I imagine you could tune the latch engagement by grinding away at the steel liner. It’s all exposed, and shouldn’t be too tough. Whether or not you’d want to is a different story. It might be easier and/or cheaper to just show up with a fixed blade knife.

Edit to add: Another ancient ninja secret for fiddling with the closed lockup on a balisong is to lightly shave the pockets where the kicker pin resides. It won’t take much material removal to cause the tips of the handles to end up closer to each other at the end of their stroke, which is what will loosen your latch (ultimately up to the point where it doesn’t stay engaged at all anymore if you go too far).

It should work fine for hacking at vines and twigs and branches and so forth. Obviously it’s a little short, at maybe a shade over half the length of my actual Ontario Knife machete, and on this thing a lot of it is handle. The blade geometry is basically exactly as if someone just took the front 7" off of a normal machete and stuck it on the handles. You’re not going to want to clear an entire acre with it but it should be plenty enough for trimming up firewood and maybe splitting a small length of log or two around your campsite.

I’ll probably take it with me camping this spring and see if I wind up breaking it.