Bear has been manufacturing "economy" balisongs for many years now and their low prices have made them fairly common. Up until recently, Bear balisongs generally came with skeletonized stainless steel handles with oval cutouts but have now upgraded to insert handle balisongs. Two of the newer balisong models were purchased for this review, the Cocobolo wood insert model (CB 17W) and the Stag insert model (BC517). Both of these come with bowie styled 400C stainless steel blades and have a boron carbide coating. The handles appear to be constructed with brass liners with nickel silver bolsters and the inserts. Both of them come with a T-latch, but no latch gate, which is quite disappointing in this day and age. I was a bit disappointed to see that they were simply brass liners with the bolsters bolted on, but I shouldn't have expected much at these prices. The wood inserts are flush with the rest of the handle, but the stag inserts are thicker.

The tang cups (shown in the pic), are a bit strange. They're not shaped anything like the tang pin and are pretty shallow, which probably accounts for the rather large gap between handles when the balisong is in the open position.

One interesting thing is the lack of a kicker. Instead of a kicker, it appears that the end of the handle spacer curves upward (as seen in the picture below) and this raised area meets with a groove in the blade where you would normally find the kicker. Upon close examination, it appears that this method does work pretty well in keeping the blade from hitting the spacer inside the handle.

Opening the box, I was immediately disappointed with the appearance of both knives. The fit of the knife is akin to an FHM in that it is a really tight fit. At the moment my two samples are awaiting a treatment of Militec-1, and if that does not work, I will be attempting to spread the handle channel with a screwdriver as recommended by some other forumites. Hopefully this will help make it into a flipper. As it stands, the knife takes a great deal of effort to flip open. The latch is also tight so the lack of a latch gate is not sorely missed since the latch does not move freely.

Aside from the tight fit of the knife, the finish and quality of craftsmanship appears to be pretty poor. As you can see in the following picture, it looks like they paint the wood inserts, and since they did not take much care in the application of the paint, there are many spots where someone had trouble "painting inside the lines."

In this picture, you can see that one of the stag inserts appears to be separating from the liner and since the inserts are not dovetailed, it is likely that the inserts will pop off if stressed at all.

In the next picture, it's a little difficult to tell, but the entire spine area between the two arrows is not coated with boron carbide. It is the same on both knives and this gives is a very unfinished look to it. Aside from the "bald spot," I do like the coating and it resembles a boron carbide coated Kershaw Chive (complete with the usual fingerprints).

Another thing I also noticed was that while the blades are sharper than I expected them to be (they are easily shaving sharp), they're tips are rather blunted.

It's unfortunate that this didn't turn out to be the knife that I set out to find, but neither is it a CCC or a knockoff. The blade seems to be well done (coating problems aside), but for anyone wanting to flip this will have a problem without some time and work on their end. Maybe it will turn out to be better than my first impressions, but I'm not holding my breath. The prices of these two are around $40 for the wood inserts and $55 for the stag. The stag handled bali does have an option for a damascus blade, but I have not really heard very good things about Bear's damascus.