Well, kids, it finally happened. Old Uncle Knifey ordered some shit from China and got taken for a ride.

I know, right? Say it ain’t so.

This, insofar as anyone can identify or describe the thing, is a “Paodin ‘Resurgent’ 6061 T6 Aluminum Alloy Handle D2 Blade Bushing System Pocket EDC Tool.” I bought it off AliExpress from the just fantabulously named “Paodin KnifeSplendy Store.”

Paodin is an online clone knife seller, or possibly maker, or both, of at least some repute. This apparently notwithstanding that all of their listings mysteriously disappeared from the internet shortly after I bought this, and then just as inexplicably resurfaced again a while later. And I still have absolutely no idea what the hell “Splendy” is supposed to be.

Anyway, this whole odyssey requires short look at the Alibaba balisong knife buying experience. You see, it’s really weird.

I am assuming due to either some asinine contortion of Chinese law and/or Alibaba’s policies, it’s not that you can’t technically sell balisong knives on the platform, it’s simply that you just can’t depict anything as being a balisong knife. Distributing is okay. Just don’t admit it. See? It totally makes sense.

So what you get to work with are hastily edited product pictures that just not-so-artfully have the blades excised from them. By all appearances you’re just buying a pair of handles, but the sellers take pains to insinuate, but perhaps not outright state, that their products are in fact “complete.” Nod’s as good as a wink, say no more. (All of these sellers further also plead that you don’t post pictures with your reviews so they don’t get busted. Eagle eyed readers will also notice that one of the handles in the picture above is wrong, and has the texture flipped around. Who knows how much of it is actually real…)

Combine this with the usual sterling product descriptions consisting of terse Engrish and containing largely only irrelevant details and it makes it a trifle difficult to ascertain just what, exactly, it is you’re buying. And that’s before you even get into the ever lurking potential hilarity inherent in direct ordering Chinese junk from fly by night sellers, vis-a-vis the possibility of thing showing up the size of a toothpick. Or the size of a boogie board. Or you might just wind up with a picture of whatever it was supposed to be on a 5x6 postcard.

Sure, these guys all claim that if you email them they’ll send you more complete product photos. And sometimes they do. But usually you may as well just stand out at the edge of the sand and shout into the ocean for all the good it’ll do you. You’d better like playing the surprise game.

So this thing. I specifically ordered the “black live blade” option. Note that “live” means a sharp blade. You know, like, a knife.

Well, what I got instead was this.

I think it’s some kind of Dwemer artifact.

This would be just right at home gently spinning on a loading screen, wouldn’t it? I know you can just picture it.

I don’t exactly know how to classify the “Resurgent.” It’s a balisong knife, obviously, but only for suitably small values of “knife.” That’s because it has no edge on it whatsoever. The listing claims it’s made of D2, which it may or may not be, and a fat lot of good it’d do anybody even if it was. It’s no sharper than a butter knife with deliberately rounded over edges, and that normally ought to mean that it’s a trainer: An unsharpened practice stand-in designed for Gud, the Gitting thereof. Or for showing off balisong tricks you might be too chicken to pull of with a sharpened blade.

Regardless, I’m pretty sure unsharpened was the one thing I was not supposed to get. But AliExpress provide only two options to rectify situations like this, which are to wit: Pay to ship the thing back to China and try again, or go fuck yourself.

Well, for 20 bucks I’m positive I can’t be bothered. And what I wound up with is damn interesting all the same, so here we are.

I wasn’t planning on getting a trainer knife just now, or at least not this one. But on the topic of that, I don’t think there are too many trainer knives out there that can do this.

The Resurgent doesn’t have an edge, but it does have a wicked point on it that’s every bit as real as, for instance, most of the throwing knives I’ve ever owned. So it’s useless for any cutting task but quite pointy enough to do yourself a mischief if you toss it into the air and it lands point-first on your palm. If you ran someone through with it they’d be bound to notice, as well.

So it’s sharp, without being sharp. A trainer blade, except not. Monkey in the middle, just what are you?

This is also one of those things that you’d think is guaranteed to be a clone of something else. But if it is, I’m drawing a blank. I racked my brain for any past or present brand name balisong or trainer this may have knocked off, and pawed through pages upon pages of Google image results trying to find a match with no success. Maybe somebody knows; I sure as hell don’t.

You won’t get any help from the packaging, since it showed up in a completely unmarked plain white box. This contained no documentation, no leaflet, no packing materials other than the baggie the knife was in (with the latch components rolling around loose inside), and certainly no branding. This knife didn’t even come with the obligatory and by now familiar useless Torx screwdriver made of cheese nor customary pair of spare pivot screws.

The Resurgent’s party trick is obviously this.

The highly detailed blade is heavily machined with various pockets and sweeps, but it’s hard to miss the centerpiece which is the array of quite fine featherlike grooves that follow the contours of the blade. It’s possible, I suppose, that the blade is cast or possibly metal injection molded to get these shapes somehow, but I don’t think it is. If it’s machined then the work is actually pretty good. Whatever the blade is made out of is some kind of steel, since it’s magnetic. Possibly D2 like the description says, or 440, or 3Cr, or something. But definitely not zinc or any other potmetal.

It’s a damn shame not only that they didn’t go as far as putting an edge on the friggin’ thing, of course, but also that since the texture is parallel to where the edge would have been it kind of impedes you from trying to sharpen much of its length even if you wanted to. But still, it’s neat.

The handles are indeed aluminum, and fairly competently anodized at that. They’re machined with radial grooves with a kind of art deco vibe. And it’s real anodizing, not paint. I’ve proven this by fumbling it onto the floor many times already where it’s withstood the abuse handily. There’s nary a flake or chip in it, and hardly even a scratch.

In lieu of a crossguard or the traditional nubbins you might find on a balisong, you get this pair of hooks. I’m pretty sure these are shaped with the intent of being used as a bottle opener. I’ll bet you it’d work, but I don’t have anything to test it on at the moment so you’ll have to just use your imagination on that one. You’d only be able to hook a bottle cap with the blade deployed, for whatever it’s worth, since the cutouts recess into the handle slightly when you have it in the closed position.

The blade’s surface is stonewashed and has a nice gunmetal sort of finish on it. I can’t tell you how well it’ll hold up long term, but my example shows no visible signs of wear in the near term of the few weeks I’ve been messing around with it.

What drew me to this in the first place was the presence of a latch. This is going to sound stupid, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get your hands on any of these kinds of clone knives that’ve got a latch. Even the ones that are knockoffs of originals that did have a latch near-pathologically omit it for some reason.

I understand some highly technical show-off operators prefer to have no latch on their knives, but I certainly don’t. I generally carry my balisongs to use, so it’s kind of an essential feature for me.

Probably in deference to those types, though, another quirk of this thing is that it showed up with the latch, but dismounted and rolling around separately in the box. I had to install it myself.

The latch is unusually also a two piece design, with the head threading into a tubular shank. The head and shank (and their pivot screw) all arrived in this disassembled state. Weird.

Either way, the latch is perfectly effective and positively drops into pockets machined on either side of the safe handle.

It’s actually little too effective, but not in the way you’d think. Rather, its edges are geometrically square; the thing’s been lathed into an almost scissorlike edge. This means it can catch on the inner lip and dig into the softer aluminum of the opposite handle slightly, which makes the knife hang up in that position.

It’s not difficult to avoid but it feels like you’ve just experienced a glitch in the Matrix every time you encounter it unexpectedly. You can see in the picture above how it’s chewed a bit of the anodizing off of the very corners of the handle, which is a trivial thing (especially for a trainer you’re bound to drop on the floor nine million, three hundred and fifty eight thousand, four hundred and six times), but it’s still kind of annoying.

This could be fixed readily, and I plan to do so, by just taking a file or a grinder or something and zipping a little chamfer into the inside edge of the latch head. The outer edge already has a chamfer on it, so I’m not sure why the inner one doesn’t. I’m doing all my photography first, though, so you all can experience in all its accurate glory how things are rather than how they ought to be.

The latch is not spring loaded in any way but falls free of its own accord if you squeeze the handles together hard enough. It has no endstops so it can strike both the opposite handle as well as the blade if you’re not careful. Since there’s no actual edge to ding, though, this is unlikely to actually do any harm.

Oh, and there’s no clip either. I’d doubt anyone cares; You’re not going to EDC a blunt knife.

Weights and Measures

I think the best way to describe the Resurgent’s size is “intermediate.” It’s not as long as a traditionally sized balisong or a competition flipper, nor is it as short as a compact EDC balisong. This may be of some interest to anyone with small hands who finds the bigger popular options to be too unwieldy, but who’s also already discovered that there’s kind of a minimum threshold for handle length required in order to pull off certain types of finger and wrist rolls that all of the EDC sized options typically fail to meet.

When closed the Resurgent is precisely 5-1/4" long. It’s 9-1/8" open, with an effective/ineffective blade length of 4-1/8" past the forwardmost tips of the handles. The handles themselves are 0.505" thick, basically exactly half an inch, and nearly square in cross section. They are tapered, though, with the tips being wider (0.522") than at the pivots (0.441").

I understand that tapered handles are possibly out of vogue in the trick-spinning balisong world at the moment, and people are probably gearing up their double pivoted siege engines for the holy war that’s about to commence on the topic. But I prefer a tapered pair of handles, and this thing has got 'em, so that’s nice.

If it matters one whit, and it probably doesn’t, the blade itself is 0.149" thick at its meatiest point which is on the flats up around the pivot area. It weighs precisely 120 grams or 4.24 ounces fully assembled, including the latch.

All of this puts the Resurgent right in between, for sake of argument, the ultra-compact Benchmade Model 32 Mini Morpho, and the hyper-traditional Model 42.

It’s quite a bit shorter still than a BRS Replicant or a Squid Krake Raken (yes, I am aware mine is a fake, hush), which are probably among the current trendy benchmarks for this sort of thing.

Screws, and The Undoing Thereof

The Resurgent continues my streak of mild surprises, wherein the last several rando Chinese knives I looked at actually came apart without any drama.

Its construction also reveals yet another lie in its product description. Paodin said this has “bushing system” pivots.

Well, it doesn’t.

It actually has ball bearings instead, which is better.

The pivots themselves are machined Chicago screws, with anti-rotation flats in their very tips. These follow the tradition of putting useless Torx heads on the female sides of the screws which actually have negative value, because you can crank on that side until the cows come home and you’ll never be able to undo them. The male side screws came out fairly easily although they were lightly threadlockered into place. Maybe be gentle with it until you ascertain which side is which, since the heads are indistinguishable from each other.

The Resurgent has single piece channel milled handles which are made of aluminum through and through. In order to prevent this from being a predictable disaster with the hard steel kicker pins bashing into the soft aluminum all the time, there are steel insert plates on the inner faces of the handles around the pivot area.

These not only comprise the surface for the kicker pins to strike, but one each of them on each handle also has the matching D shaped cutout for the anti-rotation flat on its respective screw. Its opposite is round. Thus the pivot screws can only go in one way, and you can decide which way this is if you feel like it by swapping the plates around. This also handily prevents the steel screws from wallering out their holes in the softer aluminum over time.

Rude Mechanicals

The Resurgent of course has a traditional kicker pin design and doesn’t have fancy kickerless Zen pins.

The pins are very nice, though. They’re a larger diameter than you normally find on a cheap knockoff knife: 0.157" or, more likely, nearly exactly 4mm. They’re pressed through very evenly and dead straight, and their ends have even been machined flat.

Thanks to its ball bearing pivot system the Resurgent is rock solid; far more than you’d ever expect at first glance. It has zero blade tap whatsoever and practically no lash in the pivots at all. Owing to their single piece design with fully machined in backspacers, the handles are also very rigid and don’t offer much flex at all up and down. Therefore it scores extremely favorably in the old Wiggle Test, above.

The pivot feel is fantastic and as you would hope, very low friction. There’s enough mass in the handles to offset the weight of the blade even with the mismatch in materials. The point of balance is just about 1-1/4" behind the pivots which feels pretty good to me and gives it a pleasingly intuitive feel while you’re manipulating it.

The one hangup you’ll find is possibly a literal one. The bottle opener hooks take up just a tad too much of the knife’s length in my opinion, and they’re a just a smidge pokey. You’re only faced with the points on them in the specific instance of having the blade closed up against the handle you’re manipulating, but if you’re doing anything that requires choking up on the handles around the pivot point you might find that they graze the web of your hand and tend to unexpectedly push the knife away from you a tad. It’s not common, but you have to be cognizant of it in very specific circumstances. If you’re the type of person who notices when some rat bastard slips a pea under your mattress, for instance, you may find this a trifle disconcerting. I had to deliberately look for a problem to notice this, though, so it’s probably trivial.

If you removed its latch the Resurgent would probably be dead silent. Its pivots make no noise, and even on rebounds the material and shape of the handles plus their utter lack of holes or cutouts means that they don’t resonate at all. It doesn’t clang, ring, sing, ding, or anything else ending in -ing. If you have people in your vicinity who are hypersensitive to the dulcet tones of your fidgeting with your knife all the time, switch to this. It’ll reduce the risk of strangulation in your environs significantly.

The Inevitable Conclusion

I suspect, but can’t prove (not without wasting another $20) that if you try to order one of these for yourself you probably won’t get what I did.

Or you might. It’s anyone’s guess.

That makes the Paodin “Resurgent” tough to recommend. Mechanically, objectively, it’s great. Well, not if you plan to use it as a knife, that is, in which case it’s beyond useless. But as a trainer balisong its humble origins give it no right to be as good as it is. There’s a rough edge – just one, literally, on the latch head – but other than that it’s tough to beat for the price.

And that’s what makes the clone balisong space so damn tricky. There are great values to be had here, if you know not only where but how to look, but also if you manage to get lucky.

And that’s stupid.

You shouldn’t have to get lucky. It shouldn’t need to be a guessing game. There’s no repeatability with these things because they don’t have model numbers or real names, nor will anybody admit who makes the damn things, and their titles are all interchangeable meaningless SEO hodgepodges that tell you nothing. This knife was supposed to have bushing pivots, but it showed up with bearings. One point. But it was supposed to have an edge, and it doesn’t. One demerit.

See what I mean? When it’s impossible to know what you’re getting when you put your money down it’s easy to see why any sane person would just declare the hell with it, and not even try. There are many fine points to the Resurgent but one big unavoidable one, which is ‘t ain’t what I friggin’ ordered.

You have to be a special kind of nut to put up with this sort of thing, and to be willing to take the good with the bad. Maybe a special kind of nut with a lot of empty slots in his knife drawer still.

I wonder if that reminds us of anyone we know.