Perfect Balance Sport
The Bowie-Axe is a classic, popular, and good throwing knife. And the company Cold Steel did have an excellent idea in producing a modern re-run dubbed Perfect Balance Thrower. Some years later, they came up with the concept of producing a "Sports" version of it, which is simply cheaper, with cheaper production quality. Well, bad idea - I would not recommend buying:
length:
total: 34.5 cm
sharp blade: 16cm
weight: 340g
thickness: 3.5mm
centre of gravity: nearly in the middle, shifted a little bit towards the blade.
country of production: South Africa
- The angles of the handle are so square, they will bite your hand in throwing - and training for hundreds of throws, they'll really hurt your palm.
- The throwing knife has the same dimensions as the more expensive Perfect Balance Thrower, but is 30% thinner and 20% lighter*. Gripping it, the knife just feels too light, and seems to flutter from your hand too early.
- Being thinner, the tip of the Perfect Balance Sport is also more fragile, as a side-spine that supports the tip could not be added. It's a mystery to me why sports knife throwers should need less durable knives.
- The knife is cut from the steel sheet at a crooked angle - like when you cut something from a sheet of wood with a bad hand saw, and the down-cut gets angled. There is more than 1mm difference in breadth between both flat sides of the handles because of the slanted cut - you can see it, and your fingers notice.
- The black coating (which is not important, granted) is so light that the tip is entirely shiny from just one hour of test throwing it.
Summary: Don't buy it, cheap price is no use if the quality is just not acceptable. I won't touch mine again, ever, after this one hour test drive. Go for the Perfect Balance Thrower instead.
The two-word review of this throwing knife: Too cheap!
* How can the throwing knife be 30% thinner but only 20% lighter? The answer is, the outlines are the same, but in the Sport version, the edge is not as wide, putting on weight.