Spyderco 2012 Prototype – Ulrich Hennicke Ulize

As I had my head stuck firmly behind my camera in the lightbox by the time I was handed this beautiful slender folder, I had to search for a quote by Sal that explains the origin of the Ulize prototype. Any mistakes in this quote are my own and not Sal’s.

“A police officer in Germany (nickname Sony) had an idea to create a Spyderco knife purpose designed for the “Polizei” in Germany. He wanted a percentage of the sales to go to the families of fallen German policemen. He contacted a custom knifemaker (Ulrich Hennicke) to design and build a prototype to show to Spyderco. Uli sent the knife to us for evaluation. (Uli + Polizei = “Ulize” per Uli)

Uli is an exceptional knife designer and custom knifemaker that is familiar with Spyderco, our designs and our company. We thought the design to be worthy and we showed the prototype model at the meet last year as well as some shows. Response was good to we recreated the design for production. We couldn’t use the custom textured carbon fiber and still make the model affordable, so we opted for a black peel-ply G-10. It does have a 4 way clip. VG-10. If response is good to a production piece, we can consider other handle options.”