Leatherman Wave+ — a multi-tool that earns its place

The multi-tool exists because a Fiat 600 kept breaking down. In 1975 Tim Leatherman drove one across Europe with his wife, fixing the car and the plumbing of cheap hotels with a pocket knife that was never quite enough, and spent the next eight years building the tool he had wished for — pliers first, knife second. The first order, in 1983, was five hundred units. The company that grew from it still makes the tools in Portland, Oregon, still carries his name, and still takes back the ones that fail and repairs them at its own bench.

That last clause is the record. Plenty of objects are sold durable; very few are sold by a maker who has spent forty-three years repairing its own output. The rest of this entry is only the arithmetic of what that costs per year, and an honest account of who should not carry one.

One tool, kept selectively

This is the first specific record on the Daily tools shelf, and it enters through a door the shelf left only half-open. The opening note excluded multi-tools as a category — Leatherman is fine; the bulk of imitations are not. We will catalogue selectively. This record is that selection, and the exclusion stands: what follows argues for one tool, not for the category.

The shelf’s discipline applies here with unusual force. A multi-tool is mostly maintenance — kept dry, oiled occasionally, not lost — and its failure mode is mostly neglect. The knife on this shelf asked for a stone; the multi-tool asks for less, but it asks every time it gets wet.

Why the category fails and the tool does not

The unbranded multi-tool fails in three places, and they are the same three on every example: the hinge loosens until the pliers wander, the blade arrives dull and is ground from steel too soft to hold an edge, and the locks — where they exist at all — wear into guesswork. None of these is repairable, because there is no one to repair it; the maker is a label, not an address.

A Wave+ is built against each of those failures specifically. The pliers are the spine of the tool, not an attachment. Every blade and driver locks. The one part that genuinely wears under honest use — the wire-cutter edges — is replaceable rather than terminal, which is the difference between a consumable and a death. And behind all of it sits an address: a warranty bench in Portland that has been doing nothing but this since 1983.

The category is excluded; the tool is recorded. That is not a contradiction. It is what selectively means.

Where the $4.80 a year comes from

The arithmetic of this library is the same on every shelf: divide the price by the years, and count the years honestly.

Two prices are worth separating, because the search for one usually means the other. Leatherman’s own site lists the Wave+ at $129.95 (checked 2 August 2026); on the street in 2026 it runs nearer $120. Confirm per listing, and read every figure with an ‘around’ in front of it. The maker warrants it for twenty-five years, repair or replace at their discretion. That is $129.95 ÷ 25 ≈ $5.20 a year at the maker’s list, or $120 ÷ 25 ≈ $4.80 at the street price this record uses elsewhere — a difference of forty cents a year, which is the honest size of the discount you are shopping for. We use the warranty as the divisor not because the tool dies at twenty-five — pliers-based tools from the 1990s are still in pockets — but because it is the span the maker will put in writing, and this record prefers a number someone else has signed. Where that signed span sits among other makers’ promises — the real wear guarantees, the defect clauses wearing the word lifetime — is charted in the guarantee ledger.

Against that, the imitation: around $25, a working life of a couple of years before the hinge or the blade gives out, call it $12 a year — and the figure flatters it, because the dead ones are rarely thrown away. They accumulate. The Wave+ does not beat one cheap multi-tool at the till; it replaces the line of them, the same way the knife on this shelf replaced the line of throwaway blades.

A tool you buy once is cheaper than a tool you buy every other year — even when the once costs five times more.

It only holds if you dry it

The 25-year warranty is narrower than its headline, and an honest record reads the exclusions aloud. It covers defects in material and workmanship, for the original owner. It does not cover rust or corrosion, loss, theft, or abuse — which is to say it does not cover the three commonest ways a multi-tool actually dies. A Leatherman left wet in a kayak hatch is not a warranty claim; it is a lesson.

So the $4.80 figure carries the same fine print as every figure in this library: it holds for the owner who wipes the tool down, oils the pivot occasionally, and can still find it in year nine. The boot record’s number assumed the oil; the frame record’s assumed the re-torque; this one assumes a dry pocket. A tool that asks this little and still gets neglected says more about the pocket than the tool.

The maker, in years: Leatherman (1983–)

A maker’s age is the cheapest number to verify and the most expensive to fake. Leatherman Tool Group has made pliers-based multi-tools in Portland, Oregon, without interruption, since 1983 — forty-three years under the founder’s name, through the category it invented becoming a commodity it competes in.

The continuity that matters most here is not the founding date but the repair bench. A warranty is only as real as the operation behind it, and Leatherman’s is a working floor that receives broken tools and sends back working ones — repair first, replacement where repair will not do. A maker that repairs its own output keeps a daily ledger of its own failures; that ledger is why the wire cutters became replaceable. The improvement was not a marketing idea. It was warranty data.

Who this tool is for

A multi-tool is not for everyone, and saying so is the most useful thing a record can do for the reader it is not for.

It is for the person who fixes things where they stand — the bike on the roadside, the loose screw in the field, the package, the fence, the glovebox emergency. Its whole case is presence: the second-best tool in your pocket beats the best tool in a drawer at home. It suits the rural household, the cyclist, the kayaker who will dry it, the person whose day regularly ends somewhere a toolbox is not.

It is not for the kitchen drawer — the knife on this shelf cuts better and sharpens properly, at about the same cost per year. It is not for the workbench, where every one of its eighteen tools is beaten by the dedicated version within arm’s reach. It is not for the pocket that passes through airport security, where it is a donation. And it is not for the buyer collecting preparedness as an identity; the Preparedness shelf is built on stocks you rotate, not totems you carry.

The one this record keeps is catalogued below.

The harder question: Leatherman or Victorinox

Victorinox (1884–) has made tools in Ibach, Switzerland for a hundred and forty-two years, and its SwissTool Spirit X is the Wave+‘s only serious rival: around $145, lighter in the hand, finished like cutlery, and warranted not for twenty-five years but for life. That word carries less than it seems — read closely, both makers sign defect warranties that exclude normal wear, a comparison taken up clause by clause in Leatherman vs Victorinox.

The honest comparison is close to a draw, which is why this record names its terms. The SwissTool’s warranty is longer and its maker is older; the Wave+ costs less, locks every blade and driver, and wears its one consumable part — the wire cutters — as a replaceable, which the record weighs heavily because it converts the likeliest failure into a part. On cost per year the two converge somewhere under $6, and choosing between them is a question of hand and country, not of better. The Wave+ at around $120 settles whether to own a multi-tool; we record it as the benchmark and name the Swiss alternative without a link, exactly as the skillet record named its machined rivals.

What the comparison cannot settle is a sharper question the multi-tool itself raises: if the pliers are the spine of the tool — the reason it exists at all — when do the pliers deserve to stop being a compromise and become a tool of their own? A multi-tool’s pliers are the roadside version of something a German maker has been forging since 1882, and whether that tool belongs on this shelf is its own record. We take it up there, not here.

What we look at when we record a multi-tool

Less. Does the reader already own the tools it folds together? Mostly yes — and the multi-tool is still not redundant, because the drawer is not in the field. The question is whether your days ever happen where the drawer is not. If they do not, own less: skip it.

Deep. The pliers’ spine, the locks, the steel of the one blade, and above all the wear parts: a multi-tool whose commonest failure is a replaceable part is a different object from one whose commonest failure is the bin.

Durable. Not the brochure word — the warranty text. Twenty-five years, repair or replace, exclusions read aloud. A maker that has run a repair bench for forty-three years is offering evidence, not adjectives.

Honest. Is the listing describing the tool — or describing the capable person I’d like to imagine I am? The eighteen functions are real; the question is how many your actual days contain.

Future. In thirty years, will a small pliers-based tool still ride in pockets and gloveboxes? The category is forty-three years old and its failure modes are already boring. If you cannot imagine it gone, it is for the shelf.

Audit your own drawer

The most useful thing this record can hand you is not a multi-tool but ten minutes with the drawer where the old ones live. Take out every multi-tool, knock-off, and promotional pocket gadget the household has accumulated. For each, write the price you remember and divide by the years it honestly worked before the hinge loosened or the blade gave up. Most drawers yield a number well above $4.80 — paid not once but repeatedly, in increments small enough never to feel like a decision.

This is not an instruction to replace anything today. If a working tool is in your pocket, keep it; the cheapest tool you will ever own is the one that already works. The audit is for the next time the hinge wanders — so that the replacement is a decision rather than another increment. The person who carries one repaired Leatherman for two decades is, quietly, deciding what kind of days they are equipped for. Own less. Choose deeper.

What follows

The multi-tool is the generalist’s answer; the next record is the specialist’s. The pliers that ride folded in a Wave+ are a compromise version of a tool a Wuppertal family firm has been forging since 1882 — and whether the dedicated version earns its own place on a shelf that prizes owning less is a harder question than it looks. The number to divide is smaller, the years are longer, and the maker is older than the multi-tool category itself.

One tool is now on the Daily tools shelf beside the knife’s opening note. The shelf catalogues slowly, on purpose.

The drawer rewards patience. So does the catalog.

— The Quiet Picks editors