Balisong Maintenance-Pivots

Quick How-to for simple maintenance of Balisong Pivots – for todays example I will be cleaning and re-lubricating my Cold Steel Arc Angel Balisong.

1. Prepare your workspace: Balisong pivots have a lot of small parts that can easily be lost so a clean workspace makes keeping track of your pivots, screws, and washers a breeze. (Protip -work inside a large tupperware bin so that any dancing screws or parts are contained should they fall)
2. Assemble your tools: For my Arc Angel Balisong that means; Lube, a t9 Torx Driver, small brush like nail brush or toothbrush, Blue Loctite & Acetone. (Protip- use a high quality driver like Wiha or at least Craftsman will lead to less frustration and screw stripping.)
3. Unscrew You Male Screws from their female balisong pivots. (Protip- if your screws won’t budge they may be loctited with red loctite. Don’t keep trying in vain to unscrew that will yield stripped or broken screws. Heat is your friend – either warm the ends with a soldering iron directly on the pivot, use a lighter sparingly if metal handles or you some have success with boiling the entire knife)
4. Place screws in small receptical filled with acetone
5. Use Torx Driver to push pivots out. (Protip- some balisongs like the Benchmade may have press fit pivots. This means you may need to use a punch and a small soft faced hammer to tap the pivot out.)
6. Place Pivots in same acetone filled receptical.
7. Seperate Blade from Handles
8. Make sure to remove washers from handle slabs. Depending on the viscousity of your balisong lube your washers may adhere to the handles or the blade. Pushing them gently with the drivertip should break them loose.
9. Place Washers in acetone filled receptical.
10. Use your brush tool to scrub your pivots inside and out, screws, washers, blade and handle to clean of any debris.
11. Set all clean hardware on a paper towel an allow to air dry.
12. Insert pivots and washers back through blade taking care to make sure that you have your latch or bite handle marker on the correct side.
13. Put a tiny amount of blue loctite on the threads of the male screw. (Protip- less is more when it comes to loctite. You never need to add any to the female pivots and little more than a toothpicks worth of loctite will do the job.)
14. Tighten screws to your preferred tightness taking care not to cross thread. If at any point you feel resistance or your screws will not fully seat unscrew and retry. Resistance is caused typically by either gunk in your pivots or cross threading of the screws. Reclean or rescrew to fix issue. (Protip- I like to screw the pivots to the point of handle binding and then back off a quarter of a turn or so.)
15. Here comes the absolute hardest part – You Wait! Loctite takes 24 hrs to fully cure. If you want your screws to stay put you need to be patient.
16. Lubricate your Balisong Pivots once your loctite has cured with your favorite lubrication. (Protip- Mineral Oil is food safe and easily purchased just about anywhere)

This basic writeup doesn't take into account fixing problems such as balisong tap which can be accomplished while doing pivot maintenance but requires replacing your washers with thicker washers and then lapping them to the proper thickness. See this article for more tips on removing tricky balisong hardware 

Please keep in mind that some balisongs may utilize more complex pivot mechanisms such as bearings and/or bushings which can complicate this process. The same basic methodology can be utilized but you may want to watch more indepth tutorials before moving forward.