how has your SAK saved you?

T

the rat

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Feb 3, 2009
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Just what the title says. How has your SAK saved the day for you? Mine saved the day yesterday while hanging a mirror, I needed a phillips screw driver and all I had was my SAK. I uesd it and it worked great plus it made me thirty dollars to boot.:)
 
Hanging with friends throwing back a few drinks the bottle opener and corkscrew have come in handy more than a few times.

The can opener saved me a couple of times at work when I brought a can of chunky soup for lunch (before they had the pull tops).
 
Opened bottle of hoegaarden and sliced lemon for it.. Multitool indeed! :D
 
Went on a boat tour while at Vancouver Island. I left my brand new hunting knife in the car because I wasn't wearing a belt and didn't want to lose it overboard. After a few hours looking at Black bears and fish eagles, we headed to the harbour entrance to see the sea lions when we fouled the prop with a submerged rope. After a bit of searching in the tackle box and under the seats, the charter owner asks us sheepishly if he could borrow a knife because, although he usually can't move on the boat for falling over a knife, today, well, he just couldn't find one. We both said no, we didn't think we'd need one. We tried shouting to some people on the shoreline, but they couldn't hear us. It was getting dark and the weather was picking up, when my wife suddenly had an idea and started rummaging around in her day pack. There, on the end of her key ring (the one with her UK car keys and our house keys) was a small SAK classic, with which we managed to cut the rope and chug our way back home. The owner was so pleased to be home in a reasonable time (I.e. before it went totally dark) and so embarassed not to have a knife on him that he left a six pack back at our motel. and the next day he dropped off a side of home made maple smoked salmon. Although I'm not fond of SAKs usually , I do appreciate that particular one and it has confirmed to me the saying that "the best knife is the one to hand when you need one". I just try to make sure these days that it won't be another SAK.
 
The bottle opener at parties. Sometimes, the can opener.

I have used the leather punch to put extra holes in my belt.
 
One time I was mountain biking, and I was coming down a rocky decline when the left side of handle bars broke off downward. The front brake is on the left side and I couldn’t get a grip on the brake. I just cantilever brakes, so the brake on the right side wasn’t doing much, so I had a somewhat controlled crash into a juniper bush/tree. I was able to use the saw on my SAK One Hand Trekker to cut a juniper branch to stick in my handle bars for a fix to get me home. Here’s the pic of the fix after I got home.
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Once while climbing the North face of Everest, I was setting a cleat, it broke under pressure and I had two guys hanging from my foothold. Good thing they were small (Sherpas).

I knew I had to think fast so I used the corkscrew and it dug right in and gave us safe passage. I waited until the 2nd Sherpa had passed me and unscrewed the SAK. Looks like brand new too! Here's a shot of me from the last guy in line at that moment! :eek:

mt%2Beverest.jpg
 
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Twice in my life the corkscrew has saved the day and made me the hero of the party:)
 
I don't know if it was saving me, but I went about 2 months using the can opener on my ALOX Soldier because my el-crapo manual opener stops working. The gears wouldn't mesh properly for some reason. That opener on the SAk really works well.
 
Today I went to open a bottle of beer and didn't have a bottle opener handy. Thankfully my Alox Pioneer was in my pocket.

Thanks, Victorinox! :thumbup:
 
Had much stuff in my car that I wanted in my house
Used backyard door, which is also a heavy firetrapdoor
Wedged keychain Victorinox SAK (closed) between door and doorframe

Plasticscales broke and the internals in the SAK bent beyond repair
... But it saved me a lot of time that day.
 
On vacation with the inlaws in South Carolina. Kitchen knives at the beach house were too dull to cut anything. I pulled out my Victorinox Pioneer and was able to slice bread, open a can of beans, slice mushrooms and some other small food prep. Man it came it handy!!
 
Spartans and Tinkers have saved me hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the last 40 years. Every tool on them has been needed at one time or another, but the corkscrew not so much, so this is why I carry a Tinker most days.
 
I carried a Tinker as my EDC for a number of years and I found uses for it all the time. The time I remember it the most was about 25 years ago at church. We had some old wooden folding chairs way back in the back part of the church. Some little boy, he must have been about 4 or 5, stuck his head between the slats which made up the back of one of the chairs and got stuck. Unsurprisingly, he made his predicament known to all around him in a loud howl. I was nearby and used the Phillips head on my Tinker to take the slats off the back of the chair to free him up. No harm to the boy. We got rid of those chairs soon after.
 
All the time!

Lately my dog has been getting cheat grass in her ears (two vet trips for extraction and counting…). That means a bunch of times I've been crouched in a field, pulling seeds with a pair of SAK tweezers. Lifesaver.

Of course, it's always there when I have somehow misplaced all three knives I usually carry, when I don't have a bottle opener to hand, or when there's a Philips screw that needs tightening… the bottle opener/screwdriver on the Rambler is fantastic.
 
When I was in high school, me and some friends made the 2 hour drive to Kings Dominion, an amusement park. As soon as we got out of the car, we realized that we had locked the car doors with the keys still inside my mom's Oldsmobile stationwagon. Just to give it a try, I inserted the small screwdriver (next to the chisel) of my SwissChamp into the lock and turned. And it actually worked! I was surprised, my friends were impressed, but I played it off like it was no big deal- ha! Back home, I tried to replicate the events but couldn't - guess it was a one-shot deal.

That day gave me the unwarranted (but cool) reputation of a "master lock-picker" amongst my circle of friends! I'm guessing that since the car was old, the tumblers in the lock pretty much just stayed in the unlocked position, and just needed a turn. No lockpicking involved.
 
I frequently use the scissors for cutting moleskin and second skin for my feet on long back country ski and backpacking trips.

I have used the screwdrivers to adjust my crampons and ski bindings.
 
I was given a spartan as an advertising promo by a passenger on a charter fishing trip that i was working. I used to carry that knife even if i had another knife on me. I also used to carry a recruit after i wore out the spartan. I don't remember which model i had but i was working on a whale watch trip that was heading out into a big 6-7 foot swell and pea soup fog one morning several years ago. The fog horn on this boat was part of a loud hailer microphone in the wheelhouse. The captain-in-training hadn't tested it before we left the dock so when we needed it, naturally it did not work. visibility was about 100 feet. we looked the loud hailer over and discovered that a lot of corrosion on one of the connections on back was the cause of the problem. Unfortunately the hailer was mounted in a way that no screwdriver could get behind it to remove the screw. We tried every one in the wheelhouse. Then I remembered the SAK in my pocket and with the screwdriver partially opened at a 90 degree angle we managed to remove the screw, still with some difficulty, clean the connection and reassemble everything. We got the foghorn working and the SAK saved the day! :D I don't go on a boat without a multi-tool or swiss army knife anymore. they come in handy way too often.
 
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