Our regular program of cutlery-adjacent shitposting will now resume.

By the way, never bring a knife to a gunfight.

Especially this one.

This is a 10-930GY from ElitEdge. What, you’ve never heard of them?

But they’re Trusted Brand! Military-Tactical-Rescue-Outdoor and everything.

So, while I was screwing off on the internet at work researching as best I could for the writeup I did on that fidget spinner knife a while back, I stumbled upon the Top Quest Brands catalog, which is a rabbit hole well worth falling down. Right there on page 58 I saw, if not exactly this article, one very much like it. And I just knew I had to get my hands on it.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a knife, it’s shaped like a gun. And of course it’s crap. That’s not the point.

The point is, this is how it works:

Rack the slide and the blade pops out. I mean. Come on. What’s not to love about that?

To be fair, and if you’re a wimp, you can also open this normally. It’s a regular spring assisted liner locking folder underneath.

The rack-to-deploy mechanism is deceptively simple, with the slide just riding – none too precisely, I might add – on a track in the body with a spring behind it. When you pull it back a little nub cast into it catches the protrusion on the heel of the blade and kicks it out just far enough for the spring assist to take over.

The nub is just visible if you look down into the slot when the blade is out.

The melodiously named 10-930GY is modeled kinda-sorta after a Beretta M92, but many of the details are just odd enough that I’m left wondering if the designers only had a crunchy 240 pixel wide picture of one to work with, or if they’re doing that thing where they deliberately fuck up the details in the hopes they don’t get sued but inevitably wind up doing so in a way that just makes them look incompetent. We may never know.

Much of the exterior is cast zinc over some flat steel liners. And the castings definitely have a whiff of the dollar store about them. It’s quite tough to measure, but it’s about 4-11/16" long closed, from the muzzle to the tip of the spur on the back of the grip.

Those are… words I don’t usually get to employ when describing a knife.

It’s 8" long open, with a 3-3/8" blade again measured from the forward end of the muzzle, drop pointed with the expected ghastly half serration. That must be the part that makes it “tactical.” (The “military,” “rescue,” and “outdoor” mentioned on the box are nowhere to be found, though.) The blade alleges to be made of 420C and the knife purports to be designed in the USA and “hand” crafted in China. The veracity of any of these claims is, of course, suspect. As usual there are highly visible unpolished and unrefined machining marks on the blade bevel, and the edge geometry is all wonky. I didn’t bother to take a macro shot of this. Do you know what? I don’t care.

The grips are plastic. You can see all the gubbins by peering down into what’s not the magazine well. You can also see how deploying this via the intended slide racking method is actually more difficult that it’d appear at first blush, because if you hold the thing the way you naturally want to – that is, like a pistol – your fingers on the grip are in the way of where the blade wants to swing. So you wind up having to hold it like a teacup with a dainty grip between thumb and forefingers, and that makes the little bugger tough to hold on to when you find you have to give the slide a surprisingly firm yank to get it to move. I don’t think a child would be able to reliably manipulate this which is really just as well, because this is precisely the sort of thing that children shouldn’t have it and would give Kyle’s mom the fits.

Of course this doesn’t actually need sights, but a tiny part of me is disappointed that it doesn’t have any anyway. I nothing else, they’d give you something more to grip.

It doesn’t have a clip or even a lanyard hole, but that’s okay!

Because it comes with a tiny little holster which you can stick on your belt.

I really feel that I should not have to point out that you should not go strutting around with this on your belt in public. You’ll look like a real goober. Among other issues.

This knife both looks and feels remarkably similar to a ratty old .25 ACP Saturday night special I had back when I was a lad. I can’t tell which comes off worse for the comparison, either: This knife, or my old gun.

Alas, your only options for fiddling with it at your desk are listening to it rattle and racking the slide. None of the controls nor the trigger move. I have to say, I had die cast Hot Wheels cars as a kid with more realistic moving parts than this. What a bummer.

The Inevitable Conclusion

There is a time in every male’s life when he intensely desires a thing such as this, and that time is ideally over by the time he reaches the age of 12.