Three Balisongs
By
Ralph Turnbull


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Mr. Ralph Turnbull of Spring Hill, Florida has been making knives since he was a child. He became a full-time professional knife maker in 1980. He has been a member of the prestigious Knife Makers Guild since 1978. He's also one of the longest-running makers of custom balisong knives. And he's one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.

Exhibited here are three recent Turnbull balisongs.

Let's start with that one in the middle. I first saw this as a blade only. He hadn't made the handles yet. The Damascus steel has a wonderful pattern:

So, I bought the blade immediately. As I was trying to decide what sort of handles I wanted, I overheard Mr. Turnbull talking with another client about a fixed-blade knife that had wonderful ivory handles. Mr. Turnbull mentioned that he still had a few pieces of the ivory left. So, I asked Mr. Turnbull to make handles with ivory inserts for me. . I think they came out pretty nicely, eh?

The latch has some nice extra checkering on it: