Get in, losers. We’re going shopping.

My worlds get to collide here for once. Herewith I am presented with a golden opportunity to drag you along on my travels and subject you to looking at all of my vacation pictures in what up until three seconds ago you thought was a knife column. And the best part is you can’t stop me. It’s no good calling the forum cops on me, either, because around here I am the cops. How about that?

What I Did On My Summer Holidays

Hey, get back in that seat. You’re not going anywhere.

The plan was to take a leisurely ride down the MABDR. Down through Michaux and Hancock, Green Ridge, Cacapon, Baker, Moorefield, then Petersburg and off into the woods. Not the whole way, for sure. Just to get the hell out of the city for a couple of days and set up my hammock. See some stars. Read a book. Anything but put any more effort into this column, which hasn’t seen an update for three weeks. You know how it is.

My wanderings chanced to take me by the “National Soldier Factory” military surplus store just outside of Gettysburg. Yes indeed, that is worth a U-turn for me.

Truth be told I’ve ridden right by this place multiple times before, but it’s either been closed on the day I happened by or I was under the gun to make it to camp somewhere far off before sundown, so I never bothered to stop. Today, though, I had nothing but time.

I also espied this sweet Ténéré parked outside. That helped.

Anyway.

This place is a surprisingly enormous and meandering building full of lofts and alcoves. Hidden stairwells lead to yet more little cozy corners all paneled in pine and absolutely chock-a-block full of a mixture of genuine surplus hardware as well as the usual low rent knockoff tactical stuff and camping gear. Given the sheer enormity of the square footage plus the rather lethargic pace of business, at least so far as I observed while I was in there, I honestly have to wonder just how the hell they manage to make enough to keep the lights on in here. And they even have a second location right in the middle of downtown Gettysburg, a frontage which surely can’t be cheap.

All of this, of course, is deeply fascinating to the right type of highly specific dweeb.

They even have an OG looking Jeep, parked inside, in one of the basements. That must have taken some doing.

Guess what’s in the other basement.

That’s right, kids. A genuine, honest to goodness, authentic knife hell. We’re talking multiple tables worth of the absolute finest in gas station/flea market nonsense, all laid out right there for you to fiddle with. Not a single glass case in sight. There isn’t even anybody down there to supervise. I must be having one of those dreams again. Pinch me.

Plus!

Multiple tables full of crap swords. In there are not one, not two, not even three, but four of those QVC swords. Four genuine examples! Still extant in the wild! Which QVC sword? You know exactly which sword. I tell you folks, it was all I could do to resist taking one home with me except as you know I was on my motorcycle and I did the math, ultimately concluding that I didn’t want that son of a removed anywhere near me if I crashed. (And in truth, when I was young and stupid I actually owned one of those selfsame swords. So I’ve already had the experience, and bringing home another one would require violating my subsequent “no wallhangers” household rule on swords.)

And a table full of fantasy swords. Also temping, but ultimately the same deal.

But those tables full of knives. It’s like I stepped in a time warp and went right back to those golden teenage years. This could have put me right back in my trenchcoat and combat boots, aviators, fingerless gloves, the works. No, really. I probably could have bought all of that right there and it may only have been because my panniers were full already that I did not walk out of there looking exactly like the baddest motherfucker from 1999.

You want skulls? You want wolves? You want eagles? You want marijuana leaves? It’s all here.

And rather than the $25 or $30 the usual rip-off brigade would be straight-facedly trying to pawn these off for, any of the above for a mere five bucks a piece.

Alright. You guys know the score.

The Score

I can’t walk away from a table like this without buying something.

I had to stare the spread for a while, but ultimately this thing is what spoke to me. Here is the Snake Eye 300514BL. Snake Eye is a pseudo-brand that’s crossed our path before, and this here is ultimately a chip off of much the same block. And as ever it is “Snake Eye,” singular, not “Snake Eyes,” plural, which I’m telling you right now has and will forever continue to trip me up every time I try to type it. Why are they insistent on rendering it this way? Chalk that up as another of the many things in this world I sure as hell don’t know.

As your resident balisong nerd, of course I zeroed right in on the only Balisong Shaped Object in that pile.

Except of course it isn’t. That descriptor is even more apt than usual because this is one of those thrice-damned things that’s shaped to look like balisong but is instead a regular side folder, like unto the Cold Steel Paradox and its ilk but, I suspect, a lot worse.

Look, sometimes you just have no choice but to do things purely for the love of the game.

The 300514BL is a spring assisted opener like apparently everything that Snake Eye “makes,” or is at least sold under that brand. It’s now also apparently discontinued. The proprietor of the establishment here said that the table full of knives down in the pit was a result of a buy-out from some other vendor which also included a bunch of other stuff. These were apparently not, in fact, in the category of products they actually found desirable but they were part of the lot so they wound up with them anyway. Speaking as proud purchaser of another cheap knife store’s entire closeout inventory myself, once in a bygone era many years ago, I kind of know the feeling. (It took me ages to get rid of them all. They filled a large suitcase.) This explains the fire sale prices. So if you actually want one of these for some twisted reason you’ll probably just have to journey to Gettysburg yourself. The possibilities, therefore, of my example becoming a rare and much coveted collector’s item are tantalizing, but alas probably still moot.

And let me tell you about the odyssey it was tracking down that model number. That right there was a hard earned set of eight digits, so you’re damn skippy I’m going to go through the trouble of working them into this column every chance I can.

No amount of byzantine search queries including “Snake Eye” and any combination of attachments would come up with a match for this thing. This is despite Snake Eyes’ own website taunting the reader with their current model not-balisong side folder as its headline image in all of its cheapola rainbow anodized glory. No, that one is the readily found model number AA-BBBB-C949, and I swear to you I am not making that up. The online store on their site is outright broken at the moment as well, so that’s no help. My other usual go-to for tracking down absurd Yum Cha cutlery, the Top Quest catalogs, also returned nothing in any of them. And it’s no use sticking a picture of it in a reverse image search, either, because our AI overlords consistently think this thing is a Benchmade Model 32. Which it very definitely isn’t. Trust me on that one, I’d know.

The one place it might tell you would be on the sticker on the end of the box, which I didn’t get with mine because the vast majority of these were just loose without their packaging. But, I remind you, five bucks. You can’t ask for too much.

I wasted an entire afternoon on this. Think of the sheer entertainment value, dollar-for-dollar.

But I persevered, and among the pages of highly inaccurate results I found an unbranded rendition of the thing here as well as an eBay listing for an identical looking item. Paydirt. For suitably small quantities of pay, anyway, and rather more dirt.

This just goes to show the usual problem in this area, namely that “Snake Eye,” whoever they may be, absolutely are not the outfit who actually manufacture this thing. The gods alone only know who actually does that, or where — other than somewhere in China. Somebody’s just come along and lasered their logo right through the black paint on the blade. Otherwise this is surely some manner of OEM product.

Nothing on the knife itself will help you there, either. The reverse has one of the hardest to read laser engravings in the world which simply says “China” and “440 Stainless.” Exactly what variant of 440 stainless history does not relate.

But never mind all that. Just get a load of this thing.

The 300514BL is all plastic scaled, weighing in at 113.1 grams / 3.99 ounces. It’s just under 5" long closed — 4-15/16", or possibly more accurately 125mm on the button. It’s 8-7/8" or 225mm long when open and the clip point-ish blade is 3-15/16" long or 100mm. Not all of that is usable because the root ends in a rather prominent ricasso, and even then the faux-balisong ears sticking out the sides like a hilt would prevent you from bringing the back half of the edge down onto flat surface anyway. One of those is also a flipper to kick the thing open and there’s no thumb stud. The two ears are different shapes from each other, too, for no apparent mechanical reason.

That, and a noticeable portion of the spine of the blade is left sticking out of the handles when it’s closed. If you look carefully you can see that this is because the pivot is not quite centered between the two faux handle pairs as it’s designed. It seems to be it would have been pretty trivial to make that the case, but what do I know? Me, I hardly manufacture anything.

The back side lacks the blue embellishments but makes up for it by including an honest to goodness deep carry pocket clip that’s actually quite nice despite the nicks and chips in its paint. It’s not reversible and you get tip down carry only, but it does provide a suspiciously smooth and easy draw for a knife that’s objectively crap.

The clip is also ridiculously tall.

So much so that even through the knife won’t balance on its spine because of those stupid ears, you can balance it on a flat surface at a rakish angle by using the clip. This allows me to produce frivolous bullshit like this:

Which I submit to you is now the most thorough photographic depiction of this stupid knife that has ever appeared on the Internet, and at the rate things are going ever will be, from now until the day the Earth falls into the sun. This is exactly as it is, and I didn’t even airbrush out the blemishes. You’re welcome.

Quite a bit — in fact, possibly the sum entirety — of what I respect about the 300514BL is its cheerfully nonchalant treatment of its shtick. I’m particularly appreciative of the kayfabe on display with these fake Torx heads moulded into the plastic where a real balisong would have body screws but this doesn’t.

A true Philistine, mind you, would be compelled to try to paint these silver somehow. Badly, I’m sure. I like that these have been left black instead, which shows true cheek rather than trying and inevitably failing to hold up the charade.

It’s still not a balisong. Here it is next to a knife that is:

The one thing that would really make it which it inexplicably lacks is a fake latch. That would have been rad.

I also don’t know what it says about the world that the Benchmade Model 42’s iconography is apparently the default when some turkey needs a design language to rip off wholesale, but that’s clearly what the 300514BL is going for with its pattern of holes and eyelets on its handles, there. Whenever something needs to broadcast to the world, “this is butterfly knife,” apparently the public’s monkey neurons are most reliably activated by the 42’s pattern. It’s like the world’s most nerdy type of Batesian mimicry.

Of course it’s just a regular old cheap liner locker underneath. How cheap? Well, let’s find out.

Finding Out

I put on my mystic swami hat and made several predictions about the 300514BL before even getting out my screwdrivers. Inside I expect to find a knockoff of the SpeedSafe spring assist mechanism with its highly recognizable zig-zag spring, a pair of cheap plastic pivot washers, and some metalwork that looks as if whoever made it gnawed it out of the stock using their own teeth. While wearing a blindfold.

So not only does the 300514BL use the same type of spring a the one we found in that axe thing from back when, but I’m pretty sure it’s even the same part.

The scales are a single piece design despite the gap in the middle. Strangely, all of the screws including the pivot are T7 Torx heads and not the more common T6 or T8. On my example they were all just finger tight as well, so it was dead easy to take the thing to bits despite the pivot having no anti-rotation flat and all the body screws going into round threaded barrels that aren’t otherwise held in place by anything. There was no threadlocker in evidence anywhere. I put some on the main pivot when I put it all back together and probably increased the bill of materials cost by fifteen percent.

The pivot washers are indeed plastic, and the main pivot screw is a simple round Chicago jobber. Yes, that rather alarming burr on the heel of the blade is exactly as mine was produced by the factory. One could probably improve the lockup considerably by giving this a couple of strokes with a file, if one could be bothered, but one cannot.

Here’s a surprise. The liners are solid; no speed holes whatsoever. They’re very thin, though, which is what keeps this from weighing a ton.

The 300514BL’s edginess is decent enough for five bucks. I’d be much more miffed about it for thirty. There are no evident chips or major blemishes, although my example is sharp only up to about 3/8" from the root.

The tip. S’okay? S’alright. It’ll do. Some of the blade’s cheap black finish has been worn off past the edge as part of the sharpening process, but it really takes both magnification and probably an unhealthy amount of particularity to work yourself up to caring about that too much.

Holding this straight was a challenge because, as mentioned, the 300514BL won’t stand up on its spine. But never mind my own crookedness, here. The edge isn’t true either. That’s no big surprise.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Believe it or not there was a time in my life when every knife I owned was like this. Probably for a lot of people out there every pocketknife they’ve ever owned has been like this, and they’ve never been exposed to anything much different. Although certainly not any of the regulars around here, of course, who I assume are all significantly more cultured. Well, probably.

Maybe.

Everything about this is emblematic of its price and its position. It’s outright clown shoes; pure Boffo. Even its very premise is fake, but without that it’d just be another crappy knife nobody would even care about as much as we’re doing right now. Failing that, maybe it’s still worth it every once in a while to stand where we are now and look back.

At the end of the day the 300514BL is not a knife that anyone should intentionally set out to buy. But sometimes we still just can’t resist.