BENCHMADE 300 FLIPPER

 When it comes to knives, there’s a few brands that have a pretty good reputation for making decent stuff. Sure, they won’t wow the custom knife aficionados of the world, but if their logo’s on the blade then there’s a good chance you’ve got something that’ll withstand more than the average amount of abuse. Suffice to say, Benchmade is one of those brands.

And as knife guys with a relatively modest budget, we’ve always viewed Benchmade knives (along with some Spyderco knives, for that matter) as a bit of an enigmatic proposition. In many cases, they’re expensive enough to give a daily knife carrier cause for pause, with some models that just get near the cusp of expensive enough to be considered properly nice but cheap enough to be carried and used. The Benchmade 300 Flipper is, in our opinion, one such knife.

The Benchmade 300 Flipper is Benchmade’s first kick at the flipper can, and having played with ours for a few weeks now, we think they nailed it… and at the same time, totally missed the point. But more on that later. So what is the model 300 Flipper? Well, it’s a 3.18” blade made from 154CM stainless steel, bolted into a handle that’s 4.25” long. The overall length with the blade deployed is 7.36” and the knife features a deep-carry pocket clip that allows the knife to be carried tip-up, on either side. We should note that ours came out of the box with an edge that we’d call “passable” but certainly nowhere near good, so be prepared to sharpen if you end up pulling the trigger on one yourself.

What the specs don’t quite capture is the chunkiness of the whole affair. The blade is relatively thick at 0.13” but it’s the liner and meaty G10 scales that really bulk the knife up, and although the steel liner has been skeletonized for weight, the whole thing feels weighty in the hand. Carried in the pocket, however, it seems to melt away quite conveniently. In fact, the only issue we’ve found is the aggressive texturing of the G10 can end up gripping the fabric of our pockets too hard, which can make extracting the knife a bit of a chore!

So, to get back to our initial point, how did Benchmade both knock it out of the park and totally miss the point all at once? Blame the Axis system. Easily one of the best lockup systems on the knife market today, the axis system relies on a transverse bar for absolutely all of the knife’s lockup and retention. This transverse bar can be manipulated by the two Axis studs that stick out either side of the knife. Pull them to the rear, and all friction is removed from the blade and it is free to move on its brass bushings. If you don’t touch the Axis studs, the user must impart enough force for the knife blade to overcome the friction and pressure of the transverse bar working against the blade’s cam.

The crucial difference between this system and a conventional frame- or liner-lock is that the friction is much more consistent as the blade opens. Liner- and frame-lock knives typically have a stiffer and shorter retention detent, which means flipper-style deployment works well because the force required to overcome the detent alone is usually sufficient to overcome all the friction required to deploy the blade fully. In other words, while the flipping lever is at its most pronounced and easily manipulated sticking out of the back of the knife, all the force required to open the knife can usually be applied, as the retention detent will put up more of a fight than the rest of the blade’s movement. On the Benchmade, the retention detent is less severe and is much longer as the transverse bar must ride up and over the blade’s retention cam, and the whole time this is happening the flipping lever (no pun intended) is getting harder to put force into.

So sadly, we must say that as a true flipper knife, the Benchmade is merely ok. While we can flip any number of our conventional flipper knives in any orientation and get the blade deployed in the blink of an eye, the Benchmade is difficult when held vertically. However, all is not lost, because while the flipper may not work all the time, the thumb studs and Axis lock still do. That means that while a conventional flipper and “flip” better, the Benchmade product still have more ways of opening (and closing) and a frame- or liner-lock knife… and more ways of opening means more options, and options are always good!