Brad Southard
Collaborating designer, Russian Flippin' Tanto
Brad Southard is the custom maker whose flipper for Spyderco in 2012 was that company’s first, and whose Flippin’ Tanto became the Russian Flippin’ Tanto of March 2017, the Shirogorov Brothers Workshop’s first tanto blade and its second Western joint project.
Todd Eby, NIIVES
Biography
Southard went full time as a maker in 2009, and Southard Knives is his own shop. Flippers on frame locks are his field: the blade opens on a tab at its tang and locks on a bar cut from one handle scale. The Flippin’ Tanto is his own knife, a flipper whose blade ends in the angled second edge of a tanto, and it’s the model the workshop later took up. His midtech line began with the Avo, and the Tolk and the Downing carry his name as well.
Production work came through Spyderco. The Spyderco Southard of 2012 was his first design for that company and the first flipper Spyderco had made, a titanium frame lock with a 3.46 in blade in CTS-204P steel, and the Positron followed in 2015 as his second Spyderco design.
A design collaboration at the Shirogorov Brothers Workshop starts from an outside maker’s existing model, and Sergey Shirogorov reworks it under a new name, as a rule the original’s with Russian in front. Tom Mayo’s Dr. Death was the first Western design built that way and Southard’s Flippin’ Tanto the second. No knife of the workshop’s own had carried a tanto blade. The rework also hid a screw. The clip screw does the work of a body screw as well, so the presentation side shows nothing but the pivot.
Designs and contributions
The Russian Flippin’ Tanto run, by release:
| Model | Released | Pieces | Steel | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russian Flippin’ Tanto | March 2017 | 200 | M390 | Sterile blade |
The factory news feed announced the Russian Flippin’ Tanto as a joint project with Southard, and it went to lottery in the spring of 2017. The blade is 100 mm long and the knife 233 mm overall at 145 g, with scales and backspacer both of titanium on a frame lock, and the pivot turns on single row roller bearings, the SRRBS the workshop fits to its collaborations with Western makers, over a hardened steel washer. It sold as a closed series. Entry ran for a single day and the draw came at a fixed hour once the window closed, with half the run drawn in Russia and half in the United States. Recon1, the workshop’s distributor there, ran the US draw. Each knife is numbered and ships with its factory certificate, and the run’s full specification sits on the Russian Flippin’ Tanto record.
What NIIVES tracks
The run is on niives.com under the Russian Flippin’ Tanto record, which dates it and names Southard as the designer, and market observations for it sit in the price record under the collaborations. NIIVES reads the factory news feed and Recon1’s pages for the run and the dealer listings that carry the serial numbers and the certificates; his own customs, the Flippin’ Tanto included, are outside the catalog, and so are his production knives for Spyderco.