Here’s another oldie; a knife from my youth. I bought this when I was a teenager, I don’t remember exactly when, and while it’s not the oldest knife I own I do believe it’s the oldest one that I still have and that I bought with my own money.

This is the Gerber Mini Remix, and all of the above is not to say I have any particular nostalgia or fondness for this knife, because I don’t. But you can see that even at an early age the penchant for weirdness was already there.

That because, you see, just like John Denver’s guitar this knife has a big hole in it.

The hole also comprises the pivot on the knife. Rather than the usual pivot screw, the blade rides on a hollow threaded tube that goes through the frame and it’s held centered by way of two big aluminum spanner nuts not unlike the ones go on the steering stem of a bicycle. That does mean that getting it apart is a bitch, requiring an appropriately sized spanner wrench, and thus is something most owners are probably not equipped to do. I am, but I can’t be bothered. So you won’t see any disassembly photos today.

The hole is about a size 9 ring and you can get your finger through it for twirling around – with the blade closed, preferably, but it’s also possible open if you like to live dangerously. If you have fat fingers it’s also possible to get it stuck if you’re not careful. Which is bound to be a very embarrassing phone call to the fire department if you haven’t got an angle grinder handy to hack the thing off. Unlike the typical mood ring, let’s say you are unlikely to be able to clip this off with a pair of wire cutters if you get it stuck on one of your meaty digits.

Other silly possibilities also present themselves.

The Mini Remix is no longer produced although it’s larger sibling, the OG non-mini Remix is. That’s a shame, because the full size Remix is crap and the Mini version is much nicer.

Now, I’m not a fan of Gerber knives and I never have been. This was department store dreck from back in the day. I’m quite certain this particular example came from K-Mart. In those dark days Gerber had a pathological aversion to admitting what kind of steel their knives were made out of and the Mini Remix is no exception. So I have no idea. It’s not published anywhere, and nobody knows. This is a cheap knife, manufactured by those without much of a budget, for those without much of a budget either. You’ll never mistake it for premium cutlery.

The Mini Remix is, well, mini. At 5-9/16" long open and 3-1/2" when closed it is a very pocketable EDC size. The sheepsfoot blade is 2" long and surprisingly sports a bit of a choil at the base so the entire edge is usable. The profile should make it appear fairly inoffensive and not “tactical” in any way. You’re not stabbing anybody with this. The blade is 0.097" thick and the total weight is 65.2 grams (2.3 ounces) due to the mostly steel construction. And the hole, if anyone is wondering, is precisely 3/4" in diameter.

This is an “open frame” body locking knife, which was all the rage back in the day. Despite this, the Mini Remix still surprisingly has a double-sided grind and is not a chisel edge. If this knife were produced today, that’d be the immediately obvious method of cheaping out that any budget brand would be inexorably, irresistibly, inevitably sure to employ. So be grateful we got what we got.

One side effect of this (which unfortunately did not seem to carry over to the full sized Remix) is that this pivot method effectively completely eliminates any pivot wiggle in the blade. It does ride on Nylon washers that are just visible sandwiched between the spanner nuts and blade. No other tuning tricks are required; the contact area is so broad that any minor clearances in the mechanism are practically unnoticeable. But despite this, the blade pivots fairly freely.

Mind you, the large amount of surface area in the pivot inherently adds some friction to the mechanism. You can’t flick this knife open. Not even after you overcome the detent ball in the lock. The pivot doesn’t grind as much as you’d think, but it does drag noticeably and you have to consciously push it the whole way through its entire travel.

With a bit of a rethink Gerber probably could have made this knife ambidextrous. But they didn’t. This is especially curious because the OG full size Remix is ambidextrous. Lefties need not apply for this one – There is a thumb stud only on the right hand side of the knife. The blade is fully exposed on the right side as well due to the open-frameness, but there is an aluminum endstop that completely encloses the edge when the knife is closed as well as provides a little bit of thickness so you can actually hold the thing when it’s open. The actual closed end stop for the blade’s travel is the forwardmost screw that holds this on, which contacts the choil at the base of the blade.

On the left side, or the back, or whatever you want to call it, things are very different. This is a single sheet of steel with some slots milled into it for the lock and so forth. There’s a non-reversible deep carry pocket clip there, which is a little small but works pretty well. There’s a lanyard hole also, which is drilled through the entire knife as well as the clip. The clip is thus rather… ventilated… with both screw holes plus the lanyard hole in it. There’s not a lot of metal left around the edges and if you snag your knife on things a lot, or if you’re the type of dimwit who clips their knife to the outside of their pants or off the belt, I think you’d soon find this to be a failure point.

They don’t call this the “Mini” for nothing.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Hashtag, kniveswithholesin.

If you find yourself in a time warp and as part of your travels are forced to buy a folder from K-Mart in, like, 2002 you could definitely do worse than to wind up with one of these.

It’s definitely novel, and compact and cheerful looking enough that you could probably get away with having it about your person in polite company. It’s a shame about its inherent Gerber-ness. It’d be nice to know what it’s made out of, and it’d be nice it were built out of better materials overall. As you can see my example has some rust on the tips of the screws just from sitting around, and the other materials are likely to be just as cheap.

But I kind of like it. As with so many things, we’re not likely to see its kind again.