- You are here:
-
Home
-
Tool Reviews
- Leatherman
Hi everybody! I may be a new guy but I've been around various forums for years, so what better way to intro myself than my first review?
Overall thoughts; Gee whiz is this thing B I G!!!! Here it is next to my ol' Buck tool
I recently had an opportunity to try out Leatherman’s removable hex bit driver. A friend of mine who works in the cable TV business had bought the adapter kit a few weeks ago. He encounters a variety of Torx and hex fasteners in his job, and figured this would be the best way to adapt his Leatherman Blast to the task.
The Fuse is the middle child in a family of three tools Leatherman brought out in 2004. It is more capable than the less expensive Kick , but thinner and lighter than the Blast. All three tools bear a strong resemblance to each other, and all share the same improved stronger elliptical plier head. (Along with the Leatherman Charge and New Wave .)
Once in a while a design comes along that seems innovative, and many of those that do come along just miss the mark due to one problem or another. The Leatherman SideClip is an innovative design but was discontinued some time ago. In my mind, this simply screamed “bad design” to me. I decided to pick one up after some members on the forum raved about how good it was. I figured, at the very least it was worth adding one to my collection. Once again, I was happy to be proven wrong.
Leatherman has made so many tools by now they are becoming too numerous to count, but each generation they create seems to get better than the previous, after all isn’t that what product manufacturers strive to do? They take something that the public already loves and has widely accepted and remake that item so it’s even better than its predecessors. When Leatherman came out with the Wave it hit the mulitool market by storm and soon became the “flagship” item that was the crowning achievement for Leatherman, heck even wal-mart had it listed on their shelves as “best sold mulitool”. I owned an original Wave and thought it was defiantly a forward thinking in multitool design, it was the first tool to have one handed opening blades. Having those on the outside as well as a saw and file makes the tools even with the bottom of the tool; giving the user more surface area to work with. Well in 2004 Leatherman introduced a new version of their Wave based off the design of their new flagship tool the Charge, the Wave may not be sporting a 154CM blade or Titanium handles but it’s still a contender in its own right.
What kind of people would write collect and review multitools? Quite simple really- we are designers and do-ers, outdoors types and indoor types, mechanics, doctors, problem solvers and problem makers. As such, we have, as a world spanning community, put every type, size and version of multitool, multifunction knife, pocket knife and all related products to every test we could manage in as many places and environments as there are.