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Monterey Bay Knives Gives Slayback a Lock and Exotic Super Steel Blade

August 17, 2021

Monterey Bay Knives dropped a new version of their Slayback flipper. This latest version comes decked out with a rare blade steel, lock, and a different kind of flipper mechanism.

Monterey Bay Knives is a production knife brand founded by two custom knife makers, Ray Laconico and Sanford Owen. We first spoke to them last summer, when they were rolling out the Old Guard, a knife designed exclusively for their MBK lineup with a back-to-basics ethos and construction. The Slayback released earlier this year and was a very different beast: a ball-bearing flipper knife with a trendy wharncliffe blade, and a double-detent, modern slipjoint construction.

This new Slayback keeps the general design of the original, but there are some big changes present here. First of all, this is a locking knife, with an inset liner lock beneath its titanium scales. The presence of a lock obviously expands the Slayback’s EDC capabilities even further, with that extra bit of security making it suitable for more demanding tasks.

The blade itself is the same stylized, 3-inch wharncliffe as on the original Slayback, but, instead of M390 steel, this one comes with something more exotic: ZDP-189. The super steel market has exploded in recent years, so we don’t see ZDP-189 as much these days, but even after dozens of newer steels this Japanese recipe still holds its own. MBK clad the ZDP-189 blade in 420J to shore up its major weakness, which is that it is not a stainless steel. And finally, instead of the in-line flipper tab of the previous Slaybacks, the ZDP-189 Slayback has a standard, spine-situated flipper.

The ZDP-189 Slayback is available now.

Knife in Featured Image: Monterey Bay Knives ZDP-189 Slayback

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