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reswright
3850
Jun 15, 2019
Latest example of a TwoSun titanium knife with premium steel and works: the TS-134 Shockwave.
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The Shockwave is the second TwoSun knife designed by Shan Hassan, aka Tepe Designs, which is I believe based in the San Francisco area. He's posted elsewhere on Drop about his work. Here's the first TwoSun he did, the Dynamo, pictured next to the Shockwave:
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As you can see, the Shockwave's anodized (it also comes in green and bronze anodized Ti), bigger than the Dynamo, with a bit more commercially familiar style of blade and flipper. Also a bit more aggressively lined, with a pronounced choil. It appears to have a very similar clip but there's one major difference aside from size -- this clip is actually fused to the frame, where the Dynamo's can be removed normally. I'm fairly neutral on titanium clips -- I like the material strength but I think a lot of titanium clips are way too stiff and rigid to be good clips. Of the two, I chose to pick up the Dynamo first, because I loved the flipper design and also the steel (seems like everyone works in M390 these days, and I still like S90V and S110V a little more), even though it was smaller, more expensive, not anodized, and didn't look like it had a terribly refined pivot works. I figured if I liked the Dynamo then I'd give the more conventional looking Shockwave a try. And I ended up liking the Dynamo a lot, so I pulled one of these off the bay from the TwoSun store. First things first? $86 for a mid sized knife with a US designer made out of 6-4 Ti and Bohler M390? That's kind of a steal even if it's just an OK knife, and I gotta tell you: i expected to open this package and still like my Dynamo more by the time i was done looking at this, and now I'm not so sure I do. At first it kind of looked like a much less meaningful design, sort of like after the Dynamo TwoSun said 'ok that's nice, now make us a regular flip knife' . But I'm seeing things I like better. The Shockwave shows some iterative design improvements and has a lot more refined of a feel compared to the Dynamo. The Dynamo blade fires with a decided snikt and it takes very little force to fire it. It feels like it means business. You can deploy the Shockwave a lot more slowly, though, without it hanging up. Feels a lot more polished and handfit. Grip is great. The curve on the handle is deceptive, you gotta look at it for a minute before you see how fat the pommel is and how aggressive the lines are -- like a Strider folder that someone rounded off a bit. I generally like handles with a bit of chamfer work but the rounding of this titanium will suffice, I don't have a problem gripping it. Something it has in common with the Dynamo -- both have a fat ass on them, as far as the knife balance goes. And that's a good thing, and not just because I'm down with old school Mixalot -- I find that with knives this size, a bit of weight distributed toward the back helps keep the handle square and centered in your palm, gives you some strategic counterweight as you move the knife about. The Dynamo needs the backspacer to bring that weight, the Shockwave has a fatter pommel and so a slightly lighter backspacer relative to the size of the knife. Either way both knives feel nimble in my hand. So why's this thing flip nicer than the Dynamo, even though the Dynamo has that cool little turbine wheel flipper on it?
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There's your answer. Where the Dynamo had a thin pivot, simple nylon caged bearings and a set of small raceways for the bearings with use, this one comes with a slightly thicker pivot, a slightly bigger bearing cage with more bearings, and proper, fully formed steel racers for those bearings to run in. That's why the flip's got less rub to it even though it's fresh out of the box and I've probably flipped the Dynamo a few thousand times already, just playing around with it. But it's all super simple, as a matter of fact the Shockwave is a little bit easier to take apart and reassemble than the Dynamo. Like so:
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Most knife makers will insist on making you use at least two, sometimes three different size Torx heads to disassemble their stuff. Shan was nice enough to make it a single tool job. Not bad work at all.
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(Edited)
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