The year is 1999. The Backstreet Boys are larger than life, a new Star Wars trilogy is about to begin, and Y2K is looming on the horizon. At the Benchmade factory in Oregon City, Oregon, engineers are putting the final touches on a new knife designed by makers Bill McHenry and Jason Williams. Their first collaboration with Benchmade produced the iconic 710, a bespoke knife conceived as the debut platform for a novel mechanism that would soon rock the industry: The AXIS® Lock.
We caught up with co-designer Jason Williams to reminisce about his knifemaking journey, working with his stepdad, the late Bill McHenry, and how the AXIS® Lock came to be.
Blast From The Past
Born in Rhode Island, Jason and his parents moved frequently, settling for a time in Oregon, where his budding love of knives and his passion for creating things took root. “When we drove around long distances out there in Oregon…we had any number of books that had been on [vinyl] record that we would then record onto tapes and listen to, and you could read along with them. We had the Rankin Bass [edition] Hobbit book and tapes, and the treasure and the makers of the treasure lit something in my mind.”
Jason remembers attempting to hammer out a bronze blade from random bits of copper wire on the floor of their fixer-upper; his first attempt at knifemaking, as it were, with images of dwarven forges and the swords of antiquity driving his imagination. “That same time frame is also when the King Tut display came around, and I had a coffee table book of the treasures of Tut's tomb. And so anyway, the whole making of treasures really bit me as a kid.”
His dad gave him his first knife, a Camillus Navy 4-blade slipjoint, and being outdoorsy in the Pacific Northwest, knives were a constant. He once found a rusty old knife with a chewed-up wooden handle. “My first knife restoration project,” he says with a laugh. “You know, I cleaned it with SOS pads, made a little sheath for it. I was probably 8 at that time.”
When Jason’s parents divorced in the late 1970s, they moved back to Rhode Island, where Jason would attend high school and enroll in a vocational metal-working program. After many stalled attempts, he finished his first knife, a folding straight razor, when he was about 17. He later made his first knife sale shortly after graduating in 1989.
Meeting Bill McHenry
A jeweler and goldsmith by trade, Bill McHenry was a knife enthusiast and occasional maker. By the mid-1980s, the drudgery of the jewelry business had worn thin, and Bill was ready for a change. He and Jason had met through their shared love of knives, and around this time, Bill began dating Jason’s mother. “I mean, obviously, dating a woman with a teenage son is complicated territory, and this was where Bill and I bonded. We started making knives. I did a couple of summers—I did finishing work, you know, buffing out castings in his jewelry shop. I learned some stuff like that from him. We had a little shop in the basement.”
Bill and Jason found selling knives far more rewarding than “making sterling skull rings and stuff like that,” as Jason puts it. “It was just different, and we started finding that one of the things—that I'm sure is really still a driving force within the knife world—is that you can do so much. There's so much room for self-expression. You can make anything you want in the knife biz.”
The AXIS® Lock Is Born
The early 1990s saw Bill McHenry and Jason Williams flourishing as independent makers. “It was weird in that we were working together and separately. Like I made my knives, he made his knives. We didn't really collaborate on the same piece. We would compare notes, push each other.”
The two often put their heads together to solve common problems and work out various knife mechanisms, with a focus on liner-locking switchblades. Each new knife utilized a one-of-a-kind deployment mechanism, and the two would teach other makers how to replicate it, repeating this cycle with each new design. After a while, this less-than-lucrative formula grew stale, so the two decided they needed to come up with something entirely different; something that could be theirs, make a big impact, and solve a few problems, including durability and strength.
“Bill and I were very good at working together and bouncing off each other. If an idea could survive the space between our spots on the bench, it was doing something, because we were brutal.”
The initial concepts for the AXIS® Lock took shape through this collaborative process. “Where is the real estate on the tang? Where can you grab this thing? Where could we put a pin? If we could just nail it right there…so there was significant back and forth.”
One morning in 1996, following a comment Jason had made the night before, Bill presented another mockup that became their first eureka moment. As Jason recounts, “…he had stayed up all night. He's like, ‘Jay, look at this!’ and I’m like, ‘Oh man, oh man!’...So once we realized we had a device that was significantly different from anything else, we started the ball rolling on the patent process.”
Original AXIS® Lock patent diagram handrawn by Jason Williams.
Coming To Benchmade
Armed with total confidence and a patent application, Bill and Jason needed to bring it to the masses, but they had to find the right company to do it. “We were seeing that other people were doing these production collaborations,” Jason says. "We knew Mel Pardue from the knife show circuit, and he had been working with Benchmade for a while…and Lester, we had known him a little, we had met him.”
The duo needed a manufacturer with the engineering know-how and production capabilities to achieve the precise milling and geometry necessary to pull the whole thing off. As Jason puts it, “We felt Benchmade could do it well, because if it went to somebody who screwed the pooch, it would go nowhere, it wouldn't do well. So, we felt you guys had the technological chops to do it right.” Jason sees a distinction between “companies that make knives as opposed to knife nuts who build a company,” and in their eyes, Benchmade founder Les de Asis was the knife nut they needed.
Designing the 710
With contracts signed and a patent awarded, Bill McHenry and Jason Williams turned to designing the signature knife that would deliver the AXIS® Lock to the world. Despite working side-by-side for years, it would be the first time they would put their names together on a blade. “We had some general design elements that we knew were going to work well with the AXIS® Lock,” Jason recalls, “We knew we wanted it to have a good blade-to-handle ratio. We knew in general where we wanted curves to be because we were really focusing on ergonomics… it has to look good, or they won't pick it up, and once they pick it up, you want it to feel good, so they don't want to put it back down.”
When it came to size, the pair knew they wanted a larger folder. Jason says, “In the folder world as a whole, you got your little gentleman's knives, and you have what we call scoundrel's knives, a big bad knife…so we wanted to build the full size—show up with a fistful of scoundrel knife.”
Bill handled most of the concept work on paper. The two of them traded notes and bandied ideas back and forth. When it came to prototyping, Jason took the lead, saying, “I did a good deal of the cutting it out and mechanically putting it together… I think Bill did the contour on the outside of the handle and the filing of the grooves.”
The prototype "Red Dog" built by Bill McHenry and Jason Williams.
Despite the unusual collaboration, the pair were driven by the desire to see their invention across the finish line. “That one, we did both do some of it, partly because of the sheer level of exhaustion as we’re trying to get it together to get there in time, and partly because, on a philosophical level, we felt we both needed to be hands-on.”
The finished prototype, affectionately called ‘The Red Dog,’ featured a prominent blade fuller and red micarta scales. They sat down with the engineers to give it “a haircut,” as Jason calls it. The blade morphed into a recurved profile and lost the fuller, while the handle was changed from red to black. Pre-release prototypes featured milled aluminum scales, but these were substituted with black G10 before production.
710 pre-production prototype featuring aluminum handle scales
Reception
After years of collective effort, the Benchmade 710 was revealed at the SHOT Show in 1999. Though Jason and Bill knew what they had, there was still no way of knowing if their invention would make the big impression they intended.
“The first SHOT Show, people were excited about it and were buying it. And you know, the dealers were patting us on the back. ‘Man, you guys, this is a winner. We're stoked!’ Which, you know, fed and stroked our egos quite thoroughly, but I'm going to say that's still the delusional stage of thinking and believing, but not knowing.”
For Jason, the reality of what they’d accomplished hit home at SHOT Show the following year, saying, “There were guys breaking out pictures of all the animals they had gutted with their 710…at the time, you would sell to a distributor who would sell to a dealer. Those [distributors] were huge knife nerds…it was one thing when they were excited to have this new, hot thing…but when they came back with, for lack of a better term, tales from the wild, you know? Yeah, this is catching on.”
The McHenry & Williams 710
Vindication
Fast forward to 2019. The Backstreet Boys are coming back with a new album, another Star Wars movie is about to drop, and the 710 is now discontinued. With the patent on the AXIS® Lock now expired, custom knifemakers and production powerhouses rushed to bring their own versions of a crossbar-style lock mechanism to the market.
Since then, the technology has spread like wildfire throughout the knife industry, inspiring direct copies along with some unique innovations, like tunable spring tension, and several new mechanisms have iterated on the concept in interesting ways.
When asked how he feels about the mechanism being adopted so broadly, Jason confesses to some mixed feelings, with a critical eye towards execution. “On the one hand, I hate it, but on the other hand, there is also a certain element of pride in that, you know, I did something that's worth being knocked off.”
It has become clear that the original AXIS® Lock struck a chord among makers and enthusiasts, evident in the continued adoption of this technology throughout the knife world. It’s a vindication of the core concept, and an acknowledgement of the hard work and engineering skill that went into its development—but there’s always room for improvement.
The 2024 SEVEN | TEN lineup. Photo by Adam Hislop.
The Next Generation
Les de Asis was a driven, undaunted, protective, kind, and generous man, but he was hardly nostalgic, at least when it came to his knives. Les only saw what could be done better, so he chose to push forward. It was up to those around him, like his wife, Roberta, to goad him into the occasional lookback. (You can thank her for the 42 Bali-Song®!)
2024 presented the perfect opportunity for a bit of nostalgia, as it was time to launch the new AXIS® Lock. What better way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the AXIS® Lock than by bringing back a Benchmade knife for the first time? Enter the SEVEN | TEN™, so named in honor of the original designed by Bill McHenry and Jason Williams.
Preserving the recurved blade and aggressive forward lean, we went all out and released a spiffy Gold Class version, the 710-241, a limited-edition in the 710FE-2401, and the inline 710FE-24. For 2025, the newest variant, the 710-25, harkens back to the black handle and satin blade combo of the original 710—this time in aluminum. While each one sports unique milling patterns and decorative detailing, it’s the internals that make this first-of-its-kind refresh much more than a trip down memory lane.
The 710-25 SEVEN | TEN™
The result of years of dev work and testing, AXIS 2.0, as it’s referred to internally, is a reengineered take on the mechanism that incorporates what we like to call the Numega spring, replacing the wire omega springs with a hardened, leaf-spring-style piece of steel integrated into the liners. This simplifies design, production, and assembly of new models by eliminating the pockets that must be milled into handle scales to accommodate classic omega springs, which run outside the liners. Numega springs also offer increased durability, tested to over ONE MILLION cycles with no signs of wear or fatigue. We also took the opportunity to address user feedback with a new lock bar that features ramped studs for better grip.
Legacy and Future
Almost 30 years have passed since Jason and Bill dreamt up the AXIS® Lock, and 26 years since the 710 hit store shelves. Jason isn’t really active in the knife business, though he does still dabble, making the occasional fixed blade, and he loves the resurgence of small EDC fixies in the market. “I've got a little fruit knife I'm working on at the moment because I do think it's a cool concept, but I don't want to be that guy,” he says with a chuckle.
When asked how he feels to have his name appear on the new SEVEN | TEN™, he says, “Yeah, it really does bring continued pride…One thing that we had was an unwavering conviction that we knew we were right. So, we knew it would be [a hit], and we never allowed ourselves to doubt that.”
Benchmade’s goal with AXIS 2.0 was to increase longevity and reduce engineering obstacles while maintaining the familiar feel and function of the AXIS® Lock mechanism. The SEVEN | TEN™ accomplishes this, marking a significant milestone in our long history of innovation and collaboration. While the world embraces this technology, we continue to look over the horizon while remembering to take a look back now and then. Keep an eye out for more Benchmade knives featuring this new version of the AXIS® Lock.
Two generations of the 710, featuring the 710D2 and the 710-25.
We’re deeply grateful to Jason Williams for participating in a great discussion. We hope to bring you more from Jason and other knifemakers in the future.