It’s time for some tat.

Every once in a while I get struck by the perverse urge to see if, just for once, the price/quality curve can be escaped. In short, I wind up ordering some junk from China just to see how it is. And then we wind up here, doing this, like the cutlery equivalent of Stuart Ashens. Except instead of a brown couch, I have a white void.

Welcome, then, to the current state-of-the-art of the Chinese balisong knife.

This is a Jin Jun Lang JL-13A and you might be surprised to learn that this knife is neither a counterfeit, nor a knockoff of anything. It’s an honest to goodness genuinely original design and you can tell just by looking at it that it’s not the same cast-zinc-handle flea market bullshit that we’ve all become accustomed to hating. And after being pleasantly surprised at what was inside the last Jin Jun Lang knife we looked at, I wasn’t too broken up about spending a princely $10.30 on this.

By the way, I’ve been privately told that I ought to start including pictures of my knives in more interesting environments than the Infinite Expanse. Preferably, if I am to be swayed by the current influencer’s best practices, including some wood.

Thunk. There you go.

Part of what intrigued me about the JL-13A is just what you can see it is by looking at it. This is an all stainless steel balisong, even including the handles, that’s a shade smaller than the norm and includes a pocket clip. Be still my heart, could this finally be a viable low cost knockaround EDC balisong?

The surface finish is not excessively shiny, and has a subtle brushing or rather more likely, machined finish that looks not at all unlike that on a Leatherman tool. It has some swoops and a pair of finger cutouts on the inner edges of the handles, but the styling doesn’t fall into the trap of being excessively overwrought. I like the way it looks. I’m glad they left it raw rather than trying to paint it which probably would have wound up being done badly.

This knife is 4-3/4" long closed and 8-1/8" open, with a blade that’s about 3-5/8" long measured from the front tips of the handles. The usable edge is 3-7/16", and there is what could almost be considered a choil at the base if not for the fact that the grind on the edge just barely doesn’t reach it. The blade is 0.111" thick at its thickest, which is in the center thanks to the small false edge on the back. The profile is a definite and very pokey spear point. I believe the blade is either 3cr or 5cr steel, but I can’t find any sources to authoritatively back this up. But based on how it looks and feels, plus the last Jin Jung we handled that’s a pretty good bet. The total weight is 117.9 grams (4.15 ounces) and thanks to the all steel construction it feels quite hefty in the hand.

There are a lot of features I like to see on a balisong like a kickerless/zen pin design, spring loaded latch, and fancy bearings. All of these things of course make that price tag climb up, up, and up. The JL-13A is thus a traditional dual kicker pin design, although the pins are very straight, pretty evenly pressed, and no major swarf or swage marks are evident. So that’s nicer than average.

The latch is this big through-pin design, and swings on one of the spacer pins in between the handle halves. It is not spring loaded and it rests very positively in its semicircular cutout. It will not drop free no matter how hard you gorilla-grip the handles together and even I with all of my might and wisdom, plus any other attributes you’d care to name, can’t bust it loose with my pinky. I can just about do it with my ring finger. Rest assured, when this sucker is latched it is latched. It will never, ever pop open in your pocket. But this makes deploying it rather a faff.

The latch has no endstops on its swing in either direction if you’re not careful it is unfortunately capable of striking the edge of the blade. This is true of most traditional balisongs but is a problem that’s been solved in various ways with the premium knives from the big boys. Not so here. Centripetal action should serve to keep the latch out away from the blade during handling… provided you’re not a muppet. Any users trimmed in carpet fur with ping-pong ball eyes might want to employ a little extra care.

Handling feel is where the rubber meets the road with a balisong, as it were, and that’s where I think the JL-13A scores highly considering its price. The handles are machined, but obviously they’re not machined to a super high degree of precision. The details that are there are not sharp, with vague edges. It’s obvious it was done with minimal tooling passes to reduce cost. But the edges that would otherwise be square are all chamfered, and the heavy weight of the handles contributes to definitive swinging feel. The rebound action is pleasingly positive off of the kicker pins. The knife isn’t too noisy, except for the latch. And if that sort of thing really bothers you it’s not hard to remove (more on that later, as usual). The handles don’t produce any resonance or vibration. They’re short, but not quite short enough that I have to modify the way I hold the knife like do on a truly mini balisong like, e.g., a Benchmade Model 32. In my hands, anyway.

The wiggle test reveals all, and the JL-13A is machined well in precisely the one place where it counts, which is the pivot screw holes. For an $11 knife, this degree of pivot play is excellent.

With its slightly reduced length, this knife is definitely EDC-able without being too ridiculous. A clip is provided as you see here, and it lives on the bite handle where such a thing belongs. It’s not reversible due to the offset in the spacer screws which is a shame, because as usual it’s on the wrong side of the handle for right handed pocket carry in my opinion. But it’s there, and it’s surprisingly well made and nicely sprung such that it grabs adequately but draws cleanly, without snagging, clamping like a vise, or biting the stitching out of your pants.

Since our last Jin Jung turned out to have ball bearing pivots in it I was really hoping that would be the case here. That would be rad, but alas. No such luck.

The JL-13A is built about as you would expect, with the pivots riding on a quartet of hard plastic washers. I believe they are polycarbonate. The pivot screws are the normal Chicago type with nice wide heads that accept a T9 bit which is an odd size for this sort of thing. The rest of the screws are T6 which is a bit more like what you’d expect. Disassembly is easy, although for the pivots you will need two T9 drivers.

The edge is pretty nice. The JL-13A is tolerably sharp out of the box, able to lop the corner off of a sheet of plain paper with minimal effort. The edge grind is pretty consistent all the way down its length with the exception of falling short of the choil at the base by a minuscule fraction.

It does manage to remain straight down to the point, which is something that cheap knives tend not do do, and…

…It is genuinely within true which is astounding. (The little hook on the end was from before I stabbed it into my deck, and I believe was caused by contact with the latch.)

If you encounter one of these in the wild, the “genuine” article – as genuine as this sort of thing can possibly get, anyway – has a laser etched logo. Not stenciled, not silkscreened.

The model number designation is similarly laser etched near the front kicker pin. The knife bears no other markings. No country of origin, no blade steel descriptor, nothing.

The Inevitable Conclusion

For $11, this is a fantastic knife. Even in an objective sense, it’s reasonably competent albeit by no means premium. As is tradition it has one character flaw built in, which is in this case the ability for the latch to hit the blade if you’re not careful. But with a little tuning by way of carefully fiddling with the kicker pin notches with a fine round file, the latch lockup could be considerably improved and what you’d be left with is a highly functional bali- that you really could use on a day to day basis. With, importantly, the freedom of knowing that you won’t be fucking up one of your $300+ limited run brand name collector’s pieces.

It’s not perfect. But I like it.