than most other knives of easily opening while there’s pressure on the detent. I can squeeze the lockbar section of the handle (the part attached to the aforementioned shiny round steel pin) pretty hard without hampering my ability to flip open the knife. Snecx, however, isn’t the only recent innovator on this front. Zero Tolerance Knives recently released the 0707 framelock, featuring their new Tuned Detent System, which is designed to address the same problem, but using a different mechanical approach. I watched a video review of the 0707, and although it does an admirable job of opening irregardless of pressure on the lockbar, it does not smoothly swing shut like the Mini Buster.

I only have one criticism of this knife, and this is the major design flaw I alluded to at the beginning of this review: the little tiny nubby flipper tab becomes completely inoperable if your finger is even slightly wet or slippery.

Why? The face of the flipper tab is completely smooth, without any machined texturing like most flipper-actuated knives have. That in itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it’s also so small there’s barely any surface area for your fingertip, so a single drop of water will defeat any attempt to flip open this knife. In my wet and slippery kitchen and gardening adventures with this knife, I found that the only way to open the Mini Buster was to pinch the spine of the conveniently “V” shaped blade and manually pull it open.

Snecx is known to be an absolute perfectionist, so I don’t understand how there could be such an obvious problem like this. According to what I saw in Snecx’s Instagram posts about the WE Mini Buster, he seemed quite pleased with it, so my theory is this: the lack of flipper leverage (a conscious design choice) was deliberately compensated for by using a somewhat weak detent. The detent, which in this context is the wall of force that my index finger on the flipper tab must overcome to deploy the blade, isn’t quite strong enough to guarantee the knife completely opening every time. I suspect that the detent was made as strong as was possible given the limited leverage on the flipper tab. That’s not a huge deal, but it does require more concentration and effort to deploy the blade than is required for most knives in this price range. I’m probably overthinking all of this, but I have seen several other people mention their knives have a weak detent, so it’s possible I’m right.

Nonetheless, once the blade gets going, the ceramic ball bearings surrounding the pivot give it a smooth and easy action. It locks open with a confidence-inspiring snap, and in use it feels as solid as a fixed blade knife.

We Knife Co. Mini Buster Review – Final Thoughts

Even with it’s flipper design issues, I stand by my initial claim that this is a nearly perfect large-ish EDC knife. According to Snecx, it’s also his final framelock design. He’s moved on to his “Vision” knife, for which he has invented two new technologies: the Superlock locking system, and the Zero Flex Pivot. It became very obvious to me that Snecx was onto something special when heavy-hitter designers like Ostap Hel, Rotten Design, and Tashi Bharucha all publicly commented on the same Instagram post about Snecx’s Zero Flex Pivot. Tashi B’s comment just said “Perfection”. The Vision looks amazing, but that doesn’t matter to me at all, because as I said, I’m absolutely done with buying expensive knives.

UPDATE: I bought a $160 titanium COVID tool.

It’s a very limited edition (only 15 pieces) handmade by one of my favorite knife designers, Tashi Bharucha, in partnership with his frequent collaborator Thierry Savidan. It’s part of a series called “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. I bought “The Good” (pictured above), but did not get “The Bad”, which is the same design but with three knuckle spikes. Both versions came with a little COVID-19 shaped lanyard bead engraved with the words “THE UGLY”.

Like my Hoback Buster, it’s huge and expensive, especially compared to my $17 Civivi copper COVID tool also pictured. Unlike my Hoback Buster, however, I have NO regrets about buying this thing- it’s awesome and I smile every time I whip it out to open a door or punch in my PIN number.

Finally, the Hoback Buster that I’ve been whining about for the entire review is still for sale! Hit me up in the comments or on Instagram if you want to make this “As seen on BladeReviews.com” Hoback Buster all yours…

Thank you to Sara O’Neil for the use of her painting.

We Knives Mini Buster – From $272.00
From: BladeHQ

Editor: I recommend purchasing the We Knives Mini Buster at BladeHQ or GP Knives. Thank you very much.

Bestech Marukka Review

by John Burridge Leave a Comment

Kombou is on fire lately! In the last few years, Bestech Knives has released 8 knives that he’s designed, including the Marukka reviewed here. I bought the Marukka the day it was released, and as I write this review 60 days later, two more Bestech/Kombou knives are starting to hit stores: the Wibra and the Irida.

Buy the Bestech Marukka at BladeHQ
Buy on Amazon

Kombou is the nom de couteau of Grzegorz Grabarski of Siedlce, Poland. I’m the kind of guy that notices and appreciates the evolution of an artist’s work, and I’ve been keeping an eye on Kombou for a couple of years now. I reviewed his Bestech Knives Fanga knife (see pic below) here on Blade Reviews in August 2019, and I found it be be a great knife and a good value for the money.

I’ve been stalking the Marukka on Instagram since I first saw it teased by Kombou in June of 2019. When it was finally released in April 2020, it easily passed all my stringent knife buying requirements:

Is it made of quality materials? Yes, titanium and M390 steel.
Is it reasonably priced for what it is? Yes, $272.
Is it like a big bio-mechanical stabbing machine? Yes!

I’ve been carrying the Bestech Marukka for the last 60 days. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

General Dimensions and Blade Details

The handle is 5” (127 mm), and when opened, the blade adds another 3.75” (95 mm) for an impressive overall length of 8.75” (203 mm). It’s tough to tell from the pictures, but this is a pretty big knife.

The blade steel is Bohler M390, which is an excellent powder metallurgy “super steel” with above average toughness (basically the ability to bend instead of breaking) and extremely high hardness (basically the ability to hold an edge.) M390’s bias of hardness over toughness is great for people like me who don’t sharpen their knives regularly. M390 steel or its contemporaries (like Crucible 20CV, Carpenter 204P, or Uddeholm Elmax) are generally expected in a premium production knife like the Marukka, and I’ve yet to be disappointed with the edge-holding performance any of those steels.

The blade has a substantial spine, starting out at 3.85 mm thick, but tapering to a quite thin .45 mm near the blade’s tip. The design of the Marukka’s blade appears to be simple, but there are a lot of subtle details I really like. It’s a Persian style blade, and the spine has a slight downward recurve before rising to the tip.

There’s a decorative fuller that looks straight but actually shares the slight recurve of the spine. The ricasso (the unsharpened portion of the blade between the handle and the primary sharpening bevel) is stonewashed, but the rest of the blade has a shinier satin finish, which is a cool touch in my opinion. It’s also quite difficult to show in a photograph, since it’s mainly just a difference in reflectivity.

The titanium pocket clip, pivot collar, and backspacer are anodized a brass-y/champagne-y color, and they were also hard for me to due justice to in pictures because the color is pretty subtle. There are currently two other color variants of the Marukka available, both with black stonewashed blades, but they don’t have the dual-finish blade treatment.

I’m kookoo for stabby-looking knives, but I’m also well aware of their limited usefulness in my life. My favorite knife of all time is my Microtech Ultratech signature version with a copper handle.

I don’t know what specific use the Ultratech was originally designed for, but I’m guessing it was murder. Mine even happens to be serial number 187, which is police code for… murder! I mainly use mine to murder boxes and loose threads on my clothes. The Ultatech’s blade is so thin and pointy that I can’t use it to scrape or pry anything for fear of snapping off the tip. I’m sure If I ever tried to clean under my fingernails with it, I’d be typing this with only nine fingers. Furthermore, its copper handle is so heavy that grabbing the tip of the blade between thumb and fingers to do detail work is like trying to tap in a nail with the handle of a hammer- the heavy head is at the far end, throwing off your balance. So I obviously don’t care about logic (or California switchblade knife laws), and love my impractical, stabby Ultratech.

The Marukka is far more practical and well-balanced. Its thin blade slices fruit and vegetables really well for a folding knife, and the combination of the blade’s low belly and the handle’s high arch let me dice onions without rapping my knuckles on the cutting board with every chop. It’s no kitchen knife, but it’ll do nicely in a pinch. Speaking of alternate knife uses, I always open my mail with the unsharpened spine of whatever knife is in my pocket- unless it’s the Marukka. The tip of this thing is so thin and sharp that I just know I’m going to end up slicing open my hand along with my electric bill. For me it’s usually “Oh shit, did I cut myself? There’s no blood- oh there it comes, so much blood!!!”

Placing my irrational fear aside for a moment, I think if I were to use this knife as hard as I’ve used my DPX Gear HEST/F or my Chris Reeve Knives Sebenza, then I would be a little worried about snapping off the Marukka’s tip.

The HEST/F knife (above, left) has a tip that’s protected against snapping off due to its absurdly thick blade stock, and the Sebenza’s tip is thin but is protected by geometry. My Sebenza (above, right) has the Insingo blade option, which is a sheepsfoot style blade. One of the reasons I like sheepsfoot blades is that their spines abruptly plummet down to the tip, resulting in a little more thick steel near the tip compared to the Marukka’s Persian style blade.

Handle, Ergonomics, and Pocket Clip

To test my weak tip assumption, I attacked a huge stack of industrial-sized extra thick cardboard boxes held together with large copper staples. After ten minutes of hacking them into recycling bin size (and running the blade right over the staples) I can say that the handle is comfortable and I didn’t worry once about breaking the Marukka’s tip. The balance point of this surprisingly light knife (4.02 oz / 114.4 g) is just behind the index finger groove in the handle, and it was easy to manipulate with and without gloves. The milled pocket clip added to my grip retention.

I’ve found that pocket clips often create hot spots and interfere with either a standard or overhanded grip. In fact, the DPX HEST/F (the green handled knife from a couple of pictures ago) has perhaps my least ergonomically-friendly clip of anything I own. But the Marukka’s clip is rounded and contoured, and pushed my ring and pinky fingers into an ideal grip when flipping it open. It’s obvious to me that Kombou didn’t just put the clip on as an afterthought, but thoroughly integrated it into the design.

In my months of everyday carry, the Marukka never accidentally slipped out of my pocket, but it would ride up to the tip of the clip if I’d been lying down with it clipped to my pocket. That also happens with almost every other single knife I own except my precious Microtech Ultratech, which has a “double dip” clip that keeps it snug in the bottom of my pocket.

The handle of the Marukka has 4” (102 mm) of usable gripping space, which allows me a full four finger grip with room to spare. Visually, it’s a mixture of organic curves and machine-like lines and angles. It’s like a dagger made from the Terminator’s wrist bone. The word that leaps out at me is bio-mechanical, probably because I just finished reading all five books in the “Murderbot Diaries” series of science fiction novels by Martha Wells. The main character (who calls itself Murderbot) is a human/robot hybrid, and I imagine Murderbot would appreciate the Marukka’s design aesthetic, even though it wouldn’t admit that to a human. The books are super fun, have great action interspersed with dry humor, and have won just about every sci-fi award available, including the Hugo, Nebula, Alex, and Locus Awards. Sorry- I know this is a knife review, not a book review, so back to the knife.

There are several mechanical-style details on the Marukka’s handle. The pivot screw, for example, has the look of a spinning turbine, and the machined line that travels from the pivot screw to the end of the handle looks to me like either a gear or a circuit board. The cut on the lock side that forms the framelock follows that crenelated line to some extent. That’s pretty unique, since the framelock cut is more or less a straight line on about 90% of framelock knives ever since Chris Reeve invented the framelock in the late 1980’s.

The “bio” part of the bio-mechanical theme is most evident in the shape and angles of the handle, particularly on the top of the spine.

There’s a little flat-ish area where the handle meets the blade, which is obviously designed as a comfortable thumb shelf when holding the knife in a regular grip. Behind that is another swoopy indentation, which, along with the thin milled stripes behind it, is purely decorative as far as I can tell. In matters of design, I’m a huge fan of unexpected lines and angles, and Kombou could have just kept the spine going in one long curving line like he did in the Bestech Fanga (2nd picture from the top of the article) but instead he gave us an organic, multi-angled flourish. It’s clear to me that his design style is evolving, and I enjoy noticing the steps he takes along the way.

Deployment and Lockup

The Marukka is a flipper-opening framelock, and the action is light and snappy. The blade pivots on ceramic ball bearings, and the titanium framelock has a steel insert where it meets the blade.

This theoretically replaceable insert prevents titanium on steel friction, which can sometimes result in the knife getting stuck open. This used to happen with my previously mentioned DPX Gear HEST/F, which did not have a steel lockbar insert. I realize that I’ve used it as a bad example twice now, but the HEST/F was quite technologically advanced in 2012 when I bought it- which goes to show how rapidly the knife world has advanced in the last decade.

The detent of a flipper knife controls how much force must be applied to the flipper tab to snap the blade out of its closed position. A weak detent may result in the blade not fully opening, and a detent that’s too strong just kinda sucks. The Marukka’s detent is perfect, as is the detent on the two other Bestech Knives I own. The lockup is solid and there’s no blade play either opened or closed. Actually, I can’t even think of a single modern framelock knife I’ve handled that has any blade play… well, except for my HEST/F (oh no- not again! Sorry DPX Gear!) but its blade wiggle is the direct result of it being my favorite beater knife for almost a decade.

Bestech Marukka Review – Final Thoughts

I pay a lot of attention to details, and I had to dig deep into the details to find anything negative to say about the Marukka. This is all I could come up with: the steel lockbar insert is pretty sharp, and can scratch my thumb if I hold it too far forward when closing the blade. That’s it- I have no other complaints. It’s not cheap, but neither is the the unique and precise machining that went into this big, futuristic-looking, bio-mechanical stabbing machine. Like Martha Wells’ Murderbot, the Marukka is fascinating and dangerous, but smooth around the edges. I recommend it.

Thank you to Sara O’Neil for the use of her painting.

Bestech Marukka – From $272.00
From: BladeHQ

Marukka Framelock Gray BTKT2002A

Editor: I recommend purchasing the Bestech Marukka at BladeHQ and Amazon. Thank you very much.

WE Knife Co. Scoppio Review

by John Burridge 2 Comments

I’m writing this review at my work-at-home desk during the 2020 COVID lockdown, and ironically the first translation Google gives me for “scoppio” is “outbreak.” The second translation (from Italian) is explosion, which is more likely what WE Scoppio designer Toni N. Tietzel had in mind. The German designer’s logo is his initials on a little stick of dynamite. The star of this show is the blade’s unique (explosive?) compound grind. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and as soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to buy this knife.

Buy the Scoppio at BladeHQ or GP Knives

Back in the olden times when I actually physically worked in a building that wasn’t my house, I showed the Scoppio to my two knife-lovin’ co-workers, and I noticed something interesting: several non-knife people wanted to touch it. It’s generally been my experience that most… how do I say this nicely? Most… indoor-oriented people act like if they pick up a folding knife it’s going to bite them like a rattlesnake.

But the Scoppio, which is not small or meek looking, elicited an unprecedented amount of interest. They were drawn to its unusual-looking handle design, its unexpectedly heavy weight in the hand, and definitely by its rich, sparkly blue stonewashed color. My appreciation of this knife goes significantly deeper than that, and it starts with the basic specs:

General Dimensions and Blade Details

The Scoppio has a 3.6” (92 mm) long drop point blade that’s .16” (4 mm) thick, and has a deep stonewash finish. Mine has blue titanium handle scales and a gray blade, but there are black, bronze, and gray handled versions available, some with black stonewashed blades. The open length is 8.18” (208 mm) and my medium-large hands can get a comfortable four-finger grip on the Scoppio when open. All versions run around $259.00 online.

The blade is CPM-20CV stainless steel, which is the sort of premium knife steel that’s expected in this price range. According to smart people who understand steel, CPM-20CV is virtually identical to the more well-known Bohler M390 steel. The main difference is M390 is made in Austria, and CPM-20CV is made in America.

So the Scoppio was designed by a German, the name is Italian, the blade steel is American, and the whole thing is assembled in Yangjiang, China. If I may digress for a moment, the city of Yangjiang is home to a remarkable number of knife companies. Higher-end makers include Reate, Kizer, Bestech, Rike, and Artisan Cutlery, in addition to WE and it’s less fancy sister company, Civivi. It’s like a Chinese version of European knife-producing cities like Solingen, Germany or Maniago, Italy, but undoubtedly a thousand times larger. End of digression.

CPM-20CV has a Rockwell Hardness (HRC) rating between 59 and 61, which is excellent in terms of edge retention, AKA hardness. The tradeoff of a high hardness rating is usually a lower “toughness” rating, meaning that if you whack the cutting edge of the blade with a hammer, the blade is more likely to chip than dent. That’s a tradeoff I’m happy to live with, since I would rather take the risk of a chipped blade over having to sharpen it more often, like I would have to with a less hard steel with a higher toughness rating. CPM-20CV’s 59-61 HRC is nothing compared to Sandrin Knives tungsten carbide blades which reach 71 HRC, but again, the tradeoff of that much hardness means a brittle blade.

The Scoppio’s blade has a lot going on design-wise, starting with it’s overall shape.

It’s a drop point with an unusually big belly that dips a little lower in the middle than at its base. The Scoppio’s belly is one of the many small, unconventional touches that make this knife so fascinating to me. The spine of the blade, for example, is neither a straight line nor a gentle, unbroken curve like on most knives. From tail to tip, it constantly changes angles and thicknesses. And the grind on the flat of the blade is bonkers. The multi-angled grind reminds me of the work of knife design genius Geoff Blauvelt of TuffKnives. He often does interesting 3-D grinds, and Strider Knives has what they call the “Nightmare Grind”, but both strike me as kind of aggressive-looking and seem designed to draw my eye towards the blade tip. The Scoppio’s grind just looks weird. Good weird for sure, but weird.

The unique grind doesn’t seem to impede cutting, but it is a thick blade. Slicing through a crisp apple, the thick top of the blade stock eventually ends up splitting the apple open like a wedge. The Scoppio was my only food prep tool at the 2020 SHOT Show, and I used it daily as a bread slicer, vegetable chopper, and Vegan-aise spreader. By the way, I can tell you from personal experience that it’s virtually impossible to find vegan food at the Shooting Hunting Outdoors Trade show. The Scoppio performed hotel room kitchen duties a little better than a typical flipper-opening knife due to the blade’s belly, but the flipper tab extends well below the blade, so dicing and chopping required a rocking motion, which is less than ideal. Next year I’m bringing a real kitchen knife and a cutting board.

Handle, Ergonomics, and Pocket Clip

The show side of the handle, like the blade, has a standout feature: no visible screws. The “WE” logo hides the knife’s pivot, and it’s flush with the handle scales so the knife has zero wobble when laid flat- a nice touch.

At first glance, it looks rather plain, but upon closer inspection it’s full of subtle curves and unexpected angles. My favorite example of this on the Scoppio are the side-by-side vertices (basically the corners) at the butt end of the handle.

The rearmost vertex (1) follows a logical, normal path by having its corner centered at the apex of the curve. It’s symmetrical and looks “correct” to the eye. The vertex right next to it, however, (2) goes off at a weird angle.

The eye expects vertex 2 to go in the direction the orange arrow is pointing, but instead of being normal looking, its corner angle veers off to the right. I think the design principle this violates is called isometric angle symmetry, but I don’t know anyone who can answer obscure geometry questions. The robust, milled pocket clip’s shape is a (hopefully) easier to grasp example of the strangeness of the Scoppio’s design.

The clip, starting near the tip, is a uniform width. It goes along a predictable curve, as illustrated by the orange lines. Then it gets to the screws, where it looks like it got bent and sliced off with a razor blade. The eye expected it to finish its nice curve, but designer Toni M. Tietzel said no! to that expectation. The entire knife has interesting curvy lines and strange angles, and I absolutely love how unique it is.

I mentioned at the top of the review that non-knife people showed a lot of interest in this knife, and I think one of the factors was that it feels much heavier than you’d expect for something this size. Everyone immediately tossed it up and down in their hand and remarked on the weight. The Scoppio’s bladestock and titanium handle scales are each 4 mm thick on the sides, and where the two pieces meet on the top to form a closed-back design, it’s a total of 13 mm across. The heft of this knife made me aware that titanium isn’t nearly as light as I thought it was. I have other knives that weigh more than the Scoppio’s 4.6 oz (131 gm) but this knife just feels heavier than it looks.

I think the Scoppio’s ergonomics are good- the clip is comfortable against my hand in any grip, the edges of its smooth handle scales are all nicely chamfered so there are no noticeable hot spots, and it’s long and wide enough for me be able to wrap my fingers around it, resulting in a solid grip. It gets slippery when my hands are wet, but I find most folding knives to be hard to hang onto with wet hands.

I’ve noticed that, when dry, smooth titanium feels grippier than smooth aluminum, and that textured G10 and micarta are grippy by nature. I assumed good wet knife retention to be a function of the handle material or how much traction is milled into the handles. I take the thoroughness of my reviews somewhat seriously, so I brought 10 of my folding knives over to the kitchen sink and opened, closed, and manipulated them all with wet hands. I had handles made of machined carbon fiber, machined G10, textured G10, aluminum, copper, smooth titanium, and heavily machined titanium. Surprisingly, the slippery-hands knife retention winner was my GiantMouse Knives GM1.

The GM1 (center of picture) is the smoothest, flattest titanium knife I own, but it also has the most pronounced index finger groove. It turns out that finger grooves work really well with wet hands. The finger groove kept my hand from sliding back and forth, and slipperiness barely affected my grip. The Scoppio’s flipper tab kept my index finger from sliding forward onto the blade, but there’s not much in the handle shape to keep the knife from slipping out of my hand in the other direction should I ever have to hack open an old-fashioned gallon can of olive oil.

Deployment and Lockup

The Scoppio didn’t win the wet knife handle contest, but it definitely wins the best lock engagement sound award. It’s a superbly satisfying steel-on-steel clack, and I’ve never heard its equal in the flipper knife world. I don’t know if it was by accident or design, but WE Knife Co. got the harmonics just right with the Scoppio. It may be connected to the fact that the designer ignored the modern trend of milling weight-reducing pockets into the inside of the thick titanium handles. But whatever the cause, the overall result is a meaty snap when the Scoppio is flipped open on its ceramic bearings.

I have a huge, stainless steel 44 Magnum revolver that weighs 3-1/2 pounds, and the sound of quickly thumb-cocking it is the closest parallel I can think of to snapping open the Scoppio.

The flipping action is smooth and very well-balanced, and the small flipper tab has a little jimping on the front to give my index finger some traction. Lockup on mine is at 30%, which I would usually think of as inadequate, but there’s no arguing with the clack- it’s locked open tight. One contributing factor to the tight lockup may be the blade-mounted stop pin pictured below.

A stop pin (as I understand it) is a typically cylindrical piece of steel inside a folding knife’s handle that the butt end of the blade rests on when it’s open. Its function is basically to keep the blade from opening too far, and to keep the blade in the exact right place when it’s open. On most of my knives, the stop pin is mounted inside the knife between the handles. On the Scoppio, the stop pin is attached to the blade, and it rides in little grooves machined into the handles. I read online that blade-mounted stop pins like this can help reduce side-to-side blade wiggle. I don’t know if that’s true, or if one kind of stop pin system is superior, but frankly it’s too boring for me to investigate further.

WE Knife Co. Scoppio Review – Final Thoughts

This has been a thoroughly positive review up to this point, but according to the sacred code of the reviewer, I have to find something negative to say…OK, I wish the pocket clip screwed into the handle from the inside so the screws wouldn’t be visible, giving the Scoppio an even cleaner look.

And speaking of clean looks, the Scoppio has quite a noticeable seam where the two sides meet. I’m not saying that the Scoppio isn’t well made, but look at where the two halves of the handle meet on the Reate Knives Starboy pictured above- now that’s a seamless seam.

That’s all the negativity I can muster. I love this knife. Its lines and angles are strange and unpredictable, yet it’s not some unusable art piece. The three knives pictured below are by three different designers, but what they all have in common is weird contours and shapes that I find fascinating.

The bottom knife is the Microtech Cypher, designed by Deryk “D.C.” Munroe. It’s like a piece of petrified wood with a huge knife blade that shoots out the front. Everything about it is a little wrong, and I find it endlessly fascinating. On top is the Bestech Marukka, designed by Grzegorz “Kombou” Grabarski. There are so many neat bio-mechanical twists and turns on this brand-new knife that I had to bump it to the top of my BladeReviews review queue. The WE Scoppio, along with the other knives in the picture, are functional art. At the risk of sounding sappy, these three have inspired me to take a stab at designing knives. It’s finally time to turn the sketches and notes I’ve been collecting for years into something in SolidWorks. The Scoppio is both inspired and inspiring, and I highly recommend it.

We Knives Scoppio – $259.25
From: BladeHQ

I recommend purchasing the We Knives 605J at BladeHQ and GP Knives. Purchasing anything through any of the links on this site helps support BladeReviews, and keep this review train running. As always, any and all support is greatly appreciated.

Most Interesting Knives of SHOT Show 2020 – Part Two: Medford to We Knife Co.

by John Burridge Leave a Comment

I went to the SHOT (Shooting Hunting Outdoors Trade) Show 2020 and the Las Vegas Custom Knife Show 2020 and saw literally thousands of knives. Because of the internet in general (and Instagram in particular) most of them looked familiar, but I had never seen 99% of them in person. I buy pretty much everything except fresh vegetables online, so I never really know how big knives are or how they feel until they arrive in my mailbox, so it was really neat to be able to see everything in person and ask questions.

If you missed it, here is a link to part one of our SHOT Show 2020 Coverage. My mission with these two SHOT articles is to not only give my fellow knife nerds a heads up on what’s in store for us in 2020, but since I actually got my hands on them, I’ll do my best to describe how they feel. I apologize for my bad photography- I’m going to do a much better job next year!

MEDFORD KNIFE & TOOL

Nosferatu OTS Auto and Flipper

Pretty much every Medford Knife is in permanent beast mode, and the Nosferatu series of knives are no exception. When I slid off the safety and pressed the lock/go! button, a long, asymmetrical dagger with a false top edge swung out with a nice thwack sound. The flipper version with its sheepsfoot blade was nice and all, but it’s docile looking in comparison to the auto. Both knives use a round plunge lock button near the pivot to unlock and manually close the blade. The flipper’s blade swings freely when the lock button is depressed, so if you want to wrist flick a $650 knife, you can. The auto is $25 more at an MSRP of $675, and both are due out in April 2020.

On paper, their specs sound fairly normal: 3.5” S35VN blade, overall length of 8.4”, and .19” blade and handle thickness. Did the thickness number sound a little high? To put it in perspective, I have an old DPX Gear HEST-F, which has a comically thick blade- it’s .19” like the Nosferatu. Every knife person in the world (other than me) seems to have a heavy duty Spyderco Paramilitary 2 or 3, and their blade thickness is only .15”. Even the legendarily beefy old ZT 0300 series (commonly remembered as the NCIS Jethro Gibbs knife) maxed out at .16”.

My point is these things are THICK. And heavy. I really dug the simple linear design, the coffin-shaped pocket clips (Nosferatu means vampire in Romanian folklore) and the sharp-looking but round-feeling chamfering of the handles. I had never held a Medford knife before visiting their booth, and after putting down the Nosferatu and trying out some other Medford knives, it became very clear to me that the Nosferatu knives are the only ones with corners that are chamfered for your pleasure. The signature Medford style is big square-edged chunks of titanium and steel, and my soft, city-boy hands much preferred the slightly rounded feel of the Nosferatu.

Praetorian Slim Folder

Another new for 2020 knife, the Praetorian slim’s 3.25” blade is made from shockingly thin .125” blade stock but still has that square, slightly uncomfortable Medford feel. Two unique features of the Praetorian Slim are its thin, straight, kind of un-Medford-ey pocket clip (not pictured) and its glassbreaker (detail picture above). The full-size Praetorian knives have a hardened D2 steel glass breaker pommel, but the Slim has a little glassbreaker pyramid machined into the base of the blade. The MSRP is $525.

MICROTECH

Dirac OTF auto

Microtech had a table at the Las Vegas Custom Knife Show, and that’s where I found my newest purchase, the Dirac, soon to be reviewed on this website. My Microtech Dirac has a 2.875” blade of M390 steel and a 4” handle, not counting the length of the glassbreaker.

The Dirac and its larger version, the Dirac Delta, are different from any previous Microtech switchblades in that the sliding switch is on the flat side of the handle, not the spine. The switch placement gives the Dirac a couple of advantages. First, it allows the knife to be vertically symmetrical, which looks good. Second, it allows the switch to be noticeably wider and less tall top-to-bottom than spine-mounted Microtech switches. This gives my thumb much more surface area to apply pressure on the spring loaded switch, which feels good.

Iconic Karambit OTS auto

Here is a Link to the Iconic Karambit so you can check it out. I was so busy trying to figure out the little tiny safety switch on the spine of this new for 2020 auto karambit that I didn’t get a picture. I would ordinarily ask Microtech for a picture for this write-up, but I’m kinda talking smack about this one so I’m not going to ask.

At Microtech’s Las Vegas Custom Knife Show booth, I watched three people besides myself unsuccessfully try to close the Iconic, and just put it back on the table with the blade out for the Microtech reps to close. I’m sure it’s just a matter of practice, but for the first time ever I found a Microtech I don’t like.

PRO-TECH

Malibu Flipper

Pro-Tech’s newest knife is the Malibu, and although its smooth aluminum handles and hardware components have a standard Pro-Tech out-the-side auto look about them, Pro-Tech has swerved a little out of its lane with the Malibu. As far as I know, the Malibu is only the second flipper that they’ve made, and it’s their first knife with this blade shape. Pro-Tech calls it a reverse tanto blade. The Malibu will also be available with Pro-Tech’s first sheepsfoot blade (not pictured.) According to Pro-Tech’s Instagram page, the Malibu is going to further depart from the Pro-Tech norm by having CPM 20CV blade steel instead of their usual 154CM.

The Malibu’s 3.25” blade was on ball bearings and flipped open smoothly. To close the knife, I pressed the appropriately-recessed button lock, which had what I feel to be an appropriate amount of spring pressure to keep the button from being unintentionally pressed during appropriate use. I would characterize this knife as a light-to-medium duty tool. The blade is .11” thick and the shape is designed for utility rather than stabbing. I personally do very little stabbing in my day-to-day knife usage, and I prefer blade shapes like these that don’t require much wrist-bending to get the tip of the blade onto the packing tape of a box. I didn’t find the looks of this knife particularly exciting- its kind of average in length, width, and pocket clip, but Pro-Tech’s big thing is making lots of interesting cosmetic variations of their knives, and I expect the Malibu to be no exception.

REATE

T3000 and T3500 Flippers

The final two knives in designer Tashi Bharucha’s four knife “T” series are on their way to a 2020 release. BladeReviews has already reviewed the first two releases- Dan did the T2500 review in April of 2019, and I reviewed the T4000 in October. Their names are based on blade length, and the 3” T3000 ($330 MSRP) and the 3.5” T3500 ($360 for the micarta handle inlay version (pictured) and $370 for carbon fiber) should be released between April and June 2020. All four knives have titanium handles and M390 blades, and the T3000 and T3500 samples I handled had the excellent fit and finish I’ve come to take for granted from Reate. Their flipper action was on ball bearings and the big blades locked firmly into place. None of the knives in the series are particularly thick, but the tall handles filled my hand enough to get a solid grip.

I’m a huge fan of Tashi Bharucha’s work. I’ve got a Tashi Bharucha Heatseeker flipper (made by Reate, sold exclusively by drop.com) in my pocket right now. The Heatseeker, like the entire T series, is an elegant, aggressive knife that prioritizes style over user comfort. All that means in practice is that the T3000 and T3500 had a couple of hotspots in the form of somewhat sharp flipper tabs and pokey pocket clips. These are not manufacturing mistakes, they’re design choices, and I didn’t mind at all because the knives are so cool looking.

SOG

Ultra XR Folder

First of all, I learned that SOG is an acronym for Studies and Observations Group, which makes no sense to me as the name of a knife company (I think spotting scopes or notepads or ghillie suits would be more sensible products from the Studies and Observations Group) but SOG is owning it by engraving “STUDIES AND OBSERVATIONS GROUP” on every new knife blade I saw. Nonetheless, they had some interesting new knives at SHOT, starting with the Ultra XR. It was absolutely remarkable how thin and light this knife was. The clip is thicker than the blade and handles combined. The specs: 2.8” blade, S35VN steel colored gold with a titanium nitride finish, carbon fiber handles, titanium pocket clip, and an XR (slidey-button) lock. The Ultra XR weighs 1.2 oz., which is less than half the weight of a Spyderco Delica, which also has a 2.8” blade.

My hands-on studies and observations of the Ultra XR revealed that opening the blade with the long oval thumb hole was pretty much effortless. The SOG rep thought that it was running on bearings instead of washers, and it certainly felt like it, although it’s so thin I don’t know how they fit bearings in there. Regarding its sturdiness, I didn’t try to crush it in my hand or spine whack it with the 4.6 oz WE Knife Co. Scoppio I had in my pocket, but the Ultra XR felt relatively sturdy for something so thin and light. MSRP is $139, and its release should be before fall 2020.

Aegis AT Folder

The Aegis isn’t new- Dan reviewed the SOG Aegis for BladeReviews in 2011. I bought an Aegis Mini in 2012, and we both have nothing but praise for them. 2020 brings a few updates, some of which I like. I like the upgrade to D2 blade steel, I like that the pocket clip no longer has the “SOG” acronym stamped into it (the full company name is on the blade like all the other 2020 SOG’s), and I like the jaunty new color combos. My dislikes can be summed up with this quote from The Graduate: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.” The new lanyard loop is plastic. The new spine-mounted safety lock is plastic. The AT-XR (slidey-button) lock button is now plastic- the part you must apply pressure to every time you close the knife is plastic, instead of aluminum like on the older version.

I opened and closed the Aegis maybe ten times and its assisted-opening 3.7” blade snapped open very quickly and locked open just fine. However the spine mounted safety felt somewhat vague and flimsy, and the plastic lock button didn’t feel like it would immediately break or deform, but my brief studies and observations of the SOG Aegis left me with the impression that it’s a great looking knife that I wouldn’t trust without a lot of hands-on testing.

SPYDERCO

Bombshell Folder – Flash Batch

Spyderco let me handle the not-yet released Bombshell folder, but wouldn’t let me photograph it. Instead they gave me a web catalog jpeg of it with no background, so I layered it over a picture of my kitten, Buttercup. Knife/cat size is not to scale.

The Spyderco Bombshell is the production version of designer Michael Burch’s custom Bombshell. It felt heavier than your average Spyderco, and very well made. The thick G10 handles had far more of a 3-D rounded feel than most Spyderco knives, and despite its short (4.04”) handle length, it filled my hand nicely. Its tall 2.98” CPM 20CV blade reminds me of designer Jens Anso’s work, and the pocket clip looks similar to the clip on Michael Burch’s now-discontinued Spyderco Chubby. It’s a Spyderco “Flash Batch” limited limited to 1,200 pieces. I don’t have a release date, but I do know the street price should be $280.

2020 Spyderco Sprint Run Knives

I also got a look at some of the 2020 Spyderco Sprint run knives, which all have CPM REX45 steel blades and burnt orange colored handles. Pictured from top to bottom are the Native Chef (without the upcoming orange scales), the Manix 2, and the Shaman, which were the only three of eight upcoming Sprint Run knives Spyderco had on hand at SHOT Show. Collectors love the Sprint Run because by definition it’s a one-time limited run in a non-standard steel/color combo. I don’t go bananas for Spyderco like many, many people do, but they all seemed very nice.

STRIDER KNIVES

DB-L Fixed Blade

The Strider Knives DB-L isn’t new- it’s at least 10 years old, but it was new to me when I got to check one out at the Las Vegas Custom Knife Show. The DB-L has a 3.9” blade of PSF 27 steel (similar to D2 steel) with a thickness of .19, just like the manly Medford blades mentioned earlier in this article. The handle length is just over 4”, which would ordinarily be long enough for most people to get all their fingers around the grip, but there’s a pretty big finger choil and the G10 grips don’t go far enough forward to allow a four finger grip.

The reason I’m mentioning this in an article focused on new knives is that ever since I handled the CRKT Minimalist Cleaver on the first day of SHOT Show (see the Most Interesting Knives of SHOT Show 2020 Part One). I’ve been fascinated with how knife designers can give the user a solid grip with a handle only long enough for a three finger grip. CRKT’s solution was to make the handle so thin and contoured that it squeezed into the space between the bottom of my fingers and my palm.

When I picked up the Strider DB-L, I understood Strider used a different strategy: a rather thick handle. The shape and diameter of the DB-L’s handle permitted a three finger death grip on the knife in both a normal and reverse grip. The extremely aggressive texture of the G10 “Gunner Grip” handles made by VZ Grips also helped. After relaxing my three-finger death grip, my hands retained the pressed-in Gunner grip texture for a minute or so. As an owner of some VZ handgun grips, I can tell you from personal experience that the grips would rather take some skin with them than slip out of your hand.

After taking a look at VZgrips.com just now, I’m filled with regret that I didn’t think to visit the VZ Grips booth at the SHOT Show- in addition to making grips for Strider Knives, VZ makes a line of absolutely insane G10 daggers. And not just non-metallic (non-metal detector triggering) daggers- they make sharpened cylindrical G10 stabbers disguised as No. 2 pencils and something called the Punch Ripper that’s too horrible to describe. I’m going to kick my COVID stay-at-home blues by getting one of those stabbin’ pencils!

VIPER KNIVES

Katla Folder

The Katla is a thumbstud-opening folder designed by Jesper Voxnaes. The blade is 3.23” of Bohler M390 steel and it will come in several handle and blade finish variations- pictured above are the carbon fiber version and the micarta version, which will have MSRP’s of $208 and $174. There are also some versions (not pictured) that have an interesting organic melty looking machined texture near the pivot and lanyard hole.

The action on the two prototypes I was able to handle was very smooth, and the lockup was solid. I was unable to determine if the knives were pivoting on washers or bearings. The Viper rep made a point of telling me that the pivot collars and backspacers were bronze, but to me they looked very copper-y. Later I did a little research and discovered that the bronze looked like copper because bronze is mostly copper- who knew? Blacksmiths since 3500 BC knew, and now we all do.

WE KNIFE CO.

Gava Flipper

The WE Knife Co. Gava is a scaled-down production version of the custom Gava framelock by BRR Knives of Legnica, Poland. The WE Gava has a 3.25” CPM 20CV blade (1/2 inch shorter than the custom version), titanium handles, and a bearing-driven flipper action.

In the hand, the Gava was typical WE Knife Co quality, which is high. It felt light and tight and flipped briskly. Judging by photos I’ve found online, the WE Gava I handled at SHOT appears to be a pretty faithful rendition of the custom Gava. For me, the major enjoyment of this knife would be in the long contemplation of its thousand neat little machined details. A BRR custom Gava (if you can find one) costs no less than $1,000 USD. I often find it difficult to understand the reason for the high prices of many custom knives, but I’ve done a bit of research on this one, and have definitely figured out the reason for the high price of custom BRR Knives: supply and demand.

People in BRR Knives home town of Legnica, Poland, have been panic buying edged weapons ever since the Mongol invasion of Legnica in 1241 AD. It’s obviously panic buying in case the descendants of Genghis Khan try it again. The WE Knife Gava has a very reasonable MSRP of $275.

Mini Buster Flipper

I had a nerd-gasm when I saw the Mini Buster on the WE Knife table. I’m a huge fan of the Mini Buster’s creator Snecx Tan. I find his design language to be simple and elegant, and the Mini Buster is my most anticipated knife release of 2020. Until now, Snecx has only personally made a handful of knives in his small workshop in Indonesia, and only released two of his designs to be produced by other companies: the Terra folder, produced by Custom Knife Factory, and the (full size) Buster, produced by Jake Hoback Knives. The WE Mini Buster is a framelock design with a 3.43” blade of CPM-20CV steel (vs the 4” M390-bladed JHK Buster), and titanium handles in either a light or dark stonewashed finish. The WE Mini Buster is less overbuilt than the Hoback version and is visually way more Snecx-y.

Handling the Mini Buster, my prevailing thought was that there are a lot of titanium framelock flipper knives out there, but the weight, balance, flipping action, and overall vibe of the Mini Buster have taken it to the top of the framelock flipper genre. Snecx said on his Instagram page that his goal is to make a folding knife as timeless as the Chris Reeve Knives Sebenza. The Mini Buster is not quite that, but it’s clearly a step in the process. He documents that process pretty thoroughly on Instagram, where I’ve been watching the evolution of Snecx’s next knife, the Vision. Snecx has invented an entirely new locking mechanism for the Vision, and that knife definitely has the potential to stand toe to toe with the Sebenza. The release date of the Vision is unknown, but the WE Mini Buster (MSRP of $340) is slated for an April 2020 release. I’m going to buy a Mini Buster tout suite and review it here on BladeReviews.com.

And as an extra treat, here’s a picture of the legendary Arsenal RS-1 knife/gun.

It’s a Rambo knife attached to a six shot revolver chambered in the not-at-all-powerful caliber 22 Short. It’s made by Arsenal Firearms of Russia, it’s $2,500 USD, its target demographic is Russian mob bosses, and it wins Most Interesting Knife of SHOT Show 2020. Thank you for reading!