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Artisan Cutlery Debuts New Lock and Lockless Flippers

February 5, 2020

Artisan Cutlery is experimenting with locking and non-locking designs in 2020. They debuted a knife sporting their new, in-house developed locking mechanism, as well as lockless variants of two existing models.

1822

This knife, which has yet to be given a name other than its numerical designation, will be the first Artisan product equipped with a lock developed by the company itself. The lock is located on the spine of the knife, just below where the blade begins. It consists of a sliding tab that moves forward into place as the flipper knife is deployed, and that is disengaged by pulling back on the tab and pushing on the spine of the blade to close it.

There has been somewhat of an explosion of proprietary locks in recent years. As with many of these inventions, like Steel Will‘s Ant-Lock, Andrew Demko‘s Tri-Ad and Scorpion Locks, and even the older Axis Lock, the Artisan lock is ambidextrous and able to be operated with one hand.

Archaeo and Cutlass NL

The original Cutlass and Archaeo both released last year; the former was an in-house piece while the latter marked the production knife debut of designer Dylan Mallery, packing a large blade into a slender overall package. These new NL variants are non-locking of those models that retain their flipper opening method.

Both NL knives come equipped with a secondary security option in the form of a pin that can be fit into a hole on the handle. The pin passes through the blade tang, providing the blade with more rigidity during use should a user deem it necessary.

Both the 18822 and the NL releases were among the crowd of Artisan products at SHOT Show last month. Another recent release, the Centauri, was a collaboration with custom maker Ray Laconico and checked off another first for Artisan as their entry into the front flipper genre.

The Centauri is available now. No release date has been given for the 1822 or the NL models yet.

Knife in Featured Image: Artisan Cutlery 1822

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