That’s right, here’s another entry from my seemingly never ending collection of Balisong Shaped Objects. (I think this is what the cool kids today are calling “building the brand.”)

The eagle eyed among you have already spotted what this actually is.

Yes, it’s a bali-comb.

This marks a milestone in my knife(ish) collecting career, since it’s the very last item I ever ordered from the BudK catalog, probably going on for a decade ago. Despite this, they still mail me full color glossy catalogs every so often, which certainly costs them more in printing and postage than they made from selling me this.

(I don’t deal with BudK anymore. You shouldn’t, either. That’s because they’re shitheads.)

This not-knife perfectly encapsulates pretty much the entire BudK purchasing experience, because it serves no purpose other than to look good in the glamor shots and then turns out to actually be useless for its advertised purpose. That’s because, if you hadn’t spotted it already, this does an absolutely abysmal job of being a comb. It’s actually only superficially comb shaped. The teeth are all squared off, and have no taper. So all you wind up doing with it is kind of ineffectually scraping your scalp with the corners and edges which is a uniquely unpleasant experience.

It’s as if someone described the shape to someone who had never seen a comb before over a very bad telephone line, and just stamped the result and put it in a box. It works half-okay as a balisong trainer, though. I mean, in a world that’s a vacuum in which other balisong trainers don’t already exist.

I didn’t take this apart to photograph because some of the screw heads turned up slightly misshapen from the factory. That, and I can’t be bothered. But I will point out this, which is the puzzling decision to have a different number of spacer washers on each side of the pivots. I’m not sure why this is, because it doesn’t serve to center the comb “blade” in the handles any better. In fact, it makes it sit noticeably off to one side.

The bali-comb otherwise has the full compliment of traditional flea market junk design features. For instance, these holidays in the sprayed on black finish, and the classic style of ugly press-fit kicker pins.

You know how we dig up ancient tools and objects nowadays, and attempt to divine the motives and methods of the cultures that created them? Well, I have to imagine in some far-flung date, future archaeologists are going to unearth stuff like this – probably from the crumbled foundations of my house – and wonder just what the fuck 21st century man was thinking.

The Inevitable Conclusion

As it happens, I was in Jake’s Country Trading Post the other week, which is a combination lawn statuary shop and roadside tourist trap in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As is apparently mandatory in these types of establishments, in a glass display case there they had a selection of overpriced shitty knives. And lo, what did I see in there but this exact same item – only minus the BudK “branding.” I asked the clerk there if anyone had ever bought one of the stupid things and he said that to his recollection no one ever has.

That ought to tell you all you need to know.

(I did, however, buy a different… item… that you may see here at some point in the future. It was unavoidable; you know how it is.)