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Darrel Ralph is one of the best-known custom knife makers of our time. Several years ago, he decided to try his hand at balisong knives. The result was Project Gemini. Gemini was a very limited-edition of semi-custom balisongs which are highly sought by collectors today. You can see pictures and read about the Gemini prototype by clicking here. Following the great success of Gemini, Mr. Ralph has gone on to create more custom balisongs. One of the popular styles he calls, "Venturi."

Overall, Venturi is almost exactly nine inches (about 22.8cm) overall when open, about 5 1/16 inches (just under 13cm) closed. It weighs 3 3/4 ounces (105gm).

The handles are made of titanium; hence the light weight. The blade is made of Crucible CPM S30V stainless steel.

Sometimes, when knives are photographed without attention to proper lighting, the blades and other shinny metal parts can end up looking black.

This one certainly seems to. But, I can assure you that there is no lighting problem here. This knife is black... glossy, shinny black. If there is such a thing as "bright black," then this knife is bright black from the tip of the blade to the end of the latch.

It's coated with a substance called "Diamond-Like Coating."

When we think of Diamonds, we usually think of sparkling gem stones in expensive jewelry. Diamonds are the hardest substance known to man.

Synthetic diamonds have been made for many years. The process involves very high temperatures and pressures. In the mid 1980s, a process was developed to produce synthetic diamonds at lower temperatures and pressures... indeed in a vacuum. This revolutionary process grew these synthetic diamonds using chemical vapor deposition to deposit a very thin layer of cubic carbon/boron nitride onto a metal surface. You can use this process to grow diamonds for industrial purposes, abrasives, etc., or you can just leave that diamond-like film on the metal giving the metal an extremely tough surface.

According to the Diamond-Like Carbon Coating Centre at Brunel University in London, England:

Carbon is a very versatile element, it owes its versatility to the different ways carbon atoms can bond to each other and to other elements. In graphite, carbon atoms bond strongly to each other within a plane but weakly between adjacent planes. Graphite is soft, electrically conducting and opaque. In diamond the bonding is strong in all directions. Diamond is the hardest known material, electrically insulating and transparent from the far ultra-violet to the far infra-red. Diamond films with excellent protective properties can be produced by vacuum deposition but the optimum substrate temperature for coating is about 900oC which severely limits the range of substrates to which diamond can be applied.

Near room temperature, an amorphous carbon containing coating can be produced in which a proportion of the carbon atoms are bonded as in diamond and which resemble diamond in many ways - hence diamond-like carbon.

If you're very interested, the Diamond-Like Carbon Coating Centre website has a nice explanation of how the process is done, pictures of the equipment used, etc. It's very interesting.

Basically, DLC is like having your knife coated with diamond!

Because it's made of carbon, DLC is black. But, because it's very thin, it ends up being somewhat transparent. It's sort of like sun glasses lenses; they're transparent, but they also look black. Normally, when knives are DLC coated, they end up looking sort of dull gray as they silvery metal shows through the black DLC. But Mr. Ralph mirror-polished the components of this knife before sending it out for DLC. As a result, the surfaces are silky-smooth and glossy black.

There's no other word but stunning.

The actual coating on this knife is Diamond Black(tm), which is Bodycote(tm) Corporation's tradename for their boron-based version of DLC. You can read more about it on their website