Every single Swiss Army knife has been reviewed about a million times - so I was surprised to find very little information online concerning the Mountaineer Lite. All I wanted was to see how wide it is, compared to other SAKs, but google just churns out countless product photos showing the side of this beautiful blue oddity.
So if anyone wants to see what this sucker looks like from the top, here it is, next to a Fisherman and a Spartan Lite. (Stupidly I picked two SAKs of almost identical width. I couldn't find my regular Spartan and I don't have a Swisschamp - they would have been useful for the sake of comparison.) It was a grim and gloomy day so I am sorry if the pictures are grim and gloomy too.
Three things I've been looking for in a little knife are: scissors, inline Philips, and the file. A tiny saw seems useless to me; if I want to cut wood any other saw in the world will be more handy, and there is no shortage of saws on the 111mm SAKs. (The saw on the Forester is awesome, for the size, but why go smaller?)
Conversely, there are virtually no metal saws on the 111mm Vics. The ones that have them are gigantic/ expensive/ rare. I'm not going to be safe-cracking with this thing - I'm not even going to be cutting sheets of metal with it, so a gigantic file seems like overkill. I would just like a little file for smoothing edges on things, for fingernails, even for grating stuff when camping. What's wrong with the nail file on the Classic? It's too small, and you can't cut things with it.
For a long time I've been plotting to get me a Mountaineer. It's almost the perfect SAK... with one crippling defect. It doesn't have a Philips screwdriver, anywhere.
Luckily its big and weird looking brother does have an inline Philips. It also has the world's dimmest light. Grab your sunglasses kids, and prepare to be dazzled:
Let's not forget the so-called Plus Scales. No, let's do forget them because I am not a fan of microscopic biros, toothpicks, or indeed tweezers. And a pin. I can't remember the last time I needed one solitary pin so the Plus Scales are not particularly exciting to me. These ones are pretty, though.
I forgot to mention the price of this thing. I paid 48 euros, but the box arrived with a 63 euro sticker on it. Seems a bit steep to me. For that amount of money I could have bought a Swisschamp. (This is probably what doomed the Mountaineer Lite from day 1.)
So it's been discontinued, and I doubt too many people will miss it, but it's an interesting SAK. It's a little chunky, the light is rubbish, but the "must have" triumvirate of
toothpick, tweezers, pin philips, scissors and file are present. Whoever decided to stick a Lite on this thing did it no favours; it's more expensive than it should be, it's fatter than it should be, and you can't help feeling that, for its heft, it's missing something. It's sad that it's been discontinued, because it's precariously close to perfect, especially if used in conjunction with a larger SAK like a Forester or Trekker that packs a decent wood saw.
The sun came out for a final photo:
Uh, I should also have mentioned that the Mountaineer Lite comes with all the usual blades and openers... And look, the big blade is sharp! (I thought I had the file open and snapped it shut on my thumb. I'm still alive so I don't get a Darwin award, but it was close!)
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