One frequently asked question I get about my butterfly knives, the Orions, is why did I choose internal pins over tried and true Zen pins or Tang pins? It's a good question, only one other knife maker uses internal pins in a Balisong, a very awesome and well respected knife maker named Todd Begg. I have to confess, when I first designed the Orions I didn't know Todd had used anything similar, being unfamiliar with Todd's work at the time, but was happy to find out he had been using them with excellent success for several years. I was able to attain permission to use them from Todd, and for that I'm extremely greatful, he is an awesome individual with boundless design and fabrication talent and I'm truly honored to use his system of internal pins in my knives.
But why use Begg/Internal pins at all? What benefit do they really give the user? Well, for starters, they obviously look cleaner than traditional pin arrangements. Likewise they can never fall out, unlike tang pins. Zen pins also require a specific tang and blade geometry in order to work, so the Orion design would obviously look quite different if I were limited to Zen pins. I've also found through my testing that Begg pin styled knives are consistantly capable of taking great stresses on the blade, definitly a desirable property in a hard use balisong. There's nothing technically wrong with either of the traditional pin arrangements, but Todd's system allowed me more artistic freedom with my design and a few functional differences that make the knife a little easier to maintain and cleaner looking.
Would I recomend a knife maker use a Begg pin arrangement system? With his permission, I think so, the milling work for the blade is much more difficult and you will need to have extremely tight tolerances for the system to work, but overall I've been extremely happy with the system. If you want to use a similar internal pin system, please contact Todd before doing so.
-Will
