Spooky scary balisongs are flipping through the air

Because they bought the newsroom hype they're outlawed everywhere

Imaginary urban toughs lurk only in your minds

But in your reelection bid, you make up fake new crimes

Oogly boogly!

This is the Cold Steel FGX series Tanto Balisong. This is a very scary and very naughty knife because it's not only a balisong, but as part of Cold Steel's FGX line it's also completely nonmetallic.

...I was waiting for the crash of thunder and the howling of the wolves. In the old country, whenever you said something super ominous and spooky, you could reliably count on dramatic convention to ensue.

No? Nothing?

Well, anyway, the core conceit of the FGX Tanto is easy to guess. It's made through-and-through of injection molded fiberglass reinforced Nylon. Which, according traditions both ancient and incessant, Cold Steel has made up a frilly name for. They call it "Griv-Ex." The blurb also claims that "other strategic non-metal materials" are also used, most likely ABS or something similarly mouldable in order to pull off the rivets and latch. But no matter how you slice it (har), there's no metal in here whatsoever.

It's also black, from stem to stern. I understand that makes it extra scary. So stop the presses, duck and cover. Phone the President, call up the National Guard. Quick, ban it! Ban everything!

Indeed, with any luck the very existence of this knife and others like it are keeping our harebrained legislators from getting a good night's sleep any night of the year. Cold Steel's product page also goes on to mention that this knife "may" not be legal in all jurisdictions, and I imagine that's probably so. It may in fact be shorter to list the locales where it is legal than print a veritable telephone book of all the places where it isn't. When your ivory tower is so tall that the sum total of your tenuous grasp of reality is apparently informed only by cartoons and schlock 1980s ninja movies, it's easy to miss the clear and simple fact that there's nothing inherently any more dangerous about a balisong knife than any other kind except, perhaps, to its own wielder. And not a single person hoping to smuggle a shiv through a metal detector with malice in their heart is going to deliberately pick a style of knife that's specifically and notoriously difficult to use, are they?

They're going to use, er, a shiv. Like I said. Probably made of glass or wood.

But that's not going to stop people living in fantasyland from getting extremely hot and bothered about this thing. And then we wind up with silly laws.

Even outside of all of the above, the FGX balisong is awesome simply because it is monumentally absurd. It is a mustachio-twirling, damsel-to-tracks-tying, cartoon caricature of villainy. And for that I adore it.

Monstrosity

The one thing that becomes immediately apparent as soon as you have an opportunity to hold the FGX balisong is that it is absolutely humongous.

It's 6-1/2" long closed and a full 11-1/8" when open, with a 5-1/8" blade. The numbers don't do it justice. It is, bar none and without peer, now the largest balisong knife I own... And by a significant margin. Every proportion is exaggerated. It's 0.719" thick, nearly three quarters. Counting just the handles, it's 1.336" wide. That's without the latch! Across the ears at the heel of the blade it's 1.626" wide, near as makes no difference to 1-5/8".

It's bigger even than a Kershaw Moonsault. It towers over a Benchmade 87 and outright dwarfs the Model 51. It completely eclipses a Mantis Mothra. It's gargantuan. It's a B movie monster, ripped straight from the posters.

But due to being made entirely out of plastic composites, it only weighs 90.9 grams or 3.21 ounces. So despite having probably around double the displacement of a Model 51 if you dropped both of them into a bucket of water, it weighs about the same — and is only 70% of the weight of my titanium scaled BM51 clone, pictured above. And thanks to being made of the same material all the way through the point of balance is somehow still right.

That makes the FGX balisong, contrary to all logic and expectation, a fully mechanically functional balisong knife.

But needless to say, if some ne'er-do-well is hiding one of these about his person, it's so huge that you'd be likely to notice the attendant bulge.

Otherwise, there is a full compliment of familiar features. The FGX balisong has a real working latch, which even has a primitive detent built into it. The detent's just a pair of nubbins cast into the shank on the latch, which out of the box gripped ridiculously hard. They wore in pretty quickly, though, which makes me wonder if at some point soon they'll just plain old wear out and cease to function. The latch isn't spring loaded and doesn't have any anti-rattle or clash prevention features, but you can't have everything in plastic. Well, actually, you can, but who's counting? There's also a curious extra endstop pin built into the latch itself, which rests between the handles. This is probably an anti-squeeze device, which helps conceal the inherent noodliness of the handles when the knife is latched.

It's even got a real live pair of kicker pins, although perhaps "pins" aren't the right description, because these are moulded directly into the blade. They can't be dismounted. Nor, apparently, can the plastic rivets that act as pivot pins. These too are of course thoroughly nonmetallic, and appear to have had their heads shaped in place with the application of heat. I thought at first glance it might be possible to press them out again for disassembly, but they didn't budge even after applying a generous shove with a punch, and after that I gave up.

The upshot of this is that the FGX balisong has a small but manageable amount of lash in the pivots that results in a free end handle play of maybe just under a quarter of an inch. That's actually not bad, considering not only the length of this thing's handles but also that it's, you know, made out of friggin' plastic.

There are some visible mould release marks on the various components, including this prominent one on the blade. A couple of seam lines are also apparent, all of which make it clear that every part of this is injection moulded.

Teeth, Gnashing In the Dark

Note that I called the FGX balisong a "knife" earlier and not a "Balisong Shaped Object." Cold Steel go out of their way to point out that this is not a toy, and that's the truth. That's because — are you sitting down? This thing actually has an edge on it from the factory.

Okay, it's not much of one. And that may be for the best, because with the best will in the world consumer grade thermoplastics are not renowned for their edge retention characteristics. But the FGX balisong is at minimum the level of sharpness required to serve as, say, a letter opener. As you can see it can't cleanly deal with a Post it, and it's not enough to draw blood by just running your thumb down the edge. But there is a distinct sawtoothed sharpness you can readily feel, and which is several ranks above butter knife grade.

The blade is very thick, 0.270" all the way down its length, distally tapered to its edge with no secondary bevel. Yes, that's more than a quarter inch. It's a single flying wedge, with a flat... er, grind isn't the right word, but it's the equivalent shape. Except for its very point:

The latter of which is reinforced with a convex profile. Thus it's clear that Cold Steel's intended method of employ is probably thrusting rather than cutting. Fiber reinforced nylon is only rigid in a relative sense, compared to other readily available plastics. It's not a patch on even cheap steel, but it is extremely resistant to shattering or snapping which means this is likely to be quite brutally effective if you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to insert it into an assailant. It'd surely work at least once. Maybe don't go around telling everybody, though.

It's also strangely soothing to pinch the tip of the thing and feel the point where it gently transitions from flat to curved. I couldn't tell you why.

If this isn't mean enough for you, Cold Steel also do a dagger profiled version with serrated edges. That one looks even more menacing than this one, and I may just have to pick it up for the perversity value as well as the sake of completeness. If nothing else, these things are cheap: Cold Steel list the serrated ones at thirty bucks a piece, but the simpler tanto version is only seventeen.

It's got pretty much exactly a 135° tanto point on it, like a kid's drawing of a samurai sword. And what looks like it might be chromatic aberration around the point actually isn't, by the way.

It's a bit of mould flashing, through which we can deduce that the edge is not ground or milled on in any way, but is in fact moulded right in.

While we're at it, here's what the edge looks like right at the point, up close good and proper. It's not exactly precision work, this, but for a thing that's made out of plastic for only a couple of bucks it'll do.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I've heard it whispered in the dark corners of the Internet that when manufacturers make nonmetallic knives like these, The Man forces them to surreptitiously insert bits of metal into them someplace so they'll still trigger a metal detector. Well, I'm pretty sure this is bullshit. I took one of my imposing collection of unwisely powerful magnets and waved it all over the FGX balisong and came up with nothing. If Cold Steel did something like this, they must have used something nonferrous. Personally, I'd doubt it.

So the FGX balisong it exactly what it appears to be: A plastic bogeyman, a stab in the dark, seventeen bucks worth of pure annoyance aimed squarely at the types of people we'd like to annoy. Fuck 'em.

Needless to say, carrying this anywhere is certain to get somebody's panties in a twist, some way, some how. I should also point out that nonmetallic or not, this absolutely will not sail through one of the fancy X-ray backscatter machines the TSA is using these days. And, in fact, things just like this are precisely why they use those now. So don't try it.

But in the realm of security theater, I think it's fitting that we get to be dramatic right back at these bozos. If they fear monsters lurking under their beds, well. I say let them be spooked. Wield your FGX proudly and let it flicker as a tiny candle flame of common sense in a world of idiotic darkness.

Plus, it's cool. How can you argue with that?