This Weekend's Project: Playing With Switchblades

Bit of a long overdue Spy update: finally made a knife. My Spy has been forced to go "Revolver spy" since September 2008 since I never made him a butterfly knife. No backstabbing for him.

Until now.

Naturally, what fun is it if the Spy's knife is static? Of course it works! It's perhaps one of the most fun melee weapons I've made in 1:6 scale next to the Soldier's entrenching tool. I'll go over the finer elements of the butterfly knife if you feel compelled to make your own for your Spies.
With all projects, we have the obligatory schematic. The knife is made of three main parts: the blade, and the two halves of the handle. I've taken care of the hard work of designing the parts for you. All dimensions are in millimeters, since Imperial units are for things made by Texans with large wrenches. The handle is made of the usual Magic: the Gathering card, created by folding a card in half and gluing another folded card over the first. An additional two layers were placed on both sides of the handle half for extra rigidity.

The blade, this time, is actually made of metal. I opted for metal in this case for simplicity of a strong and thin blade. You can use sheet metal bought from a craft store, but it should ideally be 0.05mm(0.002in) thick. I used the aluminum sheet that comes from electronics breadboards that I had obtained from my college days. No idea why they package a sheet of aluminum with them, but hooray for me! Draw out the blade with a marker and trim it out. You'll need a 1/16" drill bit for the hinge holes. For the hinge pins, a paper clip will suffice.

The silver paper circles are actually there to hide and retain the paper clip pins. They won't fall out normally, but it's nice to know they won't later on. You can optionally try to dull the blade so you don't do what I did and accidentally stab myself with it. But hey, if you're smart enough to make this, you have every right to make it as functionally sharp as possible.

Now with his own knife at last, he can do what all of us have been doing since the Sniper/Spy update: camping and trying to stab snipers and katana wielding girls. (The katana is incidentally from Final Fantasy VII Advent Children's Sephiroth figure, if you wish to obtain your own. It makes a surprisingly great 1:6 scale item despite it being 1:8.) Happy stabbing!

I'm going to gut you like a cornish game Aeris.