Ceci nāest pas une Benchmade.
No, really. Itās not.
With all this talk of Bugouts and Minis and Bailouts lately, obviously Iāve been building up to something. So here it is.
This pisses me off.
No, not because itās an obvious copy of the Benchmade 535 Bugout. This is in fact the āHUAAO 7.4 Inch Manual Open Bugout 535 Folding Knife,ā the titanium version. I donāt know who the hell HUAAO are, other than one of those bare minimum five-letter Amazon nonbrands, although their name has crossed my desk before. The gods alone know who actually make this thing.
Itās yours for $47.49 from Amazon, available here. No, thatās not an affiliate link ā I wonāt gain anything if you click. More the fool me, perhaps, for that being the case.
This pisses me off because of the state of the world. Because itās exactly what it says on the tin, and itās less than $50, and it fixes so much that annoys me about the genuine Benchmade Bugout, which costs four times more.
I like this knife better than the Bugout. Thatāsā¦ really just digging my hole deeper, isnāt it?
I could go over the specs of the HUAAO but thatās not too tough to do. Copy and paste what I said about the Bugout; this is the same. In fact, I will: Itās 7-3/8" long open, 4-1/4" closed, with a 3-1/8" blade. The bladeās the same 0.089" thick. It is a copy down to submillimetric precision.
It has an Axis lock, and it even makes a respectable presentation of reproducing the tumbled stonewash satin finish of the original on the blade. Note, however, that it doesnāt even pretend to have a Benchmade logo on it. In fact, it bears no markings whatsoever. No brand, no makerās mark, no model number, no serial, no steel descriptor. It doesnāt even say āmade in China,ā even though it obviously is.
This weighs 93.3 grams or 3.29 ounces. Itās still pretty light, but thatās 42.2 grams more than the Bugout ā for one very simple reason. Just like it says, the handles are machined out of titanium. And insofar as Iām able to determine they genuinely are. The scales weigh 25.9 grams each.
Of course you have to have a grain or two of salt handy to deal with the Country That Fakes Literally Everything. But a magnet doesnāt stick to them, theyāre clearly denser in the hand than a roughly equivalently sized block of aluminum, but theyāre far too light to be zinc or any other potmetal. I have a pair of titanium tweezers that I use for arranging all the fiddly little screws and pins and bits for my photo shoots and comparing those to these, they definitely feel like the business. I donāt have any other really nondestructive ways to test them.
Titanium is simply not an option on the Bugout. The Bailout comes with an aluminum handle for a massive upcharge, and the Bugout itself can be had in the 535-3 variant with carbon fiber handles for a similarly ludicrous markup. But there is no metal handle option at all. Flexy bendy plastic is your only lot.
The easy to carry svelteness of the Bugout is its headline feature, and the HUAAO knife has that. Itās 0.405" thick in total, as usual not including the clip. Thatās damn close to the thickness of the Bugout, and who knows how accurate my original measurement of the Benchmade was. The OG Bugout has a diamond grip pattern embossed into it and the HUAAO hasnāt, so maybe my calipers fell into a valley in those. Or maybe the handles flexed. I couldnāt tell you for sure. Either way, thatās only a 0.016" difference.
The handles on the HUAAO do not flex. At all. This thing is solid as a rock, exhibiting no perceptible bow whatsoever even if you give it your mightiest squeeze. The surface is subtly rounded and has a satin bead blasted finish that provides a decent amount of purchase, although without any machined or molded texture itās not as grippy as the diamonds molded into the Bugout. It feels much more refined and gentlemanly, though, which in comparing the two is surely heresy of the highest order. The spine is squared with a slight fillet, whereas the Bugout has a slight but definite chevron angle along the rear edge which is barely perceptible but makes it deceptively difficult to stand the thing up on edge. This has no bearing whatsoever on anything in the real world unless youāre trying to stand it up to take photos of the thing, in which case itās maddening. No so with the HUAAO; itāll stand up resolutely on a flat surface.
Anyway, as you can see above the clip is ever so slightly taller than the Bugoutās and it has a different radius to the semicircular part. It works pretty much the same way and just like the Bugoutās it is too tightly sprung. But the surface of the HUAAO is smoother, and that makes for a nicer draw from the pocket in my opinion. So it scores better there as well, dagnabbit.
Instead of the diabolo spacers Benchmade uses this unitary machined and anodized back spacer. It accepts a pair of screws in the same positions, though. It has grip ridges machined into it, and forms a lanyard hole where the handle scales are cut out for it. I feel this gives a much more confident lanyard attachment point and yes, the inner edges of it are even chamfered slightly so it doesnāt slice through whatever cordage you use.
Already weāre up to three things I like better about this knife than the OG Bugout. What about the action, though? This is a knockoff knife, so surely thatās crap, right?
Itās not.
The HUAAO opens with satin smoothness. This is with no tuning at all, straight out of the box. Pull the Axis lock back and the blade just falls open, as if it were a gravity knife. The lockup is exactly as solid and precise as the original, and it has zero blade wiggle.
Thatās because the HUAAO has ball bearing pivots. The Benchmade Bugout and its ilk, needless to say, donāt.
āGlideā isnāt even the right term to describe how it feels manipulating this knife. While the Bugout is serviceable, possibly even bordering on pleasant if youāve taken the time to tune yours correctly, the HUAAO is instead impeccable. I hate it because I love it so much.
Hereās what you get inside:
That is indeed a better than complete mechanical copy of the Benchmade. The blade heel is different because itās got a pocket milled into it for the bearings. Otherwise, many of the parts are even interchangeable. Even if youāre a snob and you absolutely cannot countenance not having that butterfly etched onto your blade, you could steal the handle scales and backspacer off of this and swap them over.
Here is one of my HUAAOās scales on my Bugout. As you can see, everything lines right up. Youāll also want to bring some of the screws over, thoughā¦
Because unlike the Bugout, some of the screws are different. On the OG, all of the screws are the same except the one that goes in the middle of the handle, into the tail of the liner plate. On the HUAAO, that screw and the one that goes into the endstop pin are a smaller diameter. The middle one is also shorter, and donāt mix them up or else youāll scratch your blade with the excess screw length sticking out into the channel. The two that go into the backspacer on each side are the same as each other, and also interchangeable with the Benchmadeās screws.
There are other construction quirks, as well. For instance:
The pivot screw is D shaped, with an anti-rotation flat on it just like the Benchmadeās. But the liner plates and scales donāt have matching cutouts. Their holes are just round. (Thereās also a gouge in the inner surface of this plate from the factory, but this doesnāt seem to affect anything.) So presumably to compensate for this the pivot screw in my example was glued ā yes glued, I believe with superglue ā into place.
Some of that also escaped onto the plates. This didnāt impact functionality, but it annoyed me and I had to dissolve it with acetone. Hereās what that looked like on the workbench.
For what itās worth the liner plates are totally interchangeable between a real Bugout and this. So if you really gave a shit you could swap those over, too, and have matching holes to go with your D flats.
Okay, so, some cost cutting measures have clearly been taken. Thatās to be expected for the price. Certainly no one is going to machine something to Benchmade specifications for a non-Benchmade price. And the blade, right, itās obviously crap. Right???
Well, the grind is dead true. How about that.
Sharpness is a tough attribute to convey in text, or indeed even in a video. And beyond exceptionally bad instances itās kind of immaterial, since sooner or later youāll be bound to be resharpening the thing yourself anyhow. But my example came out of the box quite serviceably sharp. It has no problems cleanly lopping the corner off of a Post-It.
HUAAO allege it to be made of 440C and given what weāve seen to be readily available from other Chinese makers like Ganzo I donāt think itās a stretch to trust them on that. So itās not a supersteel, but for a sub-$50 knife with bearing pivots and titanium handles I donāt think thatās a major knock against it. 440C is a perfectly cromulent alloy, if you ask me. Itās got decent edge retention characteristics and while its toughness is not on par with some of the current high end supersteels, youāre hardly going to be prying nails and beheading zombies with this little thing anyway.
The real Bugoutās steel is better. Thatās just how it is. But Iām okay with 440C, and just for sake of argument Iād snap up a D2 version of this in a heartbeat. Conversely, Iād pay half the price for a Bugout if Benchmade would just make it out of, say, 154CM and be happy with it.
If youāre looking to identify one of these in the wild, you wonāt get any help from the box. This knife came in the most nondescript packaging in the history of the universe. You get this black lift-off cardboard box with no identifying information on it. Itās nice in its way, sturdy with a nice woven texture in it. But it says nothing. Literally nothing. No brand, no model number, nothingās printed on it at all.
Inside rests your prize. Mine came in two plastic baggies nested inside each other. But likewise to the box, there is no manual, no tag or label, no instructions leaflet. Nothing else comes in the box but the knife itself, and a piece of foam glued to the bottom.
On the bright side, this isnāt really pretending to be a Benchmade. I could see some charlatan slathering it up with fake logos, and I respect the manufacturer a little more ā whoever they actually are ā for not trying that.
The Inevitable Conclusion
There are plenty of reasons to shell out for a Benchmade. A warranty, for one. The HUAAO certainly hasnāt got one of those, at least beyond what you can wring out of its reseller.
But underneath it all, as an object this is a better Bugout than the Bugout. Thatās infuriating. Not because of what this knife is, or who makes it, but because Benchmade didnāt. This goes beyond getting cloned ā this is an improvement over the original in several respects and for significantly less in the bargain. This is the knife Benchmade should have made all along, for the exorbitant amount they already charge.
Sure, you can buy aftermarket titanium scales for a Bugout and it wonāt flex anymore. Now your $180 knife is $276. You could probably pay a machinist to mill out your blade to take thrust bearings, too. There goes your warranty, while youāre at it. Would you? I wouldnāt.
This puts us at a crossroads. It does for me, anyway. I like the HUAAO a lot. Sure, I would like it more if it werenāt a replica of someone elseās design. Say if they took all the same features and materials, made it the same size, but in a different shape. Would anyone be howling about it being a āBenchmade ripoffā then? Itād just be a hidden gem of a little off brand knife. Weāve seen those before and even talked about them here. Is there such a thing as an ethical reworking of the very shape of something else? I donāt know. At the end of the day, itās just a pocketknife.
But Iāll be carrying this instead of my Bugout. It feels better. It opens better. It looks better. And if I destroy it, Iāll be a lot less sad about it than my Benchmade. And that right there is where the rubber meets the road. Regardless of how well itās made or what kind of fancy steel it uses, is a knife you wonāt use ābetterā in a real world sense than one you will?
I submit to you that it is not.
Yep. I find interest where I never had any before just by the wording and writing.