A-badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom…

Yes, the jokes about this one positively really write themselves.

This is, verbatim, the “Snake Knife.” By, er, NoEnName_Null. But don’t just take my word for it.

It’s like a Chinese knockoff of PlayerUnknown. (Okay, actually I’m positive it’s a placeholder that gets put there instead of an error when an Aliexpress seller somehow doesn’t have a “brand” name defined. Not that that their brand names mean much anyway.)

It’s literally called the “Snake Knife.” Iroquois Pliskin, eat your heart out.

So it says in the product image, anyway. It’s certainly a lot snappier than, “Folding Pocket Tactical Survival Knife Multi-purpose Hunting Camping Military Tool with EDC Mini Self Defense Utility Fishing.”

I love it when I score a knife with EDC-Mini-Self-Defense-Utility-Fishing. It’s the best kind.

Anyway, they’re playing up its snakiness because this is trying, albeit not trying very hard, to be like unto the Craighill Sidewinder.

As luck would have it, I’ve got one of those. We’ve dissected it previously, and for that reason I’m not going to include the entire buttload of comparison photographs with it because we’ve already seen it to the usual maniacal level of detail. Instead I’ll only include a perfunctory half buttload.

If I didn’t already have one of those it’s doubtful I would have bothered to click on this, nor spend $15.66 on it. But I do, so I did. And here we are.

The Snake is 44.8 grams (1.58 ounces) of pure sinusoidal Sino-silliness. At the very least, it’s successfully nicked the Sidewinder’s clever and artistic, albeit rather impractical, double pivoted interlocking handle mechanism. You might not know this just by looking at it online, though, because the seller really doesn’t do a great job of communicating this. Since I’ve already got a Sidewinder I already had a pretty good expectation of how it ought to work, and I’m pleased to be able to report that how it does its thing is in exactly the manner you’d hope.

Well, more or less.

The Snake makes the appearance of being a flipper opener, just like the OG. It’s got two pivots in the heel of the blade instead of one, so when you swing it out it separates the two toothed handle halves and they swap places by one notch before they interlock again.

The Snake, however, has the disadvantage of being significantly smaller and lighter than the original Sidewinder. It’s not an outright counterfeit, not even close. It’s just very heavily inspired by its, um, inspiration.

Its handle halves are also machined out of solid titanium. None of that sounds much like a drawback, and in any other circumstances I’d be just chuffed to bits that it really is titanium and not just ratty old potmetal. But in this specific case, it means that the Snake’s blade and handles are too light and it can’t carry enough inertia to carry itself all the way through to the open position with one flick of the kicker on the rear. The original Sidewinder, meanwhile, can. With a bit of practice, anyway.

The Snake stops in the middle every time, and that by necessity makes it a two-handed knife. You can just about close it with one hand if you’re clever about it, but opening it with one hand in a single motion is impossible. It doesn’t matter how hard you flick it or snap your wrist. Truly, we’re pioneering new ergonomic frontiers, here.

Otherwise, the Snake looks pretty slick. The titanium handles feel way more premium than they have any right to be, and the grey parts have a stonewashy finish over them. The blue parts are blue because they’re anodized rather than painted or coated in any way, which means the finish ought to be durable enough for pocket duty. But since titanium anodizing imparts its color on surfaces via refraction off of the nanoscopic features on its surface, if any gunk gets on it that changes the color until it’s wiped off. In the Snake’s case that makes the surface turn a duller purpleish-grey anywhere it’s dirty, and since the surfaces are also matte finished that also makes every spot and smudge singularly difficult to clean off. Which is why it so often looks like that in these photos.

I must have cleaned this thing about 946 times during this, and it still did me no good.

In my musings on the Sidewinder I proposed that it really doesn’t need a lock, despite being a liner locking knife. Whoever made this must have arrived at the same conclusion, because it hasn’t got one. Instead there’s just a prong machined into it to serve as a detent. This ought to make it legal in places where locking knives aren’t.

There’s a steel detent ball on the underside of that prong which falls into a pair of holes on the blade, one each for the open and closed positions. And it’s true, the Snake doesn’t need anything other than that. As long as you’re clamping its handle halves together it can’t fold up, since they’re mechanically connected to the blade and by necessity they must separate and switch positions in order for it to move.

The detent bar is pressing on the blade all the time, though, as evidenced here. It’s probably one of the contributors to the Snake’s slothful mechanism — all that which adds together to prevent you from opening it with one hand.

There’s another problem, too.

There’s a conspicuous keyring hole in on the end of the blade heel. You’ve probably already spotted what the issue with it is.

Yep, a whole fat lot of good that’ll do you.

The hole has to pass between the handle halves, so this is yet another rinky-dink Chinese knife with a keyring mount design that actively prevents you from opening it. It’s just as well in the end, I suppose, because the original Sidewinder doesn’t have any carrying provision at all. So it’s not like we’ve lost anything there.

Mine even included a little split keyring in its aforementioned black gift box, which I’ve surely still got around here someplace. This is conspicuously absent in every single product photo, and it’s no wonder why.

The rest of the specs seem to be accurate, other than the pictures consistently depicting the Snake being a lighter blue than it is in reality. I suspect that heavy photo editing was involved in all of its pictures, as per usual. If we’re counting, the color is apparently supposed to be “Mini Folding Knife.” Believe me that I tried, but I can’t find that one anywhere on my Pantone charts.

They really don’t say much about the blade. Especially not its composition, which is only listed as “stainless steel.” It’s about 2-1/4" long by my measure with 2-1/16" of usable edge. It’s got a real choil on it which is surprising, and against all expectation for a crummy Chinese novelty knife mine actually arrived from the factory quite sharp. It’s also got a fabulously useless fingernail slot in it, which is totally inaccessible between the handles when the knife is closed so I have no idea why it’s there.

Its primary grind is of course ratty and laden with unpolished machine marks. But the edge itself is not actually bad.

Somehow, it’s also accurate and close to true.

I took both of these photos with my new L-Series 100mm macro lens, by the way. The one above is focus stacked, and obliquely illuminated with one of my many random EDC flashlights. The background is the sheet of ordinary paper I take most of my photos on, because the process process inevitably gets grease and crumbs of gods-know-what all over everything when I do my disassemblies and I’d prefer the surface to be disposable. And just look at that texture on it. I briefly considered dropping the exposures showing this off of the stack, but in the end I just couldn’t not show them off.

As it turns out, the Snake has a couple of other surprises up its sleeves hidden inside.

For a start, what I was positive at first were just plain brass washers around the pivots turned out to actually be the weensiest little thrust ball bearing assemblies I’ve ever seen.

Look at the tiny bearing, it’s so cute. The inner diameter is just 3mm. I really shouldn’t be surprised that these are available as a commodity. RC nerds, most likely, will put a thrust bearing on any damn fool thing, and the smaller and more fiddly it is the better. Now four of 'em have found a home here.

The original Sidewinder has ball bearing pivots, too. Significantly larger ones. This undoubtedly contributes to its openability, and I’m sure the makers of this were trying to follow suit.

But in an apparent cost-cutting move, the Snake’s other end is forlorn and bearingless. Its tail linkage is just a plain flat surface riding on the inner faces of the handles. There’s a bunch of drag created here which probably doesn’t do the thing any favors in the trying-to-open-it department. I did mess with the screw tension here and also lubricated the faces thoroughly, which improved matters slightly but I still can’t get the bastard to open in a single action. Oh well.

Here’s the detent bar and its ball. If I were going to machine a detent out of a single slab of material this is exactly how I’d do it. I don’t know if that makes me smart or these guys dumb.

The total bill of materials. Despite being a bearing knife I’m kind of surprised to see that neither the blade nor the handles are pocketed for the bearings. The handle slabs remain in parallel because the linkage at the end is the same thickness, at least more or less, as the blade plus a pair of the bearings.

Here’s all the hardware. The screws are all T6 heads, and they were threadlockered to hell and back. This thing is extremely sensitive to the screw tension, so that’s probably on purpose. None of the screws have anti-rotation flats so you have to stick a driver in both sides if you want to get them out.

The tail linkage is also totally symmetrical, and thus not as elegant on the one in the OG Sidewinder which is concave in order to never stick out past the tips of the handles. The one in the Snake visibly does, albeit just a touch, when it’s in its open position.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you absolutely need to have a poor man’s Craighill Sidewinder in your life for some reason, I think this thing is just about in a class of one. If nothing else it’s about 80% as practical, but only 8.79% of the price.

The Snake is somehow both over- and under-built, with some premium(ish) materials and components which still somehow don’t quite manage to add up to a totally competent final product. There’s probably some social commentary to be found in there somewhere, but on that note there’s still nothing new under the sun.

And yes, I read the reviews.

I still bought the damn thing, though, because I’m stupid and I’ve got a brand to maintain. Maybe I ought to buy a brown table and work on my Scottish accent while I’m at it.