Mosquito-borne flaviviruses are responsible for severe diseases including Zika (ZIKV), West Nile (WNV) and dengue (DENV). Structural analysis of virions produced by these viruses require the production of large quantities of infectious virus – an obvious hazard. Since ZIKV, WNV and DENV represent the small number of flaviviruses for which the virion structures have been solved, we sought to investigate a new system for the safe production of authentic virions of pathogenic flaviviruses through exploiting insect-specific flaviviruses (ISFs). ISFs do not infect vertebrate cells, due to multiple mechanisms of host restriction, but can replicate to high titre in mosquito cells. Thus, they are excellent candidates for developing safe recombinant viruses for high resolution structural analysis. We have discovered a novel ISF, Binjari virus (BinJV), and successfully used it to construct chimeric viruses with vertebrate-infecting flaviviruses (eg. ZIKV, WNV) by replacing the pre-membrane (prM) and envelope (E) proteins of BinJV with the corresponding genes of a vertebrate-infecting flavivirus. These chimera-derived virions are antigenically similar to that of the parental vertebrate-infecting flavivirus, do not infect vertebrate cells and replicate to titres comparable to wild-type BinJV (109 infectious units/ml) in mosquito cell cultures. Here, we report the construction and purification of a BinJV/WNVprME chimera to reveal both mature and immature virus particles that appear morphologically similar to wild type WNV by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Our data demonstrates that BinJV represents a recombinant vehicle to safely and efficiently produce high yields of flavivirus virion proteins suitable for high resolution structural analysis of high-risk flavivirus pathogens.