I know, it’s not really that new. I think it was introduced in the SHOT show 2016, but as is often the case (Mora Eldris) products introduced there excite some interest and then take so long to actually become available in the marketplace that by then those who were interested have completely forgotten about them. At this writing we’ve just had the SHOT show 2017, and very few if any vendors actually have the Signal- it doesn’t show up at all on Amazon.
I’ve got a lot of Leatherman tools and other brands of mult-tool (Gerber, SOG) dating back to the original Leatherman “Survival Tool”, and I’ve always been an advocate of the concept, but of course they have always been more useful in an urban/suburban/rural context than out on the trail or in real wilderness, where many of the tools become mostly dead weight. The idea of one that is slanted more toward what’s useful in the woods certainly has some appeal to me, but this seems to miss the mark by a pretty wide margin.
Most of my initial impressions were negative. The combination of bright metal, black metal and yellow plastic seems to immediately give a sort-of toy-like impression, like the cheap tools in the sale bin of hardware stores that incorporate multiple bright colors, as though they were by the same people who design athletic shoes. It’s just not a businesslike or professional vibe.
Another early negative impression is that big, bulky carabiner hook at the pommel end. I don’t tend to dangle knives and multi-tools off of my gear in random places, I’ve never found this sort of thing useful at all, and in this design it takes up a lot of room. I gather all of that bulk is so that you can, theoretically, use the pommel end as a hammer. Sorry, I can’t see doing that much if ever in real life, even though it may add bulk and weight to the multi-tool, it doesn’t seem like there is enough weight for it to be effective in that role- seriously, what are you going to do with it, hammer in a dozen tent stakes? I don’t think so.
Apparently the knife blade is 420 steel, which these days is a strong indicator that the manufacturer isn’t really serious about it. It’s also half-serrated, which I personally dislike, and the serrations are going to make the knife blade much, much less useful in the woods since they pretty much do nothing but get in the way for working on wood. On the other hand this tool uses an excellent steel, 154CM, for the removable wirecutter surfaces. Clearly we’re much more concerned with the wirecutter function here than we are with the knife blade, which on a wilderness tool makes no sense at all. The knife blade also has a semi-Wharncliffe point, which I also dislike, I much prefer a centered point for working with wood, so you can easily use it for creating indents and chamfering holes, that sort of thing.
Two of the parts of this multi-tool are removable, the ferrocerium rod/whistle and the tiny diamond sharpener. Neither would really work if it were not, but removable tiny parts always give me pause, as they’re prone to loss. If I bought the tool and it worked out I’d have to buy spares, since it would be a real shame to need one years down the road and find out that they’re no longer available.. and even with spares, you’re very unlikely to have them actually with you.
The ferrocerium rod strikes me as just barely usable in length, but still, I guess, a whole lot better than nothing. I’m skeptical about a whistle this tiny, but of course I haven’t heard it. The tiny diamond-coated sharpener is odd, it seems to have both flat and convex surfaces, but the convex surfaces don’t seem acute enough to get into at least half of the serrations. If that’s the case you have maybe a half-inch of usable sharpening surface that can work on maybe an inch-and-a-half of the blade. Not good.
The rest of the tools are pretty much standard Leatherman fare,and not particularly slated towards wilderness use.
I tried to keep an open mind about this for some time, thinking that maybe it might make sense for some people to carry as their sole EDC tool, and have some basic survival tools always at hand, but the whole thing seems honestly too big and bulky for that.
It seems to suffer from the common foolish delusion that in a survival situation one is likely to find oneself unexpectedly in the wilderness, even though it’s very hard to come up with specific scenarios where that could happen. In an unexpected survival situation very, very few of us are going to be in wilderness, virtually all of us will at least start out in an urban, suburban or rural environment, and probably have very little incentive to head into true wilderness. If I’m intentionally in the wilderness and I don’t have a knife and fire-making capability on my person (NOT in a pack) then the chances are I’ve done something deeply stupid to get into that situation.
All in all, this just reinforces the impression I have from pretty much all of their carabiner-tailed tools and impression that Leatherman has completely lost direction in recent years. I’ve been disappointed with every Leatherman tool I’ve seen since the Charge series, and even more disappointed with the ones I’ve actually tried (Wingman). This looks like it was designed to appeal not so much to even the casual but serious camper as to young kids and armchair survivalists, like Gerber’s BG stuff, like almost all multi-function “survival” tools, it just seems gimmicky and toylike.
But maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s some redeeming feature I’m missing. I’d welcome contrary points.
– Robert the Wombat