How We Added a Pocket Clip to the GhostTi Without Adding a Single Part

The Challenge: A Pocket Clip With Zero Additional Components

When our customers asked for a pocket clip on the GhostTi, we could have done what every other knife maker does — bolt on a stamped piece of steel and call it a day.

But the GhostTi isn't built like every other knife. It's a one-piece aerospace-grade titanium frame. No screws. No liners. No fasteners. That clean, minimal construction is what gives it the impossibly slim profile that disappears in your pocket. Adding a separate clip would have meant adding hardware, increasing thickness, and compromising the entire design philosophy.

So we set ourselves a constraint: add a pocket clip without adding a single part.

Watch our Deep Dive Video below. 

That meant machining it directly into the one-piece titanium frame. And that introduced a series of engineering problems that were anything but simple.

Why You Can't Just Cut a Clip Shape and Bend It

At first glance, the solution seems obvious — machine out the shape of a clip and bend it. Done.

Not even close.

The frame still has to perform. It has to survive every loading scenario you'd reasonably throw at it in daily carry. And one of the biggest stress cases isn't dropping it or prying with it — it's something as mundane as putting the knife in your back pocket and sitting down.

That puts a significant bending load on the entire frame. Some flex is acceptable and expected. But the frame can never yield — meaning it can never permanently deform. If you sit on it and it stays bent, the knife is ruined. The blade won't track properly. The gravity-drop action fails. Everything falls apart.

We designed with a safety margin that ensures the frame always springs back, even under worst-case scenarios.

The Engineering: Why It Actually Works

The reason we can remove material to create a pocket clip and still maintain structural integrity comes down to one concept: beam stiffness.

The blade rails — the sections of the frame that run along either side of the blade channel — may look thin, but they're tall. And that height is everything.

The stiffness of a beam is determined by its moment of inertia, calculated with this formula:

I = (B × D³) / 12

Where B is the width (thickness) of the beam and D is the height.

Notice that D is cubed. That means the height of the beam has an exponentially greater impact on stiffness than its thickness. It's the same principle that makes a 2×4 dramatically stiffer standing on edge than laying flat — same material, same cross section, completely different structural behavior.

So even though we removed material from the frame to create the clip, the tall geometry of the blade rails keeps the frame structurally rigid where it counts. The areas that bear load retained their height. The areas that became the clip were strategically thinned to allow controlled flex.

The pocket clip, by contrast, behaves like that 2×4 laying flat. It's intentionally designed to flex slightly so it can slide over your pocket fabric and hold securely — without being so stiff that it's unusable.

Forming the Clip: A Two-Stage Process

Machining the clip shape out of the frame is only half the challenge. The clip also needs to be formed — bent into the correct geometry so it functions as an actual clip.

This happens in two separate stages, and the order and method matter more than you'd think.

Stage 1: The Tang

The tang is the leading edge of the clip — the part that makes first contact with your pocket and guides the clip smoothly over the fabric. This gets formed first.

Stage 2: The Clearance Section

The clearance section is the curved area where your pocket fabric actually sits when the knife is clipped in. This gets formed second.

Why Not Form Both at Once?

Because of how titanium behaves during bending.

If the tang were formed first and then held rigidly while the clearance bend was made, the material between the two bends would be forced to stretch instead of bend naturally. This introduces internal stress into the titanium — stress that weakens the clip and creates inconsistency in the final geometry.

Instead, we form the tang first, but rather than clamping it rigidly, it rests on a bearing surface that allows it to move freely during the second forming operation. When the clearance section is bent, the tang is free to adjust naturally, allowing the material to flow rather than fight.

This keeps stresses controlled, bends consistent, and clip strength uncompromised across every single unit.

The Result

A fully functional, integrated pocket clip machined directly from the same piece of aerospace-grade titanium as the rest of the knife. No additional parts. No fasteners. No compromise to the slim, clean profile that defines the GhostTi.

It flexes where it should. It holds rigid where it must. And it's been engineered to survive the one thing most pocket clips never get tested against — you sitting on it.