A little piece of history- and a rarity on this side of the Atlantic.....When is a balisong not a balisong and thus UK legal?- When it's a Jacob's Ladder:
The Cold Steel Triple Action.
What's great:
Flat and slim in the pocket, it really give little hint of being a knife until you open it.
Lovely grinds on this blade and a high finish- to start with.
It snaps open with a wrist flick with a bit practice- it's a 'shake stop-to-stop' movement, opening the 'safe handle' then a move in the other direction to snap open the blade. Takes longer to read than it does to do.
You can even do the same point down in an ice-pick grip.
As the 'live' handle with the blade inside is slimmer than the 'safe' handle, you can feel even with gloves on which way it needs to go to open.
Neat, slim styling is a treat- the aluminium handles are light and the whole package is lively in the hand....One of those knives it's hard to put down.
What's not so great:
The Jacob's Ladder design has an inherent design flaw- Fluff the opening (which you will) and either the edge or the point will impact the handles. Resulting in blade damage that can be removed...at first, then you lose the point and the edge starts looking like a ploughed field
As shown, these result in damage to the handle too. Some rubber inlay here or similar from the factory would prevent the issue altogether.
I admit to cursing a great deal when I fluff an opening not more than 5 minutes after sharpening out the nicks. I've simply given up now and live with it.
The Aluminium of the handles is a slick as politician's lie- that slim pattern gives zero grip...and the alloy chosen is very, very soft.
After some small use, the steel screws oval the holes in the grip and the handle becomes sloppy. You can feel and see about 1/16th" to a 1/8th"of movement in the safe handle in use- in all directions....She rattles like a marrraca now.
There's even about 1/16th" blade-play that can't easily be fixed as the screws won't tighten any further due to the worn handles- so much for the marketing of the time....I'd love to have seen this with steel or even G10 handles, where this softness wouldn't have been an issue- but that would make the edge/point issue more of a problem than before.
Great but flawed fun. There's no easy way to design yourself out of the hole the Jacob's Ladder puts up in to begin with....Which'd be one of the reasons why you'll never read me posting "OMG Spyderco should totally do a Jacob's Ladder knife." Not sure even Sal and Eric can fix this one
