Many of the charts & tables found on this site are PDFs.

In a field of 18, Leatherman leads the way with a quality tool at a low price. The Gerber 800 Legend, the Kershaw, SOG’s Powerlock and the Spyderco SpydeRench also sit at the top of our list.

The Leatherman's serrated and plain-edge ûknives can be opened and closed with one ûhand. The blades aren't mixed with the ûother tools, which is why we think it's the ûsafest of the large tools tested.

Following the theme of our knife-test article of June 2000, we decided to look at multi-tools, highly portable gadgets that incorporate up to well over a dozen functions. Multi-tools can't be evaluated by the same criteria as knives. They offer different sets of functions in varying configurations, and many of these interact with one another, both statically and dynamically. So we've distilled our discussion into short statements about what we believe to be important about each tool, bearing in mind that everyone has different sets of preferences and requirements when it comes to these things. We hope that the feature lists and our thoughts will allow you to select a…