Bear Song VI Balisong

grabcad

This was the first model I made in Autodesk Inventor. It's not especially complex, but it was a good learning project coming from other CAD software.There were some interesting design choices I noticed as I took measurements:- Some have said that the handles of this knife are made of cast aluminum. But given the features and how they are laid out, it seems likely that they're actually machined on a CNC mill.- The tang pins are threaded (M2, as best I can tell) and screwed into each other with dabs of red threadlocker from the factory. This is a tragic oversight. The tang pins are one of the most highly-loaded parts of the knife and a few wimpy millimeters of M2 threading is nowhere near adequate. Plus, they appear to have been lathe-turned, likely making them much more expensive than they needed to be.- The blade is unusually thickly ground. In use, sometimes it feels more like a log splitter than a knife since the sharply sloped sides spread apart what you're cutting.- The crackly powder coating is probably necessary to prevent corrosion of the 1095 steel. But it adds even more to the thickness of the blade, as well as a rough surface that generates friction when you try to cut through things.- The latch is a clever design and works well, although actually adjusting its tension seems to be next to impossible.https://web.archive.org/web/20200802202319/https://www.knifecenter.com/item/BCB600B/bear-ops-b-600-b-bear-song-vi-butterfly-knife-black-drop-point-blade-silver-aluminum-handles