Overview & First Impressions
Ninety five millimetres overall, thirty five millimetres of blade, and no lock at all. The Gnat is a friction folder from Koch Tools, made in the United States, and it is either the most sensible knife in your pocket or a novelty depending on what you expect from it. There is no detent, no bearing, no flipper. The tang extends past the pivot into a lever your thumb rests on, and friction plus your own grip hold the blade open. That is a hundred-year-old pattern, and there are good reasons it survived.
Materials & Construction
The blade is CPM154, the powder metallurgy version of 154CM, which is a steel that sharpens like a carbon steel and resists rust like a stainless. It takes a very fine edge and it does not care whether you sharpen it on a diamond plate or a river rock. The handle on this version is G10, flat, machine textured, indifferent to water and sweat. There is a version with luminous carbon fibre if you want the same knife with a party trick. Neither version has liners, because neither version needs them.
Design & Details
The geometry is the whole idea. The blade is short and wide with a full flat grind, so the edge angle stays low and the blade does not wedge in material. The tang lever sits exactly where your thumb lands in a normal grip, which means closing the knife is a squeeze rather than a two-handed operation. There is a hole for a split ring or a small lanyard bead at the butt. Width is under twenty millimetres closed, so it drops into a coin pocket and vanishes.
Real-World Use
This is a knife for the fifty small cuts in a day: parcel tape, plastic wrap, a loose thread, a tag, a zip tie, opening a bag of coffee. It is bad at anything requiring leverage, and it will not pry, baton, or survive being used as a screwdriver. What it does better than a locking folding knife is travel: there is no lock to explain, no flipper to demonstrate, and it looks like a tool rather than a weapon. In an office it raises zero eyebrows, which is worth a lot.
Ownership Notes
154CM and its powder equivalent want nothing more than a strop every couple of weeks. There is no pivot adjustment worth making on a friction folder, because the friction is the mechanism; if it gets loose, a quarter turn on the pivot screw restores it. Keep the tang lever clean, since grit there is the only thing that changes how the knife feels. G10 can be scrubbed with a brush and soap, and it will look new afterwards, which cannot be said for wood or bone. Friction folders have answered the 'small and legal' question for a century, while folding knives with a lock are the newer and fussier option. If you want EDC knives that nobody looks at twice, buy the Gnat and stop explaining yourself.
Who Is This For?
Buy it if you want a knife that is legal almost everywhere, weighs nothing, and cuts better than its size implies. It suits office workers, travellers, model makers, and anyone who has been told their folder is too big for a workplace. Skip it if you need one-handed opening, if you cut heavy material, or if the idea of no lock makes you nervous. That nervousness is reasonable, and it is also the reason the pattern has lasted this long.
Final Verdict
The Gnat is not a knife for somebody who only owns one knife. It is the knife you add once the big one is already in the drawer, and then find yourself carrying more often than you expected. EdcMall stocks both the G10 and the luminous carbon fibre version, and at this size the difference is purely how much you want to show it off.
