Jared Drinkwater of Binary Engineering is the recent inventor of a new locking mechanism which debuted on the Longblock folding knife. The prototype’s super-minimal appearance and intuitive operation mask the complexity of its proprietary locking mechanism.
The Longblock’s unique lock reflects Drinkwater’s desire to bring minimalism to every element of a knife’s design. The entire mechanism is located around the pivot itself, and is disengaged by pressing a Timascus button. An in-line flipper tab ensures that every mechanical component of the Longblock is located in the same place – at the pivot. An integral construction keeps external hardware out of the way and the blade buries completely into the handle, leaving nothing exposed. “That’s its identity, stripped of all visual distraction,” Drinkwater asserts. “The form is very prismatic. It’s brutal simplicity.”
First and foremost, Drinkwater’s motivation for making the Longblock was to stretch his mechanical engineering skills. “When I had a choice to dumb it down or ramp it up, I chose to make it harder,” Drinkwater says. “This is a project for me, to see what I’m capable of.” Construction was a painstaking process and to achieve tight tolerances it took him six months to build the prototype.
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