Don’t you just dread lending someone your knife? Someone who is not a knife person?

Never mind the potential of them cutting themselves, or marring what was until 15 seconds ago the flawless satin bead blasted finish on your newest hyper-exotic S30V-and-titanium limited production run designer piece. Worse. Here’s a familiar nightmare:

“No, don’t try to force it shut. Push the lock to the side. The lock. Right behind the heel of the blade. In the handle. No, don’t try to force it. See the little ridgy part? Push it to the left. Your other left. Don’t try to force it. No, push the lock first, then the blade. NODON’TTRYTOFORCEIT. Just… Just give it here.”

Keeping that in mind, meet the melodiously named (as is becoming tradition by now) “SDOKEDC SD604A VG10 Damascus Folding Knife Tactical Pocket Knife Yellow Sandalwood Handle Mechanical Lock Outdoor Camping Survival Hunting Multitool.” I think you’ll excuse me if I just call it the SD604A.

This knife will completely eliminate all of the above, because never mind closing it; Nobody from the unwashed masses will ever even figure out how to open it.

Have you guessed how it works yet? If you’re looking for a hidden latch or release, you won’t find one. Just trying to flip it open like an normal folder isn’t going to work, either.

Is one pivot not good enough for you and your knife, and two is still too few? Well, this sucker has three. Four, arguably, if you want to count the crossbar that goes through the blade. It has no lock keeping it either open or closed, but all of the pivots are more than tight enough to keep it from falling open in your pocket (more on that later), and when in the open position your grasping action serves to keep any part of the mechanism from moving. There is the unfortunate detail that the point of the blade passes through part of the handle ready to deliver you a poke if you open it incautiously, but we’ll just edit that bit out.

I would say accept no imitation or substitute at this point, but as we’re becoming accustomed by now, there are oodles of this exact same knife and similar all over your favorite marketplace of white box Chinese goods under a ludicrous variety of non-brand monikers. Either with black synthetic scales or wood, plain steel or this “Damascus” (not really) pattern welded arrangement, and I’ve seen different point profiles and blade shapes out there, too.

Belated update: Curious Canid points out in the comments that this knife is a clone of the ScorpioDesign Shapeshifter. I should have inserted that into the text here weeks ago, but I was lazy. That knife costs $650 euros! And this one was 40 bucks. For as silly as this thing is, I think I’m a lot happier with my purchase of the clone than I would be torching the better part of $700 USD on the real deal…

But I, of course, just had to get the zooty pattern welded steel which the product description alleges to be VG10, which automatically comes with the gaudily stained wood handles you see here. (And if that steel actually is VG10 I will eat my hat with chopsticks.) The scales are at least genuine wood of some description, judging by the end grain visible in them that I’d doubt the factory would bother to invest in moulding in.

It’s a chonky boy, too, partially thanks to those wooden handle scales but also due to a rather significant gap between the blade and steel handle liners. All of the pivots, and also the crossbar that runs through the channel to the blade to keep it aligned, ride on thick Nylon bushings which take up that gap. All of this adds up to make a knife that is solidly three quarters of an inch thick. It’s five and a half inches long, also, with no pocket clip, lanyard hole, or any other provision whatsoever for actually feasibly carrying it. So, despite what I mentioned earlier about pocket-safe carry, it’s pretty unlikely you’d try to put this in your pocket anyway.

But that’s okay! Because it came with this “leather” sheath:

…Complete with “turquoise” embellishment in the middle of the button snap.

So SD604A holds the ignominious distinction of being one of the very few knives in my collection that, as far as I can tell, has no real use case. It’s difficult to open, let alone open in a hurry, so has no self defense merit; It’s bulky, hard to carry, and made of fragile materials so it’s not much use an an EDC; It’d do a lousy job killing zombies. If it weren’t for that channel milled through the blade to accumulate crud it might just about be able to manage to slice fruit. Look, I don’t collect these things because they’re necessarily any good. I have tons of good pocket knives that are all well built and competently designed, but those are boring.