/ 11 December 2006

Call that a knife?

Swiss Army knives are obviously good things to own. They’re standard equipment for Nasa’s astronauts and feature in the Museum of Modern Art in New York as an example of outstanding functional design. When Chris Bonnington headed a Himalayan expedition in 1970, he used every one of the blades in his Swiss Army knife except the fish scaler; as he apologetically pointed out to the manufacturers, there are no fish on the south face of Annapurna.

The only downside to owning one is running into somebody whose model features more implements than your own. If, for example, I owned the Swiss Army knife called a Scout — humbly equipped as it is with only a can opener, a large blade, a nail file and nail cleaner, a cruciform Phillips screwdriver, a reamer, another screwdriver, a cap lifter, a wire bender, a toothpick, tweezers and a keyring loop — and I went on a camping holiday with a man who owned the Engineer, which incorporates everything in the Scout knife plus tag clamp, wire cutter and pliers … If that happened, then I’d probably pretend that I didn’t have a Swiss Army knife at all.

Just as you can’t be too rich or too thin, I’d always thought, so you can’t have too many tools on your Swiss Army knife. But that was before I took delivery of the new Giant Swiss Army knife. Grotesque, if superbly engineered, the Giant weighs nearly a kilo­gram and features 85 devices. It is supposed to feature every blade that has ever been incorporated into Swiss Army knives as made by Wenger, one of the two firms that make them. But I admit that I just can’t find some of the devices that I know are in there: the mysterious “special key”, for example, or the elusive “12/20 gauge choke tube tool”.

Nonetheless, I have successfully employed the cigar cutter, the flashlight, the laser pointer with 300ft range, the mineral crystal magnifying glass, the tyre tread gauge measurer and the corkscrew. It took a mere four minutes to remove a cork with the Giant, incidentally.

It’s a real product, available for the very real price of £495, but it is aimed at completists and collectors. Even Wenger admits that its practicality is limited and that its purpose is partly to promote the company. — Â