I asked about "hard use" multitools over on bladeforums, and there was a lot of good discussion.


Also a couple of jerks who gave me crap for daring to pry a washer out of a flakeboard piece of furniture with the screwdriver on my POS leatherman wave.


So, not the wave. It's junk. I broke it prying with less lateral force than I apply to my butter knife when I spread chunky peanut butter on my toast. The tip of the knife is also bent, and the ergonomics are awful.


Some tougher tools I've used are the SOG Powerlock (awesome and beefy), the Schrade Tough Tool (huge but tough), and the Victorinox Swisstools. Any of those would be an outstanding choice, IMHO. The build quality on recent leathermans, on the other hand, is absolute crap. And I've heard that the quality of Gerber tools has gone WAY WAY WAY down since I bought mine many years ago.