Despite my achievements in the realm of balisong knife collecting, it is with great shame that I have to admit that I’ve never actually managed to get my hands on either of the Spydercos, the Spyderfly and the Smallfly. But! Just the other day I did score one example of the updated re-release, the Smallfly 2. That makes me a very happy nerd.

The “new” (it’s been out for two years) Smallfly 2 is very similar to the currently-unobtanium original Smallfly, but with the important distinction that it now has a new blade shape with a full flat grind, and made out of S30V. Yes, please. It’s also of convenient EDC size, comes with a reversible pocket clip, and it’s got a spring loaded latch. I was doing that Vince McMahon meme while I was reading the spec sheet. You should have seen it, it was a riot.

I like a good EDC oriented balisong knife. This one checks all the rest of my boxes, too. To see what I’m on about, here it is compared to my by now very familiar Kershaw/Emerson CQC-6K:

(Take a drink every time the Dork says “Kershaw/Emerson.”)

And while we’re cockling the snoot at modesty anyway, here it is compared to my Model 32:

Closed, the Smallfly 2 is about 4-1/4" long. And it’s visibly very tapered, a full 1-1/2" wide at its widest end. It’s 91 grams exactly (3.21 ounces). The blade is 3-1/4" long measured from the ends of the handles when deployed, with about 2-15/16" of usable edge. My caliper says it’s 0.126" thick and it does taper down towards the point. Curiously, it does not have any kind of choil at all. The base of the edge just ends in a little ricasso. There isn’t even a perfunctory cutout for any kind of “zen” kickerless spacers, because…

…the Smallfly has these really wide, really flat kicker pins. They engage cutouts in the handle liners that are concealed by the G10 handle scales.

You can just see them here behind the pivot points. You can also get a peek at the bronze pivot washers. More on those later.

The blade has a nice usable drop point shape and sports a decorative hole, because Spyderco is contractually obligated to put a hole in the blade of every single knife they manufacture. The maker’s mark also specifies that it’s made in “Golden, Colorado, USA, Earth” in case you thought it might’ve been sent from space.

To be fair, the Smallfly does have really funky alien looks, with its skeletonized flared handles decorated with more of Spyderco’s signature holes. The handles are a sandwich construction with flat G10 scales over steel liners, and there’s really not much of a bevel or any other kind of rounding on them. The handles are very grippy and the flared ends will probably serve to keep the thing from flying out of your hands, but you feel all the points and corners as you allow the handles to roll while you flip it. The pivot action is of course very smooth and low effort (again, more on that later) but the grippiness and short handles make this a lot more of a workpiece than a showing-off toy. I heard a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth back when the original two Spyderco balisongs were hitting the streets about them “not being good flippers,” probably down to the very greebley design. Well, that may be so if you’re used to your usual latchless competition knife with super round matchstick handles. This isn’t that.

That’s because short and grippy handles do not a pleasant balisong experience make, usually. But the Smallfly 2 is nearly exactly the same dimensions as my beloved Benchmade Model 32, and I can make that thing work for me. So I can make this work as well. Deployment is very speedy, and thanks to the steel liners the handles do still manage to carry good inertia. It’s pretty quiet, too, helped by the fact that the G10 scales dampen a little bit of noise and also that the spring loaded latch is held out and under constant tension even when deployed, keeping it from flapping around.

You cannot, by the way, latch the knife in the open position. The latch isn’t long enough, and the weird asymmetrical flared handle shape wouldn’t allow it anyway. This also means that it can’t contact the opposite handle in any way while you’re flipping off as you do. I’m fine with that, really. I pretty much never bother to latch my balisongs even when I’m using them for something. You’ll just have to unlatch it again before you put it away, and that’s annoying. I find it might more convenient (and it encourages onlookers to continue to gawk) to flip it shut again when I’m done without any other steps to get in my way.

Here’s the business end:

This picture illustrates why the headline image of this knife is currently my most retouched product glamor photo ever. That’s because the flat satin machined surface of the Smallfly’s blade kept doing this with the ring light in my little photo box:

Stripey stripey.

Right, let’s void that warranty.

I only did one handle because they’re the same, other than the pin holes for the latch, and due to the liners-plus-scales design the whole thing would break down into eight handle components plus all the screws and stuff. That would be a very wide spread for me to try to take a photo of.

Here’s the part I kept alluding to earlier. Spyderco’s entire jam with this knife is apparently to just machine everything to a really exacting standard. Normally that’s just a good way for a knifemaker to show off for no other reason, but in this case they’ve worked it into the design. The pivots are these big shouldered pins that are threaded through both ends. They’re very firmly press fit into one side of each handle liner, and engage with a D shaped hole in the other.

Here’s one of the D shaped ends. The bronze washer that’s not in the blade in that photo is actually captive between the handle liner and the pivot pin. You’d need to drive the pivot pin out with a punch or something to get at the washer, but there’s no reason to.

That’s because the length of the narrow ends of the pivot pins is exactly the same as the thickness of one washer and one handle liner. The wide sections that go through the blade are exactly the length of the thickness of the blade. And that has a very unusual effect: Unlike every other simple washer pivot knife I’ve handled, the tightness of the pivot screws has absolutely no effect on the tightness of the blade. Normally the torque you put on the pivot screws is a balancing act, because the tighter you crank them down the more they sandwich the face of the blade until you can’t pivot it anymore and it all just locks solid. Not so with the Smallfly – even with the pivot screws buttoned down all the way the blade still pivots freely.

That’s really weird. But I like it.

The latch is sprung by a torsion spring which is also pretty unusual. When the knife is latched shut, it will pop out all on its own if you squeeze the handles together. The handle spacer on that side also acts as the block that allows the torsion spring to keep tension. If you take that section of the knife apart you’ll have to spin the spring against the spacer in the right direction so it’ll be back in tension. This is not hard to do, but it’s easy to forget.

Note also that not only is the clip reversible, in that not only you can put it on either side of the bite handle (the one the edge slots in to) but there are matching slots on the other two handle scales as well, so you could even move it to either side of the safe handle if you wanted to. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but you could. (Our forefathers fought and died so we’d have the freedom to set our knives up in a dumb configuration, and Spyderco is apparently happy to continue to oblige.)

The clip is a springy wire affair, and it’s held in with the head of a single screw. The screw sinks into either of the vaguely triangular handle spacer blocks. Do note that the screw holding in the clip is slightly longer than the other three screws in the alternate clip positions. If you move it elsewhere, you should also switch the screws.

The wiggle test:

The Smallfly 2 actually doesn’t score super great here for a premium knife. Which is odd, given how precisely its pivot arrangement goes together. I think part of this is down to the fact that the handles are actually pretty flexy, including in the vertical direction. My example also has one handle always pointing slightly off axis than the other, even at rest. While I was able to tune a lot of that out by fooling with the pivot screw tension relative to one side versus the other, I wasn’t able to eliminate it entirely. It doesn’t affect functionality, though, including engagement of the latch.

Since this is a new knife, I still have the box sitting on my desk. So here’s the unboxing bumf.

The Smallfly 2 comes in a nice slide-out box with a shiny foil Spyderco logo on it.

Inside you get not only the knife itself, but a little leaflet and a sticker you can put on the lid of your laptop, thereby signalling to all the ladies of the world that you’re a highly sophisticated cutlery nerd and they probably shouldn’t waste their time talking to you unless it’s about crucible steel composition, or something.

The leaflet contains a whole bunch of purple prose about the Smallfly 2’s design philosophy, which I could transcribe if anyone really wants to see it, but that kind of thing just makes me want to find whichever floor the marketing department is on and rampage through it with a fire extinguisher.

Curiously, there is also a strongly worded paragraph about the restricted nature of “automatic knives” (which this certainly isn’t), along with a very authoritative passage claiming that there will be “ABSOLUTELY NO DIRECT SALES OF RESTRICTED KNIVES” without a physically signed Acknowledgement And Representations Form. Uh, okay. Sure.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Should you buy this knife?

Yes.

Well, if you want an EDC tailored and highly functional balisong knife in a pocket friendly size. And if you’re got the better part of $300 burning a hole in your pocket. Or if you’ve been lamenting never being able to get your hands on a Benchmade Model 32, especially – get out your credit card and order one of these before they’re gone, because I’m sure just like the last go-round, these’ll be hen’s teeth again in a couple of years and you’ll never pry one out of a collector’s hands. (Spyderco, I’ll take my commission in the form of gold bullion or, if at all possible, any new in stock OG Spyderfly units you may have lying around. Thanks in advance.)