Leatherman has teased that their next Garage Series limited edition tool is coming soon.
The next tool, Batch 003, is called “Parts,” and will be dropping on 8/23/2022. Update: It launched at 9am PST/12pm EST and sold out within 30 minutes.
Leatherman’s teaser photo features two knife blades, one with a sheepsfoot profile and the other drop point, along with a message – “our next release is coming together.
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So, here’s what we know. It’s called PARTS, it has something to do with knife blades that appear to have a modular connection or attachment design, and the “coming together” teaser suggests… something being built or assembled.
Leatherman Garage Parts. Thoughts?
Update: Here’s more about the Leatherman PARTS:
Explore Previous Leatherman Garage Tools:
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Aaron SD
User changeable blades and parts?
Jared
A detachable knife maybe? That would be neat.
JoeM
Likely gonna be a “Nope” from me. They’ve been striking out on their tool releases for a few years now. The models I still want are older, and I’ve become increasingly settled into the idea that my Leatherman set is soon to be complete forever. I think I have a Crunch, a Signal, and a Black Oxide Wave+ upgrade left. After that, it’s time to move on from Leatherman for me, because they just aren’t producing anything I need or want anymore. Hell, I took the Charge/Charge+ TTI off my list because I realized it genuinely had no place for me.
These Garage limited editions are kind of the Death Knell for the company. They can’t seem to innovate, or adapt, or even expand… so they’re stripping things back to draw in either penny pinchers, or completist dollars. It’s a bad sign to me. The quality won’t drop, but the sales numbers likely will.
Still love the company, truly, but it’s a sad day when the past few peeps they’ve made have been serious strip-backs, and cash-grabs. Not the company I fell in love with as a ThinkGeek Techie type all those years ago.
Mr. Creek
Honest but true. I recently tried to order their wave band only to have my order rejected, 4 times (For the record they were still in stock at the time). 20 years ago they were very cutting edge (bad pun intended). Now, it seems they are more gimoky and put too much money in marketing at the cost of quality of thier products.
Brian+M
I’ve always wondered why they don’t offer a customizable option. A modular system would be really neat but they should have an online customizer. Pick the kind of pliers you want, the kind of blades, and then whatever else fits in the remaining slots. Seems like an obvious product for this niche of customer and could easily get other Customers into a higher-tier price point.
Ball_bearing
A modular tool would be interesting.
If what they come up with are parts for modifications, then cool.
Kyle
Very happy to see Leatherman lead the way with AMERICAN MADE innovation as other multi tool brands have either haven’t innovated in years or are relying on decades technology. As with all companies, Leatherman isn’t without issues, but I strongly commend them with the Leatherman Garage.
Gerber’s last innovation was the Dual Force and while a cool idea on paper, on application this leaves much to be desired. Bulky, no pocket clip and entirely made in China. Prior to that the USA made Center Drive is a decent tool; however the replaceable cutters leave much to be desired, the scissors are just okay and Gerber still hasn’t added a pocket clip even after more than 32 years to their serious use multi tool. Victorinox, while they make great pocket tools, their multi tools only recently added a pocket clip option after decades and tool material isn’t meant for very heavy use. Bear and Son multi tool’s have remained nearly the same the early 1990’s and SOG hasn’t innovated much since around that time either. Schrade is an after thought even before they initially went out of business.
Believe me, I wish Gerber would come out with another largely domestic (ideally entirely) made multi tool that be innovative, it’s been half a decade since that has happened. While it’s great to see Victorinox now offers a pocket clip; what took them several decades to do what Leatherman did early on?
Jim Felt
Nice perspective regards several of my former clients.
For all the gratis tools I’ve been blessed with I’m not a carrier but accidentally a collector. Except one tiny keychain Leatherman. One daily carry and one I could “possibly” pass through our benighted airport security with.
That said I too really appreciate the Made in America aspects of some of these brands and frequently use them as gifts.
P. S. Tim is a swell guy. And Gerber started as a WWll hobby garage made Christmas gift for his advertising agency clients.
Lenard
Coming from someone that has been in the trades my entire life and spending decades upon decades with engineers; this might be an uncomfortable truth for some yet the fact remains time moves on regardless. Companies either innovate or they will stagnate; this is especially true in the tool industry. Over the decades I’ve seen companies and technology come and go. As for Gerber, my old man’s company was one of those clients were those knives were given to. For that time period and for a very humble blue collar family, this was quite the gift.
Similar to Kyle, even though a very long time ago knew a Victorinox representative, I was never given any answer as to why none of their products have pocket clips. Again being the trades at least back in my generation; there is something to be organization.
Frankly I don’t blame Pete Gerber, Spencer Frazier and the Schrade Family for calling it quits and selling their company. Even 30+ years ago, owning a business was exhausting and you are constantly fighting forces that don’t need to exist but do. Take it from me; I owned the same company that grandfather started and now it’s my son’s company and eventually my Grandson’s company.
Joe H
Oh Leatherman just make a multi tool that takes Havalon replacement blades or other small utility blades so that people can cut stuff they might not want to cut with a pocket knife (like carpet) and solve the issue that a lot of guys just don’t seem to know how to sharpen a knife these days or don’t want to take the time if they can just swap utility blades.
ca
I actually filed the blade holder of a Havalon knife so that it would fit in a Charge. It worked surprisingly well for a first try. I also at one point saw someone selling a 3D printed part to do the same.
Tim D.
Please be careful using third party scalpel blade holders.
I bought one for my skeletool. I sliced my finger wide open with it due to the fit not being just right and kind of caught while folding.
contradude
check out the zapwizard tool replacements for the Free series. I’m about to order one and I’ll have a flat bit driver (and probably the scalpel blade) adapter in my P4.
MM
A modular tool sounds like it might be interesting, and that idea makes sense given the “PARTS” name. That said, just looking at those blades I don’t think they are meant to be changed out by the user. If I were to design a modular multi-tool where the user was expected to change out the blades I’d want a really secure no-nonsense method of interfacing the blade to the tool. Something that’s very durable and easy to use. All I see here is a rather small pinhole on the blade. Nothing about the shape of the blade says “interchangeable” to me. Clearly I have no proof of anything but my gut feeling is that this will not be a tool where the users swap blades.
I suspect this is going to end up a lot like the earlier Leatherman Garage models: the actual quality and function of the tool is largely irrelevant because they all got snapped up by collectors or scalpers within moments of them being available for sale, and thus they are unobtanium for the average buyer.
Jim Felt
“Unobtainium”. Yep. A see a gold Leica or equivalent there.
I think the Federal consumer “protection” laws would likely prevent any marketing attempt to casually allow consumer blade/tool changes.
Try disabling an airbag and please let us know how you fared in court.
GNew
The last release, Darkside, took over 40 minutes to officially sell out on the website. Thats far from Unobtanium.
MM
In my opinion a 40 minute sales window EASILY makes it unobtanium because unless you were an enthusiast with advanced knowledge of when the product was going to become available there’s no way you’d ever know it was for sale. I know about it because I read Toolguyd and Stuart happened to mention it here. I’m sure that some knife enthusiasts know about it from knife blogs or other forums. But how would the average Joe, who is not a knife or tool nut, ever have a chance to buy this? 40 minutes is a joke. If it were 40 days instead I’d still be thinking it was borderline unobtanium.
Ct451
My guess is you will probably have a choice of which of those to have in your customized tool.
J. Newell
Very interesting discussion.
Innovate and expand or at least change the product line, or do what you do best and stick more or less to the knitting?
Leatherman is not uncompetitive with their knife blades, they’re non-competitive. It’s useful (sometimes) to have a blade on a multitool, but I’d bet that an enormous majority of Leatherman users have at least one other blade available most of the time. As I sit here, I have two blades clipped into my pockets: a Spyderco Military and a Milwaukee Fastback (the 1505, with the liner lock bit holder, which I guess makes it a multitool).
In very different ways, both of those work far better for me than the blades available in a Charge + or Surge or Skeletool.
I think there are limitations on the design element for Leatherman that the blades in that picture highlight. It’s probably more important to keep blade dimensions within a size envelope that optimizes the handle dimensions for the pliers than it is to design with the blade as a priority and let the chips fall where they may as far as handle size and general ergonomics go for the pliers.
And then there’s steel. 154CM and then S30V as top-tier upgrades didn’t/doesn’t make sense – unless you think that keeping costs down a bit is more valuable than offering mainstream premium steel (is that an oxymoron?), but maybe Leatherman thinks that most users are going to carry a folder that’s going to check a lot more boxes for the user than a multitool ever could anyway.
“Parts” needs to offer at least a few things if it’s going to be be a real competitor as a blade and be more than a one-time, small-run collectible. The steel needs to appeal to knife fans, without pushing the price out of reach of the target market. Blade shape/size/geometry probably needs to be better optimized for use of the blade, although there are probably design/dimensions conflicts with the tool elements of the overall mutltitool. Finally, it might help if there were some innovation elements, like the strongly-suggested interchangeability idea, although there have been knives with interchangeable blades before and they didn’t do well.
Final note: I hope those holes aren’t any indication of the final pivot diameter or placement.
I might buy one of these on the theory that it would be interesting to handle on and that I can easily sell it without much risk of losing money. That was clearly (and unfortunately) true with the first two releases, but if Leatherman gets wacky with a knife-based design this one might really appeal only to hard core collectors.
Mikedt
If Leatherman wants more money from me, make blades of better quality steel for their multi-tools and sell them separately.
Nathan
yeah I dont’ need a 300 dollar knife and I find it hard to justify a 300 dollar multi-tool.
outside of all of that I would love to custom make a multi-tool for my needs. If that’s what Parts is – and it can be cheap and light duty – then I might be onboard.
Even better if I can buy PARTS and assemble it myself – awesome.
Or if I can just buy Parts, so I can upgrade modify the one I own. For example a new blade for my skeletool would be great (I ‘d like a solid non serrated one)
for my daily office grind one of the new free tools suits some. anyway I guess we will see.
J.+Newell
I just noticed – is this right? – that there’s no time given for this release. I suppose it’s possible that there will be another email with the release time sent later today or tomorrow morning, but as it is, not only do you need to know that “Parts” will be released tomorrow, you also need to be monitoring some connected device with email alerts turned on and monitoring your notifications in order to get one of these.
Did I miss something? 🙂
928'er
A while back, I bought 3 Skeletools with serrated blades. I’d never owned a serrated blade before and it turns out that I absolutely HATE serrated blades. Since leatherman makes a straight blade version of the same tool, I contacted customer service to purchase replacement straight blades for my Skeletools. They, not only REFUSED to sell me straight blade replacements, but had the gall to suggest that if I was unhappy with my 3 serrated blade Skeletools, I should just buy 3 more Skeletools with the straight blade. YMMV, but I, personally, will never purchase another leatherman product.
Stuart
I chipped the tip of my first Skeletool, which has a plain edge blade. They’ll replace it under warranty, but the current version has a partially serrated blade, and there’s no way around this, and so I never sent it in.
They’re simply not set up to supply tools or knife blades on their own.