It is that day once more, my dudes.

This is the Mantis Bottleneck BK-3B, or possibly just “Bottleneck” to its friends. And I’ve been sneaky and buried the lede here a little bit with the headline photo. Because here it is next to a US quarter for scale:

Yes, it’s tiny. Just absolutely chuffing piccolo. And it looks like something we should be sending up with the astronauts. Alien looks, overwrought design, speed holes – the Bottleneck’s got it all.

Mantis bills this as a collaboration with Hawk Designs, and also makes some noise about it being a “50 state legal butterfly knife,” which I think is a highly dubious claim. I think they’re doing this because the blade is tiny, just under 2" long. But there are states – California leaps to mind – where butterfly knives are illegal full stop, regardless of size. So out the window that goes.

The Bottleneck’s funky design terminates in a bottle opener ring behind the blade heel. The bumf says that the opener can be used while the knife is still mounted to a keyring (not included), which I guess is true if you affix it in the apparently intended way, which is looping a ring through the latch like so:

I shouldn’t have to point out that this is actually rather a dumb idea. It really doesn’t take much of a tug at all to bust it loose, and then a flapping-open knife falls down the inside of your shirt, or wherever else you’ve stashed it.

Also, you know, let’s use this thing to help us chug beers while we fiddle with a knife design that’s notorious for being tough to use even when you’re sober. That sounds like a great plan.

The Bottleneck would just be a small ugly little balisong knife if it weren’t for some strange and let’s face it, rather questionable design decisions.

The latch possesses no end stop, so it’s easy to make it strike the cutting edge of the blade. That’s a bit of an oversight. It also tends to get jammed there if you’re not paying attention when you close the knife, which makes it even worse.

Although in some respects, the Bottleneck deserves a little credit for being an absolute master class in cost cutting. This thing retails for around $33 (which if you ask me is already too much), but balisong knives typically contain a lot of parts which require some care and attention to detail which amounts to cost. On this, the handle plates are just single thickness laser or waterjet cut steel. No scales, no contours, no chamfers, no embellishment at all. Simple, cheap, no separate parts. Mantis has saved a nickel by making all of the kicker pins not pins, but rather just commodity Torx head Chicago screws. This completely eliminates having to do any precision drilling or press fitting at all. The tolerances between the holes and these “pins” can be huge – and they are. That’s because once they’re cranked down, they won’t wiggle anymore regardless of how off-center they may wind up. The bottoms of the screw heads will also ensure that they’re reasonably square. Clever. Ugly, but clever.

The business end. The Bottleneck has this funky flared tanto point arrangement, although other variants are available with this funkier still double edged pointless configuration. (That variant would be illegal twice in California, I think, also qualifying as a “dirk or dagger.” Don’t quote me, though, I don’t even pretend to play a lawyer on TV.)

Latch tension is provided by slots cut into the handles which allow them to flex, providing spring action via the sheer bendiness of the steel. That’s probably required because otherwise the handles would be far too short to flex far enough to allow the latch pin to clear, like on a traditionally sized balisong. This creates another unfortunate condition, though, in that the Bottleneck’s pocket clip is near useless because the location of one of these slots makes it nigh impossible to actually clip to your pants.

That’s because the low point of the pocket clip is located right over one of the flex-slots in the handle, so it directs the edge of your pants’ fabric right into the slot and the knife snags there. This is as far as it’ll go, unless you spread the clip away from the knife body before trousering it which is, how shall we put it, impractical. And also pretty dumb. That means this knife has not one but two intended ways to carry it, neither of which work right.

Here it is from the side, showing the clip. Note the slot cut right below it there, which intersects with the contact area of the clip:

The Bottleneck is also damn difficult to use, for a couple of reasons. The major one is this: If you handle any of the possibly thousands of models of balisong made over the last several hundred years, you’ll notice one common feature of all of them. That is, few to none of them have any bullshit sticking out past the end of the heel of the blade. Well, the Bottleneck has a fuck-off giant bottle opener back there which is half or more of the length of the blade itself. So the bottle opener catches on the web of your hand every time you flip it open, making most balisong opening techniques impossible to perform even if you wanted to. This would be less of a problem if the handles on the thing weren’t only three inches long. Way to go, guys.

Even if it weren’t for that, the thing is so friggin’ short that the handles barely carry any inertia, so fooling with it as if it were a regular balisong isn’t a charming experience anyway. The latch is also weird, requiring very little effort at all to undo from the closed position but a monumental amount of squeeze to get it to snap over its home to lock the knife open. And then you’ll notice that there are two bumps where it can rest in the locked open position, one of which is right and one of which is wrong. Getting it unlatched from the further in wrong position is much tougher than if you land it in the right one.

Well, maybe it’ll be redeemed by having fancy ceramic bearings in there or something…

But you didn’t really expect that to be true, did you? The blade rides on the cheap plastic washers you see here. The pivot play and handle rattle on this thing is immense, not that it matters much beyond contributing to the cheap feel.

One other strange detail I noticed was that the screws holding it together appear to be a random hodgepodge of whatever was lying around, furthering my impression that this is a parts bin knife.

All of the screws on the latch side handle were T6 Torx heads, but the ones on the other handle were all T7. Uh… What?

The Bottleneck’s edge grind is also seriously out of true. Usually this type of thing is not readily apparent without magnification (or until you try to sharpen it) but on this thing it’s clearly visible if you just look at the nose of it. Mine came out of the box with a near butterknife level of sharpness, but we can see even putting an edge on it is going to be quite a lot of work.

Here’s the transition between the, er, “main” portion of the edge and the tanto point. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

From all of this I can conclude that the Bottleneck is purely designed as an object that’s not meant to be used for any purpose, except maybe cracking beers. But as usual we’re not here for what’s good, we’re here for what’s weird.