New Leatherman Arc is out

Guy McVer said:
All of the patents ran out on the Wave and their other models. That's why they introduced the Free series a few years back. It's a newer set of patents. It's also why we've been seeing all these cheap Wave clones coming out of China. All of Leatherman's exclusive rights to their older designs ran out, so now anyone can use them. That's not the case with the Free series and the Arc, so it makes sense for Leatherman to push those as much as possible.
Click to expand...
Good point.
 
Have a few Leathermans, a Charge black in the Jeep, Charge =TTI in the house, a wave plus in the RV and a Skeletoo in the wifes car. I might buy an ARC in the future but not right now. Also have a a couple of Victorinox Swiss tools and an assortment of SAKs around the house.
 
Guy McVer said:
PSA

There are now multiple videos on youtube showcasing a design flaw with the replaceable wire cutters which ship with the Leatherman Arc.

The wire cutters included with the Arc have been redesigned so that they have a small gap at the base of the pliers. These newly redesigned cutters have a very high tendency to break when used to cut hard wire, coat hangers, or small thin nails. The older replaceable wire cutters do not have the same issue and will happily cut the aforementioned items without any trouble.

If Leatherman intentionally did this in order to sell more replaceable wire cutters, then the problem may never be fixed.

As a workaround, you can swap the replaceable wire cutters from older Leatherman pliers to the Arc. Anything made before 2022 should work and won't have the same issue. Going forward, it appears that all Leatherman pliers with replaceable cutters will have the same tendency to break. In other words, this issue is not restricted to the Arc. It theoretically affects all Leatherman models from 2022 onward, but anything before 2022 should be fine.

To check whether your pliers have this issue, simply examine the replaceable wire cutters for a gap at the base of the pliers when they are closed. The old style replaceable cutters have either no gap or a very tiny gap that is almost unnoticeable. The newer redesigned replaceable cutters which break easily have a noticeable gap at the base of the pliers when they are closed. The cutters themselves are also rounded at the bottom, whereas the older style are not rounded at the bottom.
Click to expand...
Some of the assertions here are ridiculous. Do you have any information that says for a fact leatherman intentionally changed the design to cause failure of inserts? I doubt that. People make design changes that in theory look good, people are wrong, and corrections get made. The sky isn't falling and leatherman isn't grenading as a company. I have an arc, it's fine. I swapped the inserts from a p2 in the arc, and the gap was gone. Easy fix that if I had to wager on, leatherman will make right.

I think them switching from 154cm to 440c for cutter material is interesting, but if both geometry are identical I'm not sure we'd see a difference in performance. Yet to be seen.
 
shinyedges said:
Some of the assertions here are ridiculous. Do you have any information that says for a fact leatherman intentionally changed the design to cause failure of inserts? I doubt that. People make design changes that in theory look good, people are wrong, and corrections get made. The sky isn't falling and leatherman isn't grenading as a company. I have an arc, it's fine. I swapped the inserts from a p2 in the arc, and the gap was gone. Easy fix that if I had to wager on, leatherman will make right.

I think them switching from 154cm to 440c for cutter material is interesting, but if both geometry are identical I'm not sure we'd see a difference in performance. Yet to be seen.
Click to expand...

Sorry for the confusion. If you look carefully, you'll notice that I didn't actually claim that Leatherman did this to intentionally cause failure of the replaceable cutters. I only speculated that IF they did this intentionally towards that end, THEN I think it's not likely that we would see them fix it. Companies doing that sort of thing is not unheard of. Again, this is just speculation, and we won't really know until someone from Leatherman publicly addresses the issue and gives an official reason for the redesigned cutters. Please carefully re-examine my post. It was not my intention to offend anyone who is a fan of Leatherman, nor do I think that I ever implied that "the sky is falling" or Leatherman is "grenading as a company".

On a separate note...

It's been suggested by multiple people that the new cutter geometry has nothing to do with them breaking. It could just be a bad heat treat of the cutters or something like that. Perhaps it's even due to a change in the material of the cutters. The newer style cutter geometry is inferior in my opinion because it doesn't fully cut unless you carefully position the wire above where the gap is. I think the geometry should be switched back to the old style without the gap, regardless of whether or not they are able to fix the breaking issue without changing the geometry.
 
Guy McVer said:
I have also been seeing several different QC issues. For 230 usd they probably should have better quality control. In some places it's significantly more expensive. I suppose they bet on making their money with super high volume, and that probably meant that the QC would suffer. Now that the issue with the cutters has come up, I wonder how they are going to handle it. They may just choose to ignore it and then quietly update the replaceable cutter design without saying anything.

If they really want to make money with high volume then they ought to release a non-magnacut version of the ARC without the bit kit and without the sheath. No thumb stud would be great too because they could just use the regular blade from the Free series with the thumb slot. That should cut the cost significantly.

If they made a bladeless version I think that would be pretty neat. They could just have the saw and the file on one side and nothing on the other side. Or they could have the scissors and the saw, or the scissors and the file. Or maybe have a knife and scissors on one side and a t-shank adapter as one of the shorter side tools.
Click to expand...

Guy McVer said:
Sorry for the confusion. If you look carefully, you'll notice that I didn't actually claim that Leatherman did this to intentionally cause failure of the replaceable cutters. I only speculated that IF they did this intentionally towards that end, THEN I think it's not likely that we would see them fix it. Companies doing that sort of thing is not unheard of. Again, this is just speculation, and we won't really know until someone from Leatherman publicly addresses the issue and gives an official reason for the redesigned cutters. Please carefully re-examine my post. It was not my intention to offend anyone who is a fan of Leatherman, nor do I think that I ever implied that "the sky is falling" or Leatherman is "grenading as a company".

On a separate note...

It's been suggested by multiple people that the new cutter geometry has nothing to do with them breaking. It could just be a bad heat treat of the cutters or something like that. Perhaps it's even due to a change in the material of the cutters. The newer style cutter geometry is inferior in my opinion because it doesn't fully cut unless you carefully position the wire above where the gap is. I think the geometry should be switched back to the old style without the gap, regardless of whether or not they are able to fix the breaking issue without changing the geometry.
Click to expand...
You're posts are filled with more "i suppose" and "if" assumptions than a philosophers personal journal.

To what end are all your negative suppositions and assumptions? Lol

I'm hardly a leatherman "fan" though I've had their multitools for decades at this point. I'm merely reading your hyperbolic assumptions and calling you out. Leatherman isn't perfect but I've used their warranty a handful of times and they come through, at least for me.

You come off as a disgruntled ex employee lol 🤣
 
Speculation and hypothesis are pretty normal in any topic when there are unknowns involved. If your issue is personal then there is nothing I can do to help. Cheers.
 
Guy McVer said:
Speculation and hypothesis are pretty normal in any topic when there are unknowns involved. If your issue is personal then there is nothing I can do to help. Cheers.
Click to expand...
Nothing personal about it at all. When someone makes up some random unsubstantiated theory and runs with it publicly, getting called on it is pretty normal as well.
 
Guy McVer said:
Speculation and hypothesis are pretty normal in any topic when there are unknowns involved. If your issue is personal then there is nothing I can do to help. Cheers.
Click to expand...
So you defamed them without any established facts using rumors and internet gab on what might could be a handful of units that slipped through out of thousands of units. If you have actually experienced it with your own Arc that’s one thing but to make an accusation from other accusers who might not even have an Arc that’s another thing. What if those claims were made by bot’s hired by Leathermans competitors ?
 
Okay, here's a replaceable wire cutter test with the following configurations:

1. 2023 Arc with old style cutters from a 2020 Wave

2. 2020 Wave with new style cutters from a 2023 Arc

3. 2019 Free P4 with new style cutters that Leatherman sent back from a warranty service.


The results are pretty much what you would expect. The Arc cuts great when you use it with the old style replaceable wire cutters. The Wave and the Free P4 cut like s🤬t with the new style cutters.

At first I really didn't like this guy, but the more of his videos I watch, the more he makes me laugh.
 
UPDATE on the wire cutters issue:

Youtuber Joe from the Ink&Iron channel recently received his Arc back from Leatherman's warranty service. His broken cutters were replaced by the exact same updated cutter design with a curved gap at the bottom. So Leatherman does not appear to be fixing this by going back to the old design, but we'll have to wait and see if maybe they change back to the old design once the current stock runs out.


As you can see, the replacement cutters didn't break this time, but they still struggled to cut and they also caused the pliers to bind up.

Youtuber Ben from TXToolCrib claims to have gotten an email from Leatherman about this issue. He claims that Leatherman said there was a quality control issue with certain batches of the replaceable cutters. To me that sounds like a bad heat treat, but they didn't specify what the actual issue was. He says Leatherman are going to offer replacement cutters to anyone who experienced problems with the cutters breaking.

So there appears to two separate issues going on here. One is issue is bad quality control. The other issue is that the new style cutter design absolutely sucks if you try to use the hard wire cutters at the base of the pliers. A workaround is to carefully place the wire just above the gap at the bottom, and the cutters should then work fine. You simply need to pay attention to where the wire is going instead of being able to place it at the bottom which ordinarily wouldn't require any thought.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top