Lee Williams
Collaborating designer, 110 Kickstop
Lee Williams is the custom maker who invented the Kickstop, a flipper tab on its own pin that folds into the handle once the blade is open, and the Shirogorov Brothers Workshop put it on a reworked early 110 as the 110 Kickstop of February 2020, its one joint project built around an outside maker’s mechanism rather than his shape.
Todd Eby, NIIVES
Biography
Williams is a custom maker, and the flipper is his hallmark. The Kickstop is the flipper he invented. Its tab is not part of the blade tang; it sits on its own pin in the frame, and once the blade is open it rotates on that pin into the handle, out of sight, so the open knife shows no tab at all.
His named customs include the Iceman, the Crux and the Adventurer. The Donk he made with Tom Mayo. John Barker and Tashi Bharucha are two more makers he has built knives with. The Kickstop has gone into production knives from other makers as well: the Chaves Redencion 229, the Steel Addiction Oeser F-22 and Steel Addiction’s Krypton, a Tashi Bharucha design.
The Kickstop ran on his own customs for years before the 110. The Shirogorov Brothers Workshop’s design collaborations start, as a rule, from an outside maker’s shape, which Sergey Shirogorov reworks under a new name. Williams’s project runs the other way. The shape is Sergey’s own, an early 110, and what Williams supplied is the mechanism; Sergey reworked the 110 around the Kickstop, and the workshop released it as the 110 Kickstop in February 2020, in three colors. On niives.com it is filed with the design collaborations all the same.
Designs and contributions
The 110 Kickstop run, by color:
| Model | Released | Pieces | Steel | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 110 Kickstop Sapphire Blue | February 2020 | 100 | S90V | Numbers 1 to 100 |
| 110 Kickstop Amber Brown | February 2020 | 100 | S90V | Numbers 101 to 200 |
| 110 Kickstop Anchor Grey | February 2020 | 100 | S90V | Numbers 201 to 300 |
The 110 takes its name from its blade length, 110 mm, 4.33 in, and the lock is a titanium frame lock. The colors sit on the pivot collar, the backspacer, the clip and the handle screws. Where the lockbar relief would be a single cutout there are five linear grooves, Williams’s own pattern. The run turns on the workshop’s single row roller bearing system, the SRRBS rollers it puts under its collaborations with Western makers. The 300 split 150 and 150, half sold in Russia and half in the United States through lotteries, the US draw through Recon1, the workshop’s distributor. Each knife carries its serial number and ships with the factory certificate. The specification sits with the run on the 110 Kickstop record.
What NIIVES tracks
The run is on niives.com under the 110 Kickstop record, which dates it, 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; his own customs and the production knives from other makers that carry the Kickstop are outside the catalog.