The WESN BOK is a button-lock folder nearly five years in the making, and it’s the first button lock the Detroit maker has ever built. It’s live on Kickstarter now, early bird tiers start at $139, and the campaign closes December 20.
Press the button and the blade swings out. Press it again and the knife folds shut, with either hand, no grip shift, and no fingertip sliding inside the frame to find the liner, because the button works the lock from outside the handle. A conventional liner lock wants a fingertip inside the frame. The button fixes the geometry by moving the release outside the frame, so the same press opens or closes the knife from either side, and the holding hand never changes its grip to do either one.
The WESN BOK
MagnaCut drop point, 2.89 inches · Button-operated internal liner lock · Grade 5 titanium or Black G10 scales · Campaign ends December 20, 2026
Price: $139 (G10 Early Bird) on Kickstarter
Where to buy: Back on Kickstarter
A liner lock that answers to a button
That’s clumsy for the left hand, and it’s worse with gloves on, cold hands included.
The mechanism underneath is a liner lock, the slim internal kind that keeps a folder’s profile clean, except WESN actuates it with a button instead of a bare thumb pressed against the liner itself. It’s the part WESN had never built before. Five years of development went into that one mechanism. It’s WESN’s first button lock, and the rest of the knife, from the stud to the clip, is built to stay out of its way. It opens the way it closes. There’s no second technique to pick up for the left hand and no liner edge to hunt for with a thumbnail, because the press that frees the blade is the same press that locks it away again.
Left-handed carriers usually get the afterthought version of a folder, and the left pocket here gets the same knife the right one does. No asterisk, no left-handed variant to order separately.
MagnaCut and two sets of scales
The blade is a 2.89-inch drop point ground from CPM MagnaCut, and it opens 6.90 inches long against a 4.00-inch closed footprint, so the proportions stay in compact everyday-carry territory. The thumb stud is removable. Pull it and the silhouette goes clean, with nothing left to snag on a pocket seam on the draw. Nothing here is oversized. A 2.89-inch blade, a 4.00-inch handle, and a carry weight between 3.0 and 3.9 ounces depending on scales put the BOK in the small-folder class, built to ride in a pocket all day. Every number on it stays pocket-sized.
Scales decide the carry weight, and the edge doesn’t change with them.
Grade 5 titanium brings the knife to 3.9 ounces, Black G10 brings it down to 3.0 ounces, and the finish follows the scales, satin on the titanium knife and stainless on the G10 one. Same blade, two different pockets.
Set up for either pocket
The clip is deep-carry and reverses sides, the lanyard anchor sits inside the handle instead of dangling off the butt, and WESN builds the carry as ambidextrous, the same setup in the left pocket as in the right. Closed, the knife all but disappears. Four inches of handle rides low under the pocket’s hem, with only the deep-carry clip showing against the fabric. Designed in Detroit, the BOK keeps its hardware simple: a button, a pivot, a clip that swaps sides, and a stud that comes off if you’d rather run without it.
The lanyard anchor deserves its own line. It sits inside the handle, so a cord can go on without hardware hanging off the butt, and the knife’s back end stays as clean as its sides.
Both versions ride the same way: titanium or G10, the clip, the anchor placement and the closed length don’t change, so picking a scale is a weight and finish decision and nothing else.
Early bird tiers start at $139 for the G10 knife, and WESN reserves its deepest discounts for the first backers through the campaign’s December 20 close. The window is fixed. The campaign closes at 11 p.m. Central on Sunday, December 20, and the early bird tiers close right along with it.
The trade is simple: you pay the lowest price the knife will carry, and the wait is the rest of the price, because a campaign delivery date is an estimate and never a promise.
Only the early birds get that pricing. WESN says its best deals, up to half off, go to the first backers, and once those tiers close the same knife costs more to back, so the $139 G10 tier is the one to watch.
There’s a smaller WESN for anyone skipping the wait. The Microblade is the same shop’s answer at half the size, and it needs no campaign, no tiers and no December deadline attached.
The WESN Microblade
1.5-inch D2 drop point · Titanium frame · Frame lock · Thumb stud
Price: $99.00 $89.00 (save $10.00, 10% off) on Amazon
Where to buy: Buy on Amazon
Back the BOK if you carry left-handed, or if a button lock in MagnaCut at $139 is the folder your rotation is missing. Buy the Microblade if the wait is the dealbreaker, and wait for the retail run if estimates make you itchy.
