Sometimes I wonder if I ought to rename this gig “The CRKT Show.” Certainly it seems that a pattern emerges regarding a surprising number of their lineup. I couldn’t begin to guess why this is, but I’m down for it.

Here is the Gravitic Flip, which is in fact not a B list direct to video '90s superhero movie based on some obscure Dark Horse Comics property, but is rather yet another point on the universal curve of probability. That is to say, if any given mechanism exists then its appearance behind the action of some manner of folding knife is a mere matter of time.

From the outside, the Gravitic Flip doesn’t reveal much. Of course, from the name you can take a pretty good guess at how it works. Yes, it’s a gravity knife. A double edged one, too, so your local legislative body is probably already angry about it twice over. And it’s black.

This is a Ted Valerio design, and one wonders just what ray of inspiration may have struck him to produce this because nothing else on offer in his product lineup is quite as bonkers. Said lineup these days largely seems to consist of wave opening adapters and 3D printed whatsamajigs including one that goes on the venerable Kershaw CQC to turn it into a karambit. Now there’s something I can get behind.

Anyway it seems ol’ Ted got CRKT to make his knife for him, like so many others, and so here we are.

For your money, precisely $38 of it, you get this 4-3/16" long rectangle. It’s made of some manner of injection moulded polymer, and if I had to guess I’d say it’s FRN — fiber reinforced nylon. Glass fiber, if I’m any judge. The black paracord lanyard is included in the box, but it’s also curiously short. Even if you move the knot all the way down to the end the resulting loop is a shade too small to get your hand through. But that’s not the weird part.

Here’s how it works.

Grab the inset bar and, yes, flip it up.

The blade slides along its track and pops out the front. This is a non-switchblade OTF, then, which theoretically ought to help with its legality. Except it’s also explicitly a gravity knife so you’re right out of the frying pan and back into the fire.

Hup, hup.

A pair of neodymium button magnets sunk into the handle hold all the works in place, and a pair of ears on the flipper bar or whatever you want to call it drop into matching slots in the handle to keep the blade locked either in or out. And of course when brought anywhere within the same postcode as the types of metal shavings production that I engage in these days said magnets immediately and inescapably attract a bit of ferrous fuzz.

Since the blade has to be loose enough to drop out under the power of gravity and its track is only made out of fancy plastic in any case, this obviously engenders a bit of wiggle in it. In the stowed position the magnets do a passable but not quite complete job of keeping the blade from rattling around audibly inside.

Despite my artful avoidance of depicting it so far, the Gravitic Flip does include a clip. It’s short, stout, and incredibly tightly sprung. If anything, the lanyard is probably there to aid you in managing to rip the thing off of your pants. The clip isn’t reversible, not only because the notch it sits in is presented only on one side, but it’d also block the mechanism if you flipped it. Other than the lanyard hole the entire thing is thoroughly symmetrical anyhow, so all a left handed user would have to do is trouser it in the other pocket and it’ll be precisely equally difficult to open with either hand.

That’s because the Gravitic Flip’s mechanism, while certainly very clever, doesn’t provide you much to grab. You have to get a fingertip under either of the ears without dropping the thing in the process, and they’re rather small with not much of a cutout beneath them. If you flub it, the magnets are maddeningly prone to snapping the bar back into its locked position and are capable of doing so from a remarkable distance away. Getting it open reliably requires practice, and I would not recommend trying it under duress. Doing so with gloves on is likewise probably not a winning proposition.

Its little double edged blade is only 0.108" or 2.74mm thick and 0.591" / 15.03mm across, and it has no type of forward guard, grip aids, or finger rests whatsoever. It’s about 3-1/16" long with the entire ensemble adding up to nearly 7-1/2" precisely when it’s open.

The Inevitable Conclusion

At least neither CRKT nor Ted Valerio bother to make any implication that the Gravitic Flip is supposed to be any kind of fighting knife. Instead, they admit right in the blurb that it’s an EDC fidget toy, which is a job at which it excels much more handily.

Thanks to the bodaciousness of its inbuilt magnets and overall light weight (1.41 ounces or 40.05 grams including the lanyard, with mine) you can also stick it directly to a ferrous object and it’ll stay there. That, I think, puts it in a class of very few. For whatever that’s worth.

At least 38 bucks, one would hope.