You know, sometimes I almost miss the pre-Internet days. Or at least the early Internet era. Back then, the junk purveyors were all on late night television instead. In those pre-dawn hours, if you wanted to get your hands on the truly godawful and macabre you had to call the 1-800 number now, where operators were standing by, ready for your credit card and one easy payment. All of that took effort. Dedication, even. You had to be up at that hour, for a start, and even then you'd have to peel yourself out of your chair.

Nowadays it's just too easy. And some of us have a reputation to uphold and a show to keep going. So you scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and then you wind up with crap like this.

This is the NSOUR "Stainless Steel."

I'm serious. Its model designation is literally "Stainless Steel."

Or be precise, it's the "NSOUR New Stainless Steel Sharp Outdoor Camping Handle, Portable Meat Handle, Unboxing Fruit Knife for Self-defense."

I will let the record state that I am leaving the Portable Meat Handle completely unaddressed. At least this time they managed to get all the letters into "self-defense," and even in the right order. And NSOUR sounds like it ought to be the name of a Chinese knockoff boy band.

If a cigar cutter got drunk and fucked an out-the-front switchblade, the resulting crack baby would undoubtedly be this.

It's tough to miss the NSOUR's most prominent feature, which in fact isn't its silly name, but rather is this tantalizing trigger mechanism behind the big hole in the blade. At first blush it appears that sticking your finger in here ought to be an express ticket to amputation, but no part of the circular cutout is sharp nor contacts the edge in any way. This is a slide opening knife — not a side opening knife — and here's what that looks like:

The action is slightly gritty and drags noticeably. But it is not spring loaded and thus very emphatically, definitely and clearly, and by all legal precedent is absolutely not a switchblade. It just wishes it were.

The NSOUR weighs 57.8 grams or 2.04 ounces and is constructed entirely of steel of some description, most likely stainless per its blurb but with these things you can never really take anything at its face value. And it's not quite as compact as you'd think. It's nearly exactly 4" long when closed, call it 3-15/16". But thanks to a good chunk of its length being taken up by the finger hole the blade itself is actually a comically stubby 1-7/8". Open, then, it's 5-5/8" long overall. The heel of the blade ends in a short ricasso and somehow this knife manages to be the only one I think I've ever handled that actually has more length of sharpened edge than is actually presented to the user. Even with the blade fully extended there's about 1/8" of edge that doesn't come out far enough to ever actually make any contact with the outside world, instead preferring to hide in between the handle plates.

I guess that bit will never get dull, at least.

Because this sort of thing is contractually obligated to contain one on it somewhere, the front of it also serves as a bottle opener. Let it not be said that every part of this is useless, then. (And at this rate my collection of dumb bottle openers is nearly as large as my collection of dumb knives. Many of them are, in fact, one and the same.)

The NSOUR is nearly completely flat, made up of just two shiny polished handle plates made of sheet steel (also presumably stainless, or at least one would hope) separated by a springy backspacer. Only the screw heads protrude past this. Without them it's 0.217" thick. The designers probably could have countersunk the screw heads and made this much slicker, but they didn't. So with them, the total thickness is 0.304". That's still not much.

There's no clip. However, you do get a triangular lanyard/keyring cutout in the tail and a cheap split ring was included in the baggie with mine. For the paltry $10.25 this costs, perish the thought of actually getting a box. That's not how it works.

What It Do

Rather, here's how it works.

Opening this with one hand isn't quite impossible, but it's harder than you'd think. The blade doesn't lock in the retracted position, thankfully, because with only that trigger to work with unlocking it would probably take three hands. It simply detents there, but it does so just exactly too firmly to be convenient. The track the blade slides in isn't polished in the slightest, and despite the typical Chinese predilection to douse everything in petrochemical-smelling grease my example showed up entirely unlubricated. Matters improved a little bit once I dripped some machine oil in the track, but not much. Fidgeting with the thing a whole bunch helped, too. Even so, the amount you have to scooch the blade forward to get it locked open is too far to do in a single operation with one hand. You have to play this little game of push, scoot, push, scoot, regrip, and repeat which is not only inelegant but also makes to feel kind of like a twerp. Like you're doing it wrong. Every time you think if you choke up on it a little further, really reach for it, and contort your fingers like a sleight-of-hand magician, this time you'll get it in one smooth movement. And you can't. Not now, not ever. That's just how it is.

I think perhaps it would be best to ignore the purported self-defense application of this knife. I don't know about the fruit or the meat handling, either.

It might be better if there were some manner of grip greebles on the edges of it. But there aren't, and every face is polished smooth.

On the bright side, I thought for sure this would also be a self dulling knife with the edge raking across the bottom of the track every time you opened it. Surprisingly, it isn't and it doesn't, at least if you open it the usual way. Trust me, I'm just as shocked as you are. You can knock the edge into the bottom track if you deploy it halfway and deliberately push it down, but thanks to the spring action built into it, it won't want to stay there and it helpfully cams itself back up into a position where it won't damage itself. If you value what little edge this has from the factory, don't do that.

As a consolation prize, the frame totally does scratch up the mirror polished faces on the flat of the blade every time you open and close it. What, you didn't think we'd manage to skate by so easily without some crucial aspect of the mechanism being fucked up in such a way to perfectly annoy you, did you?

The trigger does indeed lock the blade in the open position. The lockup's not very solid and there's a great deal of rattle left in the blade in every direction you can think of even when it's ostensibly locked. But it won't close up on you until you deliberately pull the trigger back, which both unlocks it and retracts the blade back into the handle as you'd hope and expect. This brings your index finger with it so it's actually damn difficult to cut yourself with this even if you do accidentally cause it to fold up unexpectedly. So that's nice.

Obviously there's no real forward finger guard, but if you hold this the way it appears you're supposed to you'll have your index finger through the hole, which ought to do a good job of preventing your grip from sliding up onto the edge no matter how much of a muppet you are.

Since there's no externally visible mechanism on this thing whatsoever you're probably wondering, as was I, just how the hell it works. Well...

One. Moment. Please.

The NSOUR's external construction is superficially very simple, with just four Chicago screws in the corners holding it together. They're threadlockered and obviously they don't contain any anti-rotation flats, so getting the plates apart requires sticking a T6 driver in both sides and giving a hearty twist. Preferably without slipping out and stripping the screw heads, or stabbing yourself with your own screwdrivers.

Inside you can see the NSOUR's secrets, which are simultaneously brutally crude and ingeniously clever. It's just all dichotomous like that.

Which side you get off doesn't matter. Most of its mechanism is not only contained in, but also comprised of the backspacer. A selection of prongs carved into the spacer serve as both the detent and lock-open springs. A tiny ramp and notch carved into the top of the blade engage with these.

When the blade is retracted there's a pair of prongs that are just mashed against it and prevents the thing from just falling open in your pocket. It's not great but it works, in a broad sense. It's certainly better than nothing, and all this is what prevents the NSOUR from just being a gravity knife. I believe the lower one is also meant to assist in preventing the edge from riding against the lower surface of the spacer. There's a notch on the lower heel of the blade that I think is supposed to make the closed lockup a little more positive and less squidgy, but it doesn't quite accomplish that. Just by looking at it I have to figure that the assembly of one of these requires a fair amount of hand finishing and tuning with a file or more likely a tiny grinder. Expecting whoever-it-is to nail it perfectly every time is probably a reach. In my case they certainly didn't.

Out on the business end, another prong serves as an endstop and one more just barely falls into the notch on the back of the blade once you push it to its fully extended position, acting as a one way gate and preventing it from backing up. The trigger is very lightly spring loaded and pivots on its top screw, camming upwards when you pull it back to minutely push the locking prong out of the way so you can retract the blade.

The trigger itself is the most complicated part of the entire assembly. It's made of two plates held together with yet more Chicago screws, with a pin pressed into one of them. There's a hair-thin torsion spring around the lower screw which pokes into the little hole you see there and goes off "ping!" as soon as you take it apart. I couldn't get it to stay in place without putting the top plate back on, so I left it out for this shot. The interface with the prongs is a tiny lobe made out of what I presume is hardened steel, which is clearly the only precision machined part in the whole damn knife and rests in a dovetail notch on top of the blade.

Here are all the trigger components separated out, including the spring:

Reassembling the stupid tiny spring is exactly as annoying as you'd expect. The long arm of it doesn't go anywhere in particular and just rests against the back of the hole in the blade. Keen readers will have already spotted it in some of the other photos, but in the exceedingly unlikely event that you also own an NSOUR knife and have also unwisely it apart for some reason, here is where the other end of the spring is supposed to go when you finagle it back together:

And, the full spread of parts:

The left and right handle plates are identical, and you can swap them from one side to the other if you like. They're even polished on both sides.

All the internal bits, such as they are, in action:

It's always deeply satisfying once you get one of these weird knives apart and understand how its screwball action works. In some small part it represents a triumph over whichever dickhead designed it. It's even better when you can get the fucking thing back together without losing any parts, and it even still works. I'm happy to say I won this round, for whatever it's worth.

This knife's action is novel, but also really a stupid way to go about it. It's inevitable, though. The longer any mechanism exists, the closer the probability of some turkey trying to use it in a knife gets to 1:1.

And speaking of inevitable...

The Inevitable Conclusion

I have a friend who is an engineer. No, really. I do. For many years, he's told me he's kicked around the idea of writing a book. He wants to call it, "Why We Don't Do It This Way." I think I might have just found him a new chapter.

History is littered with dumb ideas that never caught on. How fortunate we are, perhaps, to have this opportunity to witness one of them unfolding right in front of us in real time. But the truth is, if nobody actually gave it a shot we would never discover what the next big thing might turn out to be.

Whatever that is, though, it probably isn't this.

It's easy to declare it's all been said already, everything's been done before, and there's nothing new under the sun. I don't think that's so, myself. But that doesn't mean that the next radical idea won't be a bloody stupid one.