Easy to install, look good & turned my Al Arc Angel into a nice bali knife.
I’ve been on a balisong collection spree and bought the resurrected Arc Angel as soon as it came out. It turned out to be one of my most disappointing knife purchases of 2024. The blade is great looking and came razor sharp. However, the handles are way too light and unbalanced, making tricks like the fan almost impossible. To add insult to injury, the knife came with an impractical latch which didn’t feature a stop to prevent it from smacking into and ruining your edge and tip. I normally like latches but removed this one ASAP. I played with the knife for a bit and then put it away inside a knife storage case and tried to forget about paying $180 for it.
When I saw this product by Zippy, I had to try it. The shipping was fast, and I then sat at my computer desk and installed these weighted spacers following Zippy’s instructions video on YouTube. It took all of 10 mins. Making the retaining pins fit inside the holes was the only tricky part, but as the video instructs, you just have to play and experiment with it a bit. After you start a pin, it’s easy to get it all the way in and centered.
Anyway, after I installed the extended spacers with 1 tungsten ball inside each piece, the knife was still light, but much better balanced and easier to handle. It’s not just better for tricks but a lot more practical in general. It’s actually a good knife now.
It's great that they allow you to pick the color for each spacer. However, they really should do it for the plug pairs too; so that you could do like two spacers of the same color and matching color plugs for the safe handle and then red plugs for the bite handle. I really like my bite handles to be clearly marked. What I ended up doing is getting a Metal Gray spacer for the safe handle and a Red one for the bite handle. I would have preferred both spacers Gun Metal and then Red plugs for the bite handle. Alas, that wasn’t an option.
Speaking of the plugs, I was kind of worried that they wouldn’t stay in place. However, I’ve done quite a bit of flipping over the past several days here and the plugs didn’t budge.
Thanks for making these!