I don’t really have any more Weird Knives for WKW, but I guess you could consider this knife weird in that it somehow exists.
For those not familiar, last December, Walmart released a $6 axis lock knife. It doesn’t really have a name, though there’s a model number somewhere (it doesn’t really matter). They were initially very difficult to find by me, with 2 stores in reasonable driving distance not having any. However, we eventually got them in and I snagged 2.
The steel is some sort of 420(x) that Walmart uses on all their Ozark Trail knives. The grinds somehow…good despite the likely accidental recurve. The action on both was exactly what you’d expect out of a $6 knife. And yet…and yet they both improved. The spring tension is off the charts. It requires a ton of force to pull the lock bar back, but once done, you can flip the knife out and most of the time flip it back closed again. I never tried to disassemble it because I had heard that the screws strip if you even show them a torx bit let alone try and use one.
I gave one away in a white elephant gift exchange at a Scout meeting shortly after buying it. The other I’ve kept sitting on my desk at the home office just flipping it back and forth and watching the action get better over time.
I’ve not seen them for sale since and I have no idea if Walmart will ever make another. So not a weird knife in the physical sense, more a weird knife because it defies reality.
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That is pretty wild. It reminds me a bit of the story of the Braille Walmart skateboard, which had a botched product launch and took so long to hit store shelves that the brass decided it needed to be clearanced out the instant it was physically available. So when they finally arrived at stores they were retailing for $9, there was a frenzy, and then they were all gone. (These did get a second run, it appears, but now they’re $60.)
One wonders if a similar thing happened with this knife. Lord only knows who actually manufactured these for Walmart. Their product sourcing remains a mystery to me.
I wasn’t familiar with the skateboard story but that sounds like a big corporation screw-up for sure.
This knife was one of about 4 or 5 different knives released for Christmas all for $6. I got my youngest his favorite (see this link ) and I kinda wish I had picked up the others just to see what they were like. His was really rough. Pivot screw is overly tight so you can’t actually flip it all the way open, even with a decent wrist flick. The liner lock is pretty stiff too so it’s hard to close but he figured it out eventually. It’s a decent 2-hand opener and fine for Cub Scouts and whittling tasks around the house.
