Weird Knife Wednesday: CRKT Cottidae

Dudes. The Day. Once more.

This is the CRKT Cottidae and, once again, I find myself at a loss for any authoritative indication of how you're supposed to pronounce its name.

This knife is a Jesper Voxnaes design, as the engraving on the blade will tell you. We've seen his work before. We will certainly do so again; I have at least one other knife in my collection known to be done by him.

As you may have also guessed from the logo, the Cottidae is a ball bearing pivoted flipper opener. So confident are CRKT and Mr. Voxnaes in these ball bearings that it has no thumb studs or equivalents whatsoever, and barely any of the spine of the blade is visible from between the handles. The only way to open it is via the very low profile rear flipper.

The handle scales are unitary slabs of textured aluminum.

The Cottidae has a drop point D2 blade that's a sturdy 0.135" thick with a full flat grind. That ought to give it very good cutting power despite its rather diminutive size. It's only 6-5/16" long opened, 3-3/4" closed, with a 2-9/16" blade. About 2-3/16" of the edge is usable due to a very long, squared, shallow choil at the base that forms a finger notch in conjunction with the flipper, which makes it easy to choke up very far with your grip.

It's thick for its size. 0.513" not including the (reversible) deep carry clip. It's dense, too. 93.6 grams or 3.30 ounces, giving it a solid feel in the hand. The ergonomics are pretty nice despite the overall squarish Bauhaus minimalism to the shape. The opening action is, of course, impeccable due to the presence of the bearings even if the tiny flipper takes some getting used to. The detent resistance is very light on this knife, possibly the lightest out of any pure non-spring-assisted knife I own.

Yes, I am deliberately beating around the bush here. "What is so damn weird about it?" I hear you shouting at your computer and/or phone screen.

Well, I've been coy and I haven't shown you the other side of the knife yet.

There's this switch thingy. "Aha!" Say the comments, "So, it's got some kind of goofy lock."

Well, no. It is a normal liner locker inside.

The switch pivots to the side, and then slides forward in its track like so. And then what happens is...

...the entire knife just...

...falls apart.

That is what Patent 10,226,871 is. CRKT calls this "Field Strip Technology," and for most intents and purposes this knife can be dismantled as far as normal people would want to take it with no tools.

No screws, no bits, no drivers. The Cottidae is apparently held together by witchcraft.

How it actually works is, there is a sliding metal plate between the aluminum handle scale and the liner on that side of the knife. When you toggle the latch, the plate is allowed to slide forward and a pair of keyhole shaped cutouts in that plate disengage themselves from the main pins inside.

Here is the pivot pin hole in both positions. Note the crescent moon slice of metal visible in the hole in the first picture that's gone in the second.

The tips of the main pivot pin and the tail pin are grooved, and these grooves get engaged by the plate.

These remain captive in the liner lock side of the knife when you take it apart. As does the pivot endstop pin, which rides in the semicircular channel in the blade. So there are no small pieces that can fall out and get lost. There are no little pins, tiny screws, springs, washers, or spacers. The knife breaks down into just three major components: The two handle halves and the blade. It should therefore be safe to pop this apart even in the middle of the woods to ungunk it, without fear of any of your vital hardware disappearing to live with the fairies beneath the forest floor.

You can take the rest of the knife apart further by undoing the screws on the outside which will ultimately release all the pins and liners. But doing so is totally unnecessary for normal cleaning and maintenance.

Inside, the thrust ball bearings and their carriers are plainly visible, and are semi-captive in cutouts in the heel of the blade. Note also the aforementioned channel for the endstop pin.

Compared to the traditional CQC-6K, the Cottidae's compactitude is thusly evident. This isn't small enough to truly count as a micro-knife, in my opinion, but it should be well within the bounds of blade length limitations in most places. Plus it hasn't got any springs, gravity action, or other Naughty Features. The blade isn't even black. So it ought to be legal to carry in a wide variety of locales.

The Inevitable Conclusion

For the habitual knife-fiddlers in the audience, this one gives you a whole new way to play with it beyond the usual flicking it open and closed, an action that tends to, with sufficient repetition, put everyone in your office on edge and slowly drive them insane.

Instead, you can incessantly reenact the scene of Forrest Gump field stripping and reassembling his M1 carbine in company record time. I highly recommend it.

(And if you want a larger but more expensive version, you can check out the CRKT Bona Fide, which uses the same system.)