Once again with feeling, here is another example of how we can’t have nice things.

Oh, never mind the knife. It’s a fine knife, not a thing wrong with it. Well, not much wrong with it, really. It hasn’t got an edge, so it isn’t even a knife. But that’s on purpose.

No. Rather, I only bought this a few short weeks ago and already it’s doubled in price since I did. We all know why.

It represented an alright deal, back then, provided you knew what you were getting into. Now, though, it doesn’t.

And that’s extremely annoying.

In this incarnation at least, this is the “HDD-ZH-005 Generic Butterfly Trainer, Balisong Trainer, Practice Butterfly, Balisong Butterfly Knives NOT Real NOT Sharp Blade, Black Dull Trick Butterfly, Butter Fly Training.”

Drink every time these dweebs say “butterfly.”

It’s a balisong/butterfly knife trainer. Not sharp. Did you get that? The seller wanted to make sure you got that, so they don’t get banned.

“Wait just a damn minute,” I hear you cry, “That’s clearly a knockoff of the Squid Industries Krake Raken!”

Er, well. Yes it is. Here is the object in question, with a picture furtively stolen directly from Squid’s website:

The resemblance is undeniable. There’s a key difference, though, as you’d expect.

Squid Industries are rather unique in the balisong world in that they manufacture very few actual knives. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they don’t – I did, at first. The majority of their lineups are trainers, edgeless, and specifically for practice and showing off. This is kind of the opposite of most other makers, and their incarnation of the balisong (and they have quite a few) is quite a bit closer to belonging in the the yo-yo or fidget spinner worlds than knives. So fervently do they separate their product lines that they even have different web sites for their live and trainer models; never the two shall mix.

They’re also one of the current darlings of the balisong trick-spinning world, and for that the real deal (trainer) Krake Raken is the thick end of $220. In its aluminum incarnation, anyway. They also do a titanium one which starts at $350.

The HDD-ZH-005, meanwhile, is worth $20. Never mind that at the moment it currently sells for around $45; it’s worth $20.

I bought one of these for two reasons, broadly related. First is that I would love to own a genuine Krake Raken, because I have no doubt it is a very fine piece of equipment. But I really can’t justify it at the moment when $220 will buy you an entire matched set of Böker’s tactical balisongs, with change left over for a trainer.

Second is that I keep seeing these bloody everywhere. When you travel in my circles of the internet it seems you can’t escape the damn things, so I wanted to pick one up to see if they were any good and finally put the whole affair to bed. There are no end to the places and means by which you can (attempt, at least) to score one of these, depending on which bunch of wretched charlatans you’d like to do business with and/or their level of audacity. (And get a load of some of those product descriptions. “Sea Monster.” Nudge nudge, wink wink. Yeah, okay, sure.)

All this to say, don’t take what I write as advice. I’m sure somewhere in China there is a factory pumping out a billion of these and they’re all the same regardless of who’s hawking them. Or then again, maybe they aren’t and there are better and worse made examples. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever know, and even if I figure it out it’s tough to tell in advance anyway, what with all the butterfly-edc-training-balisong-trainer-not-sharp-no-edge-trainer-no-edge-trainer, et. cetera.

What You Get

Or what I got, anyway.

I probably shouldn’t be proud to say that I’ve bought a handful of clone balisong knives by now, and therefore I know very well how this is supposed to go. The HDD-ZH-005 follows in the exact same tradition as many others in that its box contains many “value added” items, the actual value of which is in fact rather dubious.

In its little presentation box – which arrives completely bereft of any markings or brand names – you get all of the above. As is very common with Chinese clone knives, you get a set of replacement pivot hardware which in this case is enough to replace both sides, two full pivot setups, but no replacement zen pins. There’s also a faux velvet drawstring pouch in which no self respecting individual would actually store their knife in a million years, a little L shaped Torx driver ostensibly for tuning or undoing the screws, and a bottle of pivot lube.

Here’s the full spread:

It all looks quite comprehensive at fist blush. Just, never you mind that all of these things are completely useless.

I’ll start with the bottle of lubricant, which I’m quite positive actually isn’t.

Whatever’s in there is very thixotropic. I’ll point out that I laid the little bottle down on its side for this photo and within the time it took me to fiddle with my tripod and dial in my focus and all the rest of it, the gunk inside had only flowed as far as you see. Here, just look at this:

I can’t assess the qualities of the product inside because it’s impossible to actually squeeze any of the stuff out of the bottle. No joke. It’s too unctuous and there isn’t enough of it in there for you to actually get any out of the nozzle no matter how hard you squeeze. And it won’t even dribble out of its own accord no matter how long you leave the bottle upside down. Believe me, I tried. So given that, I predict it would not provide you favorable results if you somehow actually managed to apply it to your knife’s pivots.

But good luck with that anyway, because the included Torx driver is made of softer steel than the screws. So if you try to attempt use it on your knife it’ll just round off instantly.

What It’s Like

For $20, the HDD-ZH-005 is great. It only took a thousand words so far to get us here.

It alleges to be a complete and utter clone of the Krake Raken V3 and is therefore identical in size. There’s actually a slight cosmetic difference in that the channel milled into the outside faces of the handles was done after the anodizing rather than before so it shows through shiny whereas the current version of the Krake Raken does not. Possibly this follows suit from some prior version – The Raken is on its fourth incarnation to my knowledge, despite what the V3 on the end would have you think. Apparently, there was a version 2.5 between 2 and 3.

Anyway, that means the HDD-ZH-005 is a full competition sized flipper at pretty much exactly 10" long, open.

Here it is (center) compared to Ye Olde Model 42 (left) and I think what is the biggest balisong I own at the moment, a Kershaw Moonsault (right).

The HDD-ZH-005 – You know what, can we give this thing an easier to type name?

I’m going to call it “Horven.” That seems appropriate.

Horven is 5-3/4" long closed with a “blade” of 4-3/8", which is of course totally unsharpened although the edges are all chamfered.

The blade is some sort of steel, evidenced by a magnet sticking to it. The handles aren’t – they’re definitely aluminum of some description although whether they’re T7075 like the original is anyone’s guess. It is at least competently hard anodized and not painted. The finish on mine has already demonstrated its durability by hitting the floor quite a few times.

All those slots milled into the blade aren’t just for decoration, by the way. They’re an essential weight reducing component. It’s maybe not obvious at first blush, but a real sharpened knife blade has a good deal of material removed as part of its taper, which this hasn’t got. If you just had a flat slug of the same steel of a consistent thickness all the way through with the same footprint it’d be much heavier and throw the point of balance way off. So you’ll find that pretty much all trainers follow this same methodology of taking huge decorative bites out of the blade. This also presumably alerts anyone who is paying attention that this isn’t a “real” knife and is therefore not likely to do anyone any harm.

Still and all, maybe don’t take this to an airport or school.

Thus with all the machine work in the blade, Horven’s point of balance is right where you’d expect it to be, which is about 1-5/8" behind the pivot point when it’s open or just slightly forward of the first hole drilled in the handles. Altogether it weighs 106.8 grams or 3.77 ounces which is pretty in line with the weights of all the high speed/low drag aluminum and titanium tricky buggers the cool kids all seem to be wielding these days.

That weird slightly brown mark on the blade is not an optical illusion, dirt, nor any kind of photographic bug, by the way. It really is there in real life, and on both sides. I don’t know what it is, but it won’t clean off. Maybe some kind of burn mark from when it was machined, but I have no clue why any of that would have been done after the rest of the surface finishing. Oh well; Maybe that’s what you get for saving $200. It’s easy to overlook until someone points it out, so I’m not too worried about it.

It’s a kicker pin-less or Zen pin design and also latchless, both of which also seem to be the current fashion. The handles are unitary channel milled billets, 0.504" thick, and tapered: 0.525" thick at the tail and 0.424" at the pivots. There’s a machined concentric crosshatching pattern on the faces…

…And some decorative channels in the sides, plus some wide jimping down at the ends.

One thing Horven didn’t come with was anything to mark the bite side handle versus the safe side, and while it’s somewhat academic with a blunt trainer and the handles are otherwise completely symmetrical, the blade isn’t. So maybe you’d like to keep track of such a thing, but if so you get to provide your own solution.

You can see that there are bronze pivot washers, and Horven has a bushing pivot system in keeping with its list of trendy bullet points. Or, more prosaically, the original Krake Raken does as well so this has ripped that off wholesale along with everything else.

It’s tough to argue with the action, and whoever made this copied Squid’s homework closely enough that the “mathematically tuned” balance of the original is probably sufficiently faithfully reproduced.

Horven’s pivot action is 100% satisfactory, the next best thing to having ball bearing pivots. However…

…While it’s not possible on my example to get the blade to strike the inner surfaces of the handles (“tap”) there is still a noticeable amount of lash in the pivots. So it definitely doesn’t compare with a ball bearing knife in that way.

Horven is also very loud. It makes not only a ton of racket but has a decidedly weird rebound action which is probably related.

This is getting deep into wine-snob territory, here. But Horven is a lively one – There is a ridiculous degree of bounce off of the Zen pins, much more than any other knife I own including similarly constructed (and similarly cheap!) all-aluminum channel milled jobbies. I don’t know why.

You can see that here, where just plain old gravity is enough to make the free handle bounce like a pinball right off the Zen pin, to the tune of, what, 10 or 15 degrees? If you’re not ready for it I found this can actually cause you to miss catching the handle in some situations, which will leave you looking totally uncool to anyone standing around watching you.

There’s also some kind of tuning fork resonance going on in the blade, and the thing not only clanks like a bell but continues to sing for some seconds after coming to rest if you listen to it carefully.

I have no idea if the original exhibits any of these quirks, what with not owning one. Give me a raise and I’ll buy one, then we can do a side-by-side?

Well, it was worth a shot.

What’s Inside

Look, I’ve been intentionally avoiding this subject for many paragraphs now, but there’s no getting around it once we’ve made it this far.

Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to take your Horven apart. It’s damn near impossible.

The blasted thing comes with spare washers and lube and even that little screwdriver all just cheekily implying that you’re expected to tune it or be able to dismount the blade. Well, forget it. It’s unlikely that mere mortals will succeed at this, because the pivot screws are beyond overtorqued from the factory and they’ve been glued into place with permanent threadlocker. Thanks a lot, assholes.

Luckily I am a bird of phenomenal skill and talent, not to mention a lot of tools and a penchant for fire. In the spirit of journalistic integrity I gave it the old heave-ho anyway and damn the outcome.

To get this apart I had to blast the screws with a pencil torch for some minutes, and apply my high quality Wiha T8 Torx bits to both sides of the pivot screws simultaneously, and put one of them in a 90 degree driver just to obtain enough torque. I thought for sure I was going to strip the screw heads, but I ultimately persevered.

…Until the next problem.

Note here how I have both pivot screws removed and nothing up my sleeves, nor in my hat. But look, it’s like magic – the fucker still won’t come apart, with the blade remaining resolutely locked into the handles as if the screws were still there. (Maybe they’ve turned invisible.)

Just look how hard I have to yank on this to get the handles off.

The problem is that the Chinese failed to copy one very critical dimension, which is the space between the handles. I imagine this was to compensate – or more likely overcompensate – in an attempt to reduce the amount of wiggle in the blade. But if that was their intent they didn’t quite succeed.

The play between the blade and pivots is actually down to the clearances between the bushings and both the blade itself and the pivot screws, not the handles. That’s evidenced here by the amount of daylight you can see showing through in this arty silhouette shot.

Getting the blade, washers, and bushings assembly out of the handles is difficult enough, but getting them back in would surely stymie anyone who didn’t already know exactly what they were doing.

Not only do you have to cram the parts into a gap that’s slightly smaller than their assembled dimensions and literally bend the aluminum handles apart slightly to do so, but then you have to get two washers and the bushing near-perfectly lined up with the holes in both sides of the handle with no inbuilt aid. I successfully got mine apart and back together – twice – but this necessitated a… small amount of violence.

You can see what we’re up against by peering down the channel of one of the handles here. There is a stairstep in it where the pivots are, which is carried over from the Squid original. But the clearances are slightly wrong.

To determine just how wrong, I really went reaching for that Pulitzer and got out my calipers. Here’s what I found:

The bushing outer diameter is 6.97mm but the holes in the blade are 7.07mm, so either the bushing is undersized or the holes are oversized by 0.1mm. That doesn’t sound so bad, but the bushing inner diameter is 4.83mm and the outer diameter of its matching pivot screw is 4.77mm, so there’s another 0.06mm. All told that’s 1.6mm of overclearance per pivot, which is obviously noticeable.

But the stack of washers and the bushing, which all together comprise the true thickness that the handles must account for (the blade is irrelevant because it’s thinner than the length of the bushings by design) is 4.20mm exactly. And the channel in the handle is only 4.12mm. So this is the only dimension that’s undersized, and boy does that make things a faff and a half.

So to get the whole sandwich back in there you’d better be either very mighty or very clever. I know which one I am. You can take your own chances.

While we’re in here, this is the usual hardware lineup. You might notice that this is minus the Zen pins, and aren’t those Torx screws as well? Yes, they are, but just like the main pivots they have no anti-rotation flats, and they’re torqued to hell and back just the same as the big screws. There’s no way to even have a hope of undoing them without grabbing them hard with pliers and destroying their surfaces to the point that even if you got them busted loose they probably then wouldn’t clear their own holes.

So again in the spirit of journalistic integrity, I bravely gave up.

So What?

Horven is a broadly competent little (maybe not so little) balisong trainer that’s perfectly acceptably built provided you never have occasion to take it apart.

And let’s be honest, other than showing off for ninja cred and writing long-winded tripe like this, there’s really no reason for most people to do so. So don’t.

The real headline here is that you might never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

The genuine Krake Raken is already untenably expensive for what amounts to a fidget toy, at least for most normal people. (Balisong people are not normal people, as I have opined many times before. I mean, hell. Just look at me.) But the way things are going these days it might soon turn out that things like this might become unreasonably expensive as well. And what a pisser that’s turning out to be.

For $20 or so this is a fun little toy that’ll save you either lopping your fingers off or throwing one of your near-kilobuck collector’s items on the floor. Or, if you were a budding little waddler just starting off and with only your allowance money to work with, it could be the perfect cheap entry point into leaning how to do the whole balisong thing. There are, it must be said, certainly far worse values available for the same money (or more!) wherever shonky Chinese goods are sold.

So all that’s cool. But for $40 it’s already questionable, and if it touches $50 I think that’s the point where its cost completely exceeds its worth.

At that rate there are better values for your money in a trainer balisong.

Maybe I’ll even show you one of them eventually.