Holiday Gift Guide: Twelfth Day of Christmas
Tony Sculimbrene 12.23.17
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me a keychain multitool worth keeping
The Choice: Gerber Shard
Its been tough over the last few years to find a Gerber product to love, but the Shard is not just good, it is great-—easily one of the best keychain or one piece multitools on the market. It comes in a number of colors, as an intuitive and simple design, and it has features that really work. In many cases, these one piece multitools are more totems than tools—representations of something capable of doing work more so than something that actually can do work. But with Shard, you get actual utility. The angled pry fork is actually capable of generating leverage, which, you know, is important in a pry device. The bottle opener hook is especially aggressive and removes caps quickly with a single quick tug. The attachment point is exceptionally large allowing for a lot of options, all of which are easy.
But there is one thing that sets the Shard apart from virtually everything else on the market—it has a real, three dimensional Phillips driver. It seems like a basic thing, but it is not. So few of these micro multitools have this feature that it alone makes the Shard worth the price of admission. The Shard also happens to be exceptionally inexpensive—its less than lunch at Subway. Ironically, Gerber produced the Shard as a piece of schwag for a trade show. When the EDC community first saw it people went bananas and demanded it be released to the public. Given that it’s competition in the Gerber line up was the horrendous Artifact, the Shard was a huge hit. It makes one of the best stocking stuffers around.
Alternatives
Scrooge Before Ghost Visits: CRKT Snailor
The Small Snailor is a great bottle opener, a production version of the Jesper Voxnaes custom. It is significantly smaller than the original, but it retains the abstract animal shape and the great bottle opener. It also happens to be very cheap, coming in under $10. I’d opt for the Shard for true Gear Geeks, but if you are microbrew hipster, this is the easy choice.
Scrooge After Ghost Visits: Munroe Mega Dangler
There are a ton of premium one piece multitools out there. Atwood Tools hold a special place in the community, basically starting this entire craze. Burnley’s CyPop is similarly sought after with prices that start at $125 and cap out, according to Burnley himself, at $6,000. These items are true man jewelry. They all look amazing and allow makers to experiment with treatments and finishes. Of these crazy pieces of pocket frosting, the Deryk Munroe Mega Dangler is the one I want the most. It has real function—a good pry, a good bottle opener, and a very cleverly designed dangler for your keys. These custom pocket tools are the EDC equivalent of rare breeds of tulips, but some of those exotic tulips are still around today, hundreds of years after the bubble burst.
