Quoted By:
so much idiocy in this thread...
first, a balisong is a viable edc knife, that's pretty much obsolete, and the bucketload of rebel attitude it used to come with in the 1980s has been replaced with codkiddies.
As a knife design that predates the buck 110 folding hunter, the balisong did something no other [folding] knife of it's time did - it had one-handed operation and a reliable locking mechanism.
Strictly speaking, the balisong is the strongest locking mechenism design on the planet. Forget sebongos and other titanium framelocks - the balisong is stronger than all of them. Provided, of course, that the handle is made of something that won't break - I have a cheap junk balisong lying around somwhere that I could literally bend the handle in my hand. Needless to say - that doesn't sound like something reliable.
But when you get something like a benchmade 51 (titanium liners, g10 scales), 62 (steel), or the now discontinued 42 (solid titanium), there's no way that's going to fail under any reasonably concievable circumstances.
Thare's a problem, though. Benchmade balisongs are waaaay overpriced. The BM 32 (iirc the cheapest model they have) is some 200 bucks msrp, and it goes up from there.
And, like I said, they are pretty much obsolete. Sure, you can carry one as your edc (I did, for over a year straight), and it works like any other knife. Any normal folder, though, will do the same job, and is just that much more straightforward to use.
As for their status as nall ninja weapons - you have TF2 and CS:GO to thank for that. Counterstrike in particular has a tradition of taking shitty knife designs that are both impractical, and poorly made, and making them desireable (to the target audience) because the in-game model doesn't take anything besides appearance into account.
