Can I be honest with you? Rule number five on that sidebar there. No brand elitism. I had one brand in mind when I wrote that, and it's Gerber.

I've just never liked them. Maybe it's their preponderance of crappy multi tools and low rent knives incessantly festooning the shelves of all the department stores which among other things consistently and for decades couldn't even be bothered to specify what they were made out of. Maybe it was seeing yet another one of those stupid Bear Grylls "survival" knives snapped off at the hilt, or having one too many Paraframes brought to me for sharpening with the tips busted off.

Come to think of it, maybe it's actually Gerber owners I have a problem with.

Well, like it or not, now I am one. Again.

Because here is the Gerber Doubledown, a notionally Balisong Shaped Object which is a classification of thing, as we all know, which can't cross my airspace without at least one example falling into my hands.

But, you say, what's so special about it?

Hur, hur, hur.

That's a Kershaw Moonsault in front, there, which is already so much so one of the largest balisongs on the market that I believe I used the term "ridiculon hugeitude" to describe it in my own ancient writeup on the same. And then, the Doubledown makes it look like a trinket you ought to dangle off of your charm bracelet.

In fact, Gerber don't even market the Doubledown as a knife. Instead they bill it as a "folding machete," describing it as "an outdoor tool that delivers never-before-seen function with an innovative design."

I certainly suppose you could say that.

Therefore, looking at it in knife terms the Doubledown is absolutely gigantic: 9-1/8" when it's closed, and a full 15-1/4" open with a rather imposing 7" long blade. Said blade is 3/16" thick and right there in the blurb Gerber claim that it can be used for chopping at batoning. The wisdom, or potential lack thereof, of trying this remains thus far unknown.

All told the Doubledown weighs just over half a kilo, 503.7 grams or 17.77 ounces by my scale. That's just the article itself, not including its included nylon pouch thing.

Several months ago I retired my storebought little illuminated photo box and built a bigger one, to my own specifications, from scratch. I'm glad I did. But for the Doubledown, it's still not big enough. I had to employ a considerable degree of wide angle trickery to take most of these pictures, and even then I just barely pulled it off. That's what we're dealing with, here.

The sheer enormity of the box it comes in ought to clue you in to the fact that this is in no way, shape, or form an EDC piece. And of course, what drew me to this in the first place is that it's very clearly something approximating a fuck-off massive balisong knife.

Well, almost.

On the head end we find a few familiar features such as a double pivoting arrangement, which is in this case curiously geared. There's also a single enormous kicker pin here. Not, it must be said, two of them which would be more expected of a balisong knife. But hey, the Benchmade Model 42 got away with only one pin and that thing's a bonna fide classic, right? So maybe there's nothing to worry about after all.

The tail sports a swinging latch which is a little odd in that it slots into a pocket in the tip of its opposite handle rather than wrapping all the way around to grab it from the outside.

A spring prong cut into the steel liner there detents the pegs in the latch into place and there's a little croquet hoop there for your lanyard as well.

You can't butterfly-swing the Doubledown open, though. That's because it's equipped with Gerber's "patent-pending 4 lock system which engages in 3 positions to ensure safe operation," which they make an awful lot of noise about.

That would be these, which are a quartet of pinch latches with one on each side of both handles. You have to squeeze all four of them fully to get the Doubledown's action to let go. Regardless of what the latch is doing these lock it — plus or minus a certain amount of lash and wiggle — in both the open and closed positions.

And lest you think this is just another one of my gratuitous knife-half-open glamor photos, for some damn fool reason they also lock it in precisely this position if you're not holding them all pinched throughout the handles' full range of travel. Gerber describes this as a feature and not a bug; it's the third position alluded to in the marketing copy.

I presume this is meant to catch the handles when you're closing the knife, not necessarily when opening it, in order to forestall chopping your own fingers off if you're incautious. And to be fair, the Doubledown probably has enough heft that it could do it.

Here's the full song and dance with its action:

All of this is probably warranted, as you'll discover once you start reading the reviews on this thing.

"Dangerous!" writes 'Brandon,' "Love this knife. Caution it is very sharp. Kinda clunky when closing keep it away from your body. I accidentally dropped it when closing it and it went right through my shorts and cut my thigh deep. The safety stop to keep you from cutting your fingers off works well. Make sure you have a good grip."

Or,

"So sharp I had to go to the ER," from 'Nelson121.' "I love this knife, despite my trip to the hospital. It’s compact, rugged, and sharp. So sharp that right out of the box I cut myself. Note, while closing the knife there is a snag point to keep the knife from closing on your own fingers, good feature, but if you’re not ready for it, it may cause you to drop the knife. Even while sitting cross legged and the knife only falling 6-8 inches it pierced through my foot near my ankle, severing an artery."

And so on, and so forth. Perhaps that shade I was throwing by picking on Gerber owners wasn't quite going far enough, in retrospect.

The Doubledown's blade is not shaving sharp out of the box, but it is indeed keen enough to deal you or anyone else a significant mischief if you're waving it around like a nincompoop. It's made of 420HC which is not a very fancy steel. But then, so is the venerable Buck 119 and its sister the 120, and nobody ever seems to complain about those. Plus, iT's tHe wEeD NuMbEr!!!1!one!!!

I do like that Gerber has resisted the urge to spraypaint this with some manner of crud that'll get rubbed off instantly, and not only left the steel bare but also applied a nondirectional brushed finish all over it that'll help conceal scratches and scuffs. What I'm less keen on is the splotches and discolored spots that my example arrived with straight out of the box. Or rather, I would be if I weren't confident I'll trample them instantly by doing a whole lot worse to the surface as soon as I start using this thing.

If I had to take a guess at it I'd conjecture that the edge is hand ground. It's extremely toothy, which may be to its advantage if you're meant to be using this thing to hack you way through the jungle, or whatever. Keep your stone handy, though, because it's likely the Doubledown's edge will probably require dressing pretty frequently.

I forgot to take a picture of the trueness of the edge. Rest assured, it isn't. I did take this picture up towards the tip, though. The Doubledown's profile is not very stabby, and is clearly not designed for thrusting in any capacity.

Grind aside, one thing that you can't fault Geber for is that at least some of their knives are apparently still made in the US. In light of that and as absurd as it may be, that probably makes this one of the more affordable options left for a USA made balisong. Go figure.

And now you all know my serial number in case you want to impersonate me for warranty purposes. Or something.

The Doubledown is ludicrously chunky. It's constructed of single piece sheet steel liners over injection moulded scales that are, I presume, some manner of fiber reinforced polymer. It's massively thick, just a hair under an inch, especially at the widest point in the flares in the scales. They're heavily sculpted with all kinds of swoops and dips and greebles moulded into them.

There's a significant cutout with a generous index finger notch in it which seems to be where they expect your grip to fall as you hold this. This puts your hand quite far down towards the tail, and well away from the choppy bit.

It takes an inordinate amount of effort to latch the thing open, and unlike when it's in the closed position the latch goes into a more traditional location when you're locking it here. It sticks out, probably quite deliberately, combining with the flare in the tip of that handle to produce a pronounced bird's head shape probably in an attempt to keep the thing from flinging out of your hand and burying itself up to the hilt in the forehead of the guy at the next campsite over. Geber, if nothing else, probably know their customer base well.

You don't get a pocket clip with the Doubledown. Don't be an idiot.

Instead you get this fancy ballistic nylon pouch with a Velcro closer. How fancy is it?

It's so fancy that it's got a MOLLE compatible mount on the back of it for some twisted reason.

In fact, for the Smooth Operators in the crowd the top loading design of this thing plus the absurdly long profile and MOLLE mount put one distinctly in mind of a P90 magazine pouch.

Yes, I was able to put this suspicion to the test handily. And now for tax purposes I refuse to elaborate further.

Instead, let's take this sucker apart and see how hard it is to defeat all those stupid locks, because they're really cramping my style.

Getting into the Doubledown isn't actually too tough. The pivot screws are T12 Torx heads and the rest of them are all T8. All of the above are threadlockered, but I found that the scale screws let go when attacked with concerted effort and a quality bit, and the pivot screws are broached with anti-rotation flats so you wont be stymied by the fact there's no driver heads in the reverse side.

The safety latches are dead simple, just a steel stamping that seesaws on a pin, with a little clothepin spring underneath. As an aside, these knurled pins are easily the nicest piece of machine work in the entire assemblage.

There's a square hook on the end of each which engages with a set of matching cutouts in the heel of the blade.

That works like so, and you can see here the slots for that stupid tertiary midway lock position. I imagine if you wanted to disable the middle lock position specifically, or maybe any of the others, you could just fill in the cutouts with your material of choice. Epoxy, maybe, or solder. That's left as an exercise for the reader.

The latch just swings on a pin which is also threaded, and the latter is retained by two of the scale screws. There's also a threaded hole immediately adjacent to this for no purpose whatsoever as far as I can tell, because nothing screws in there. 'Tis a mystery.

Gerber used red threadlocker on the majority of the screws, and I can tell this because they got it everywhere like you see here. It's all dried on so it's not going anywhere, and none of it is visible from the outside. Still, though. Thanks bloody awfully.

The Doubledown consists of approximately nineteen million parts, most of which are latches and screws. All of the screws save for those in the pivots are the same, at least, so you can't do any harm by mixing them up. It's obvious that they don't intend for you to disassemble this thing, but it's nice to know that at least you can if you have to.

Here's the blade heel, and here you can see the funky gear teeth cut into the pivots as well. There's no closed position endstop mechanism for this, and it seems that Gerber expect the cross pin in the latch living in its little pocket in the tail to serve as what keeps the tips of the handles from clashing into each other when you're carrying the thing around. For what it's worth the tips of the handles do indeed clash before the inside of the liner contacts the blade's edge. There's a pretty generous gap left over between the edge and the inner surface of the liner even when you have the handles clacked together as far as they'll go — by my reckoning, at least an eighth of an inch. So at least this isn't a self dulling knife, but until I checked for myself I wouldn't have put anything past anyone these days.

I was also interested to see what kinds of bushings or washers the Doubledown has to aid its action. The answer is none, as it happens, with just a set of bosses stamped into the liners as a token concession to the pivot feel. But given that as designed it's categorically impossible to open this thing one handed anyway, I can't imagine that was much of a consideration.

That's pretty easy to rectify, by the way. If they annoy you, you can easily defeat the safety latches entirely by the trivial expedient of just not putting them back in.

That, plus a small degree of fooling with the pivot screw retention, ultimately nets you this:

Achtung, baby. Fur der erfahren messerflippen only. I feel safer already.

The enormous heft of the thing notwithstanding, flipping the Doubledown around is a distinctly uncanny affair because of those geared handle tips. The gears are not just there for decoration; they're fully functional and act to rigidly enforce symmetry between the handles at all times. If you pivot one handle, so goes the other by the same amount no matter what you do. And the blade with all of its mass remains exactly in the middle, always. I imagine that this will make some selection of balisong tricks utterly impossible to perform with this even if you were crazy enough to try.

Another point of contention which you may have noticed is that Gerber saw fit to place the latch on the wrong handle. The bite side is the latchless one, and don't get that wrong because I have no doubt that the experience of having the blade close on your fingers would not be a pleasant one.

In fact, for my inaugural flight here you'll notice I'm wearing a cutproof Nomex glove and a full gauntlet sleeve made of the same stuff. You won't catch me out with that one; I prefer all of my digits to remain firmly attached.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The Doubledown is, I think, a bit of an albatross. It's fitting, not just in the metaphorical sense but also once you take into account its sheer wingspan.

There are objectively better choices for a knockaround bushcrafty camp knife. Like, just to name an example or two, practically all of them. But barring a few shining exceptions, all of those are boring. None of them will scratch that hipster itch, whereas the Doubledown is clearly superior by way of being bizarre, mechanically overwrought, and designed to be deliberately difficult to use.

You're going to tell me none of those sound like advantages to you. Uh, you have met balisong users, haven't you?

So the Doubledown remains more or less in a class all by itself. It's flamboyant, it's ridiculous, it's absurd.

It's awful. It's fantastic.