Old Dakine Multitool

[SgtTowser]

...Plier based multitool probably bought for skis, or skateboards, and never used. Even has a nylon sheath.

Clip point blade tange stamped rostfrei, but I find no Solingen, or Germany stamp.

Round up the usual tool suspects: serrated sheep’s foot, can opener, cap lifter with flat driver., Phillips head driver, pry bar, a slender boot binder adjuster, robust needle nose pliers. Ho-hum.

Dakine in plain black letters on one side

Don’t buy it, said the anal, exacting, only the best, buy once/cry once voice. You were going to wait and get a Surge, or Swisstool, if you weaken and fall off the SAK wagon.

Don’t. Do. It.

But I did it.

Oh, well, at $6.00 US without tax or shipping, in the age of hyperinflation, it was one of those things I could not say no to.

No skate boarder would ever want it now that Dakine makes slick little high density multi tools not  on the folding plier form factor.

No one but a COB (cheap old b-tard) would think twice of buying it.

So I thought: that’s what I am.

I laid down six anachronistic Fed notes looking increasingly like Italian lire in the Rain of Lead days of Fellini. Analog nostalgia drenched me. Cash money. Untraceable. Legal tender. Weird Masonic symbols of Zion and gematria dating to 1913, when Crown financiers jacked the clearing house functions and turned USA into their war machine. Using chipped plastic, or crypto, seemed disrespectful to the ghosts of all the rebel skate boarders in baggies that once might have aspired to it.

Memories of my own paleo skateboarding rushed by in an eyelid movie. It looked all Costa Gavras. Fast, grainy cuts. Z crossed with Leave Ito Beaver.  It was 1963, maybe 64, in a Spartan store parking lot and my pals and I had just scavenged our old metal skates—the kinds with adjustable length metal frames, metal wheels, metal butterfly keys...you name and it was metal. The skate clamped to shoe sole and strapped on with leather straps and metal buckles, but we parted them and nailed the front wheels to the front end of a 1 x 6 and the back wheels to the back.

Suspension? We don’t need no stinking suspension!

Metal wheels on asphalt.

The way it was meant to be!

There wasn’t even a name for what we did that day.

I found the Dakine multitool in a thrift store across the street from a dedicated skateboard park full of kids in dedicated wardrobes riding highly engineered factory skateboards. They wore helmets and joint protectors. They were riding chutes, taking on air, standing front ends up, pivoting, and shooting off in other directions. The park probably cost $5 million, maybe ten.

But I was there first, I thought. 1963, maybe 64..

When I got home, I used the Dakine to tighten a nut on a wind spinner I keep by a gardening box to keep the birds away. It wasn’t meant for this, but neither was nailing old metal skates to 1 x 6s.

The story of my life: adapting things, including myself, and trying to have some fun along the way.

[Alan K.]

Great story. How about a pic with all the tools splayed out so we can see what you really got for your $6.00.  It looks like a fairly standard copy of an early Super Tool.

[SgtTowser]

Hope this pic helps.

Pretty simple, but simple worked.

I cannot tell if it’s DNA comes  from Leatherman, or Germany, or Italy, or Asia, or if it comes  from one of the American or European multitool lines that preceded Leatherman.

Whatever, my thanks  to whomever designed and manufactured it.

My one gripe is the edges are a bit sharp to clench on barehanded, but there is a handy workaround. Wear a leather work glove. It works. 😀

I also doubt the wire cutter is stellar. The workaround for that would be a Knipex wire cutter.

It lacks a ratchet, but fortunately I already have a ratchet.

Frankly, I hope it breaks soon, because I want to ask Santa for a spendy MT.

But I am afraid it won’t break. 🤞