Stop the presses. Hold the phone, blow me down, and stone all the crows.

We can pack it all in. Completion is achieved. SOG — you know, the Seal Pup and Trident people? They’ve gone and done it. They’ve invented a better and cheaper Bugout than the Benchmade Bugout, and apparently nobody noticed. This despite the latter apparently living rent free in every manufacturer’s head. And ours too, come to think of it.

I labored the entire span of my teenage years believing that SOG stood for “Special Operations Gear.” Apparently it’s the Studies and Observations Group, and I would have called that an April Fools’ day prank if I hadn’t seen it written on the box. This is their Ultra XR, which is mildly saddled by having a name that makes it sound like some startup’s virtual reality gizmo rather than the spiffing EDC knife that it is.

Oh, yeah. And NKD, by the way. As if my still having the box kicking around my desk didn’t tip you off. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to doing all the photography on this thing I can actually start carrying it without having to hyperventillate about getting pocket lint all over it.

The Ultra XR retails for about $90, so half the cost of a Bugout. And it’s got a blade made of S35VN steel, so theoretically two notches better than the S30V that the base Bugout comes with. No, there’s no compromise there.

As we all know, Benchmade’s patent on the Axis lock expired in 2018. And as we all further know, this opened up the floodgates for every other knifemaker on Earth to nick the idea and run with it. This is well into becoming one of those exasperatingly repeated factlets, like did you know that Steve Buscemi was a firefighter who helped in the rescue efforts after 9/11, or that the US version of Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a reworking of the Japanese game Doki Doki Panic? Did you know???

So while Axis-alike derivatives have been thick on the ground for the last several years, there’s been one curious blind spot in the market. If you want a compact Axis folder, up until now your only options have basically been to give Benchmade some money. You can either buy a Full Immunity or a Partial Immunity, or a Mini Bugout, or you can go and soak your head. Everything with a crossbar lock from everyone else is seemingly pathologically in the 3" and up category.

Well, not anymore. For lo, here is the Ultra XR with an Axis-alike lock on it which in its various guises SOG as branded as their “XR lock.”

None of this tells you much about what the Ultra XR’s big headline feature is. In fact, even looking at it lying on a table like this doesn’t do it justice.

This ought to give you a clue.

The Ultra XR is so thin, every cell phone reviewer in a five mile radius just got an inexplicable stiffie. It’s only 5.57mm thick (0.217") across its scales, not including the clip or screw heads. They don’t add much more, with it measuring up at 9.9mm across the button heads on the lock bar which is its widest point without the clip, or 0.390". Thanks to its single piece carbon fiber handle scales, it also only weighs 34.6 grams or 1.22 ounces — Around two thirds what a Bugout does.

It seems that ought to be an easy enough goal to achieve; just build your knife to be uselessly tiny and you too can enjoy a bunch of minimalist numbers on your spec sheet. But the Ultra XR isn’t, and is still sized such that it’s an actual Big Boy knife.

It’s not that much smaller than an OG Bugout. 6-1/8", by my measure, not including the little part of the clip that sticks out. That’s roundabout the same size as the Mini variant of the Bugout, itself a knife that costs twice as much. And that’s just the pokey Grivory version, too. If you want a carbon fiber one to mix it with the Ultra XR’s racecar materials cred, that’ll be a full $325, thank you.

Part of what makes the striking thinness achievable is carbon fiber’s high rigidity for its weight and thickness. Thus the Ultra XR doesn’t require any liners beneath its scales, and they’re constructed purely of thin slabs of carbon fiber. It’s not totally unsqueezably rock solid rigid, but it’s darn impressive compared to a bog standard old Bugout:

SOG have gotten clever with the XR Lock, as well. It eschews the usual “omega” hair springs that would normally reside in between the liners (or dinky plates, in the case of that-which-is-oft-named) and scales, the former obviously being something this thing hasn’t got. Instead, the lock bar is driven by a tiny torsion spring that’s wrapped around one of the body spacers.

You can see this easily in this highly uncouth and overexposed down-the-barrel shot that I took by shining a flashlight straight into the gap. Otherwise the lock works in the usual way, and is as ambidextrous as ever.

I took this thickness comparison shot but did not plan ahead to devise an appropriate segue to fit it into the narrative. Here it is anyway, for all that it’s worth. The Ultra XR is visibly quite a bit thinner than either Benchmade’s old 535 or its little brother. Why the Ultra XR is thus not the undisputed darling of, say, all backpackers everywhere remains a mystery.

The Ultra XR’s drop pointed blade is 2-5/8" long or about 67.9mm, and only 0.0805" or 2.05mm thick. There’s no thumb stud, since obviously that would add to the thickness. Instead, there’s a slot cut into the spine of the blade for grip.

Of course you can still Axis Flick it open and shut all the livelong day. Nobody with an Axis locker uses the thumb studs for anything, regardless of how shiny and anodized they may or may not be.

The Ultra XR has a super deep carry clip that SOG suggest you could also use as a money clip. Despite appearances it is reversible. It sticks out the side more than double the thickness of the knife, but otherwise it’s actually really nice. For once in history its not sprung so damn tightly you can’t get it to friggin’ let go of your pants. The draw is nice and smooth and very easy. I imagine that’s largely due to the fact that the thing weighs so little overall that not much spring force is required to keep it clipped.

If you want to employ it as a keychain knife instead, there’s no real provision made for that. I suppose you could pass some cord through the mounting holes for the clip if you removed it, or use the holes intended for reversal on the opposite side. You’d probably have to use dental floss, though.

There are two sizes of screw head on the Ultra XR, T6 and T5 Torx. It seems that SOG used T5s on all the things they didn’t want you fucking with. The clip screws, for instance, are T6 and there are matching holes on both sides.

The Axis/XR/crossbar/whateveritis lock is a two piece design, and unscrews from one side. It’s got T6 heads in both sides, but like everything on this knife is severely threadlockered so you have to stick a driver in each side in order to get it out. In its slot you can see the prong from the little torsion spring that powers it.

The pivot screws are T6 as well and of course also threadlocked. Believe it or not there is an anti-rotation flat in the pivot screw’s shank and a matching D shaped cutout machined into one of the scales. It’s anyone’s guess as to which side is which out of the box, though, since the heads are the same on either side. So tread lightly. The blade rides on what appear to be Nylon washers.

The two carbon fiber handle slabs are separated by four barrel spacers with screws in either side, one of which acts as the end stop pin for the blade. They’re also permanently threadlockered, and require a driver in each side to remove. I’m ashamed to admit that I only have one nice Wiha T5 driver bit despite owning oodles of the T6 ones (for obvious career-related reasons) and I snapped the tip off of my cheap T5 trying it. So, you won’t get any photos of the back sides of the Ultra XR’s handle scales. I’m sure you’ll live. There’s nothing exciting in there anyway, except the little torsion spring which I imagine has one leg slotted into a tiny hole drilled in one scale, and is probably prone to go “ping!” and get lost.

In case you forget what SOG actually stands for, they’ve helpfully laser engraved it in the back side of the blade. And speaking as the proud owner of a very nice laser engraver myself, I am now well versed in exactly what that kind of thing looks like. They used different power level or pulse width settings for the blade steel descriptor than they did for the branding. Cheeky devils.

I had a whole paragraph here speculating on what the blade was coated with to make it black, but I realize belatedly that it’s all moot. The front of the box says right there that it’s a titanium nitride coating, so undoubtedly applied via some manner of PVD process. I don’t normally go for a coated blade but this one at least looks very nice for now. Time will tell if it holds up acceptably for a change, or winds up annoying me and I laser it off.

What I can tell you is that this thing is exceptionally sharp out of the box. The blade’s thin geometry makes it slice through suitable materials very easily, although this will obviously never be a fighter or a bushcraft knife.

The Inevitable Conclusion

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m just smitten with the Ultra XR. As SOG themselves tell it, it’s the perfect urban carry or polite company EDC knife. It’s short enough to be within the legal length limit practically everywhere, is made of a nice steel, and has a build quality that can’t be criticized. It also weighs practically nothing and rides in your pocket so discreetly that, the marketing department actually being truthful for once, you may genuinely forget that it’s there.

It doesn’t hurt that it looks cool as hell, too. Even non-knife people can tell as soon as they handle it that it’s something special.

I say this a lot, and in fact I might have made it my life’s secondary mission to find all the myriad ways to prove this, but as long as the Ultra XR exists there’s really no reason to spend the money for a Bugout. Like, ever. (My life’s primary mission seems to have become to collect every balisong and screwball knife in the world.) Surely the big B has taken notice of this sort of thing, and all of the above probably has a lot to do with the rumors that the Bugout is finally slated to get a redesign for next year with purported aluminum handles plus a new thinner lock.

I think somebody’s running scared. I’m still not in a big rush to buy one, though, because now I have this.