So, this sucker was on eBay for a long time... so I made an offer of $15 and it was accepted! The knife arrived today. I had to fiddle with the lighter to get it to fill and work. Pressure valve needed to be worked a bit, and I disassembled it and cleaned gunk out of it, reassembled, fiddled some more, and got it filled. The lighter scale works perfectly.
The knife is... well... it's good. It's actually good. I'm looking at this thing, and I don't think it's a copy of a Wenger. It's too close. It looks like Wenger provided Coast with blanks, which Coast did the final machining on. It's too close to be anything else. The shape of all the tools is identical, with minor exceptions. Not close, IDENTICAL. The clip point blade is the same blade out of a Swissbuck. The scissors are the liner-sprung scissors out of every Wenger knife. The saw is 100% identical, right down to the nail nick, tooth count, and tooth shape. The differences are the nail nicks are different, the level of polishing is different, the blade is a combination blade with a plain edge and a serrated back portion, the bottle opener flat head blade is not at quite the right angle, and the can opener lower tang profile has been ground down more. If Wenger provided just blanks, this makes sense as Coast would have to do the final grinding, machining, sharpening, and polishing. I'm guessing this was a similar arrangement that Victorinox had with Schrade to make the Century line of pocket knives.
The only tool that is significantly different from a Wenger tool is the nail file. But, I'm not 100% familiar with all Wenger knives. That could actually be a Wenger tool, I just don't know. The tools are over-polished. Where Wenger tools still have sharp edges and machine marks, the tools here are polished so that hard edges are more rounded and softened. The front scale with the Coast name attaches with the standard Wenger pucks from the 90s. The ones that shatter when you try and remove the scales, and are often damaged with age and wear. The tweezers in the scale are shortened Victorinox tweezers with a slightly reshaped plastic head. The bends are in the exact same place, the plastic is attached the same way, the tweezers are just slightly shorter below the bend.
The lighter scale is attached differently. The fuel tank is attached to the scale with a screw, as is the lighter head. However, to remove the screw for the lighter head, I'd have to do major disassembly, because the flint is in the way. I'm not willing to do that just yet.
Unfortunately, not all is right with this knife. While the blade is sharp and the knife is in overall good condition, it's obviously a used knife, and it has some issues. The thin scale's mounting point by the tweezers, like so many wenger knives, has failed. And the knife desperately needs to be re-peened. It looks like someone over-torqued the T-handle phillips driver and popped that peen, and now the backsprings are not tightly held together. So I'm eventually going to have to take the lighter scale off just to re-peen the knife. That said, I intend to put the knife back together as-is, and likely use it. It has all the tools of a Wenger Handyman, plus a butane lighter, with Wenger-quality tools. Really except for the peening, the knife is very close to Wenger quality.
Edit: The scissors in this knife cut open a blister pack. Not with ease, but they did it. None of the Chinese-made pocket knives I have can muster that, not even the big multi-tools with the larger scissors can manage much more than a few layers of paper. These scissors are serrated just like Wenger scissors and cut blister pack just like Wenger scissors. So, I'm even more convinced they actually ARE wenger scissors.
Charles.