The perfect lefty folding knife

The perfect knife for a lefty will come in many forms. Here are a list of features every lefty folding knife should have:

Clip: should be on the left side of the knife (looking at the knife tip up and edge away from you). It can be mounted for either tip up or down to your preference.

Opening: The opening device should be accessible with the left hand. A hole in the blade, a disk on the spine, or a stud sticking out of the blade on the right (and maybe left also) side are all fine here. A Kick, or blade spur that sticks out the spine when the blade is closed, is also a useful way to open a knife. To do it, you flick the kick into the handle with your index finger, pushing the blade open. Sometimes this alone is enough to fully engage the blade. Other times you may need to give your wrist a flick to help the blade open fully.

Lock: The perfect knife can close one handed. This takes lock-backs off the list. Liner-locks and Frame-locks are available on some knives for lefties. A correct lefty liner-lock will be on the same side of the blade as the clip. This allows you to push it out of the way with your thumb, not pull it. Other locks include Benchmade's AXIS lock, a through the handle bar that is spring loaded and engages a cutout in the blade when fully opened. You pull it back out of the cutout to disengage. This can be done with a finger or thumb, or by griping the bar with both thumb and middle finger and pulling back and using the index finger to close the blade (without needing to adjust your grip at all).

That's it: clip, opener, lock. These are all that are needed for me to be happy. However, the perfect lefty folding knife also has:

Blade Edge: This is barely a requirement, as I've never handled a knife where I wouldn't keep it if the blade edge grind wasn't good. If your knife has a chisel grind, that is sharpened on one side and flat on the other, the flat side should be the clip (left) side of the knife. Most blades are sharpened evenly on both sides of the edge, making this a moot point.

There are no examples of a current production knife with a liner-lock that's lefty. In the past, Benchmade, Emerson, REKAT, Spyderco, CRKT, and Kershaw all made lefty liner-locks.

So, say you want an inexpensive lefty knife, what are your choices? Your best choice is to go with an AXIS lock, or AXIS-like lock. Benchmade has the AXIS Griptilian or Mini-Griptilian, SOG has the Arc-lock Mini X-Ray Vision, Spyderco has the Ball-Lock D'Allara Drop Point or even the Cold Steel Ultra Lock Recon-1 (the only knife on this list I don't own, and I own many knives).

Your other choices fails the Lock category, but you can adapt:
One choice would be to go with a lock-back knife. You sacrifice the one hand closing, but many companies make knives that fit this category, including Spyderco (Native, Endura, Delica), Ka-Bar (Dozier folder), Benchmade (Pika), and many others. Just make sure the clip can be relocated to the left side, and that the opening device can be used with the left thumb.
Your other choice would be to go with a righty liner-lock. Here you just have to pull the lock with your thumb; some find this hard. Again, the clip and opener need to be setup for the lefty. Columbia River Knife and Tool are well known here with their M-16 and all it's versions, but many other companies make liner locks too.


More expensive? Higher end production knives from the companies listed above, like the Benchmade 940. Also Chris Reeve Knives makes a lefty version of their Sebenza frame-lock, a solid workhorse knife. Strider just did a run of lefty SnG.

Custom knives? Many knife makers will create a lefty liner-lock for you. You're see examples of these in this blog. Some are rarer than others, all are expensive.