Blade Show 2023: Fox Shows off Customizable Metamorphosis Knife

Fox Knives really brought the heat at Blade Show 2023. The Maniago shop’s incoming products include two new collaboration models and an in-house project called the Metamorphosis, a concept that lets users customize multiple elements of the knife before they make a purchase.

Anzu

This rugged, handsome folder comes to us from Les George, and it bears a family resemblance to his previous well-known work – especially in that blade profile, a burly drop point with a long sloping swedge and stout thumb ramp. Opened with a thumb stud, the Anzu’s blade is made from MagnaCut blade steel.

Also on display here is the Verso Lock. You can probably guess what we’re going to say next: this is a variation on the ambidextrous, spring-loaded crossbar mechanism that defines the Axis Lock – a concept that has been riffed on a lot since the patent expired in 2018.

Eastwood Tiger Fixed Blade

The original Eastwood Tiger was a swaggering, over the top flipper design from Dutch custom maker Gudy Van Poppel. Now in 2023, it has been transformed into a fixed blade, which allowed Van Poppel and Fox to really lean into the hard use characteristics that were always present in the design. There’s the same bulbous bowie blade, and what would have been the flipper tab on the first version is, here, a finger guard. Instead of titanium scales, this fixed blade will have full-sized, aggressively textured scales made from various synthetic options.

Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is a pretty wild project. At it’s core, its a typically high-end Fox folder, built around the Radius Lock. This mechanism, designed by Denis Simonutti, opens with a thumb stud-esque component placed, not on the blade, but in a crescent-shaped cutout around the pivot.

What gets the Metamorphosis its name is that, in essence, it is a locking frame that can accommodate different blades and handle materials, allowing users to make their own knife before they buy it. Fox themselves painted this picture: “the shopkeeper will have the opportunity to present in a special box the various components that…the end customer will be able to match and combine through the central mechanism equipped with the patented Radius opening system.”

The Metamorphosis is still in an early prototype phase but Fox says that the possibility is there for a “very extensive family” of model options here.

Knife in Featured Image: Fox Knives Anzu

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