![]() ![]() I have several friends (4 or 5) who closed the knife on their fingers because I forgot to warn them to be careful. The one warning I have is that even with your thumb at the very top pressing down where the ball is, it is very easy to close the blade on your finger. The little ball you can see is what keeps the blade from opening in your pocket and is also very trustworthy. Like the bottle opener, you can see the little unlock symbol that is supposed to signal you have to press it down to close it. It uses a liner lock, which uses a heat treated bar that springs up to hold it in place. The blade lock is very solid, and I have never worried about it closing under pressure. Though if you are right-handed, you can definitely operate the blade with one hand. Even after three years and some mineral oil, the knife still does not open that smoothly and never has. ![]() Usually I used it for opening boxes or cutting fruit, but it held up to wire stripping and wood whittling every now and then as well. I carried the knife about 3/4 of the time for the last three years. As you can see, there is not even a hint of rust and very few scratches. It has held up to abuse pretty well, although the point broke off a while ago. It is 2.6 inches long (so legal to carry in your pocket in most of the US), and out of the box the blade was nice and sharp. Other than the opener, the knife is definitely the part of the Skeletool CX that I use the most. Even if the opener itself does not work well. I also love the little bottle opener symbol on it, which shows Leatherman was paying attention to the little details. It's perfectly functional though, and I do almost always have it with me. The bottle opener is not very intuitive, but a particularly sadistic side of me does enjoy watching people struggle with it before they give up and let me open their bottle. The bottle opener doubles as a karabiner clip and it functions much better as the latter. The one-size-fits-all wrench is also fairly difficult to use and is useful almost only from removing the over-tightened cables from cable boxes. ![]() ![]() Same goes for the bottle opener, and the flat-head screwdriver bit, although the wire cutters seem a little useless. To be honest though, I still find myself using them because I do not feel like carrying around a 10 oz (~280 g) pair of pliers. Thanks to Leatherman's 25 year warranty policies, you will only have to go without your multi-tool for a week or two, but it is still aggravating since most of their products do not have this problem. On both Amazon and Leatherman's website, reviewers complain that they have a tendency to break when you apply any real force to them. They are very skinny and I often find they slip when I am trying to pull on things (for example, pulling a staple out of a piece of wood). Honestly, the pliers are probably the weakest part of the whole package. The carbon fiber scale seems like a bit of a gimmick for aesthetic purposes, but it does feel nice in the hand and it sure looks good. They call it DLC for Diamond-Like-Coating which is probably a little bit of an exaggeration, although it is very scratch resistant as you can see in the photos. While Leatherman doesn't specify the type of steel they use for the rest of the multi-tool, it is entirely covered in a carbon based coating. The pliers and knife blade are made of 154CM stainless steel, which is pretty hard steel and fits right into this price range. The Skeletool CX weighs a paltry 5 oz (142 g) and is 4 in closed (10 cm). Getting back to the point, how do I feel about the Skeletool CX? In short, it's the pretty boy of the Leatherman lineup, and I love it. So while I was willing to have it with me around the engineering department, I never took it into the city. The law is pretty vague, but in theory you can't even take home a chef's knife from the store (it's a cutting object) or else you get 90 days in jail and a $300 fine. The state has fairly open knife laws, but Philadelphia has an old knife ordinance left over from 1968 when the city was dealing with a crime spree. While it's true that every now and then I run into someone who understandably finds the knife a little intimidating, I find having a bottle opener, knife, pliers, and flat-head screwdriver is incredibly useful.įirst things first, you have to check into your local knife ordinance. What a lot of people (myself included at the time) don't necessarily know is that carrying a multi-tool is actually really handy. Back in my freshman year of college, I noticed that a lot of the engineering students carried knives or multi-tools. ![]()
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