Seven years into the project, his Oregon State University pal Steve Berliner offered to invest in the fledgling company. I’m pretty resilient and very goal-oriented.” Fortunately, Tim wasn’t too stubborn to accept help. “My friends at school just got A’s with little effort, but I had to work hard to do that. “Things have never come easy for me,” Tim says. He even tried to manufacture the PST himself, but retailers turned it down too. Then he confronted a steady stream of rejection as knife and tool companies panned the idea for swerving too far beyond their existing categories. Tim Leatherman stands in his Portland, Oregon, factory in January 2020.īack in the U.S., Tim scavenged metal from discarded appliances and crafted a prototype in his brother-in-law’s garage. In Tehran, he sketched out a design that would eventually become his breakthrough product: the Pocket Survival Tool, or PST. The couple had been driving a temperamental used Fiat between cheap hotels with balky plumbing, and the then-26-year-old Tim kept wishing for a multi-tool with a pair of full-strength pliers-something that no Swiss Army knife included. In 1975, he was on a shoestring trip across Europe and Asia with his wife. It’s a change of pace for a man who invented the company’s first multi-tool. Now 72, Tim Leatherman loves to spend some of his semiretired days taking the curious around the company that bears his name. Leatherman, and that, like an exceptionally handy Willy Wonka, he’s leading their tour.

But even among these tool fanatics, many are surprised to discover there’s a Mr. They peer into tumblers filled with synthetic stones that smooth and buff the tools like shells in the surf. Visitors come to watch silver ribbons of steel cut into intricate shapes by a massive press that booms like a giant’s footsteps, applying 300 tons of pressure with each stomp. Like microbreweries and chocolate shops, the Leatherman factory in Portland, Oregon, offers public tours (suspended during COVID-19). The multi-tool as we know it didn’t exist before Tim Leatherman invented foldable pliers-and that was just the beginning.Ī version of this story appeared in the summer 2020 issue of Uncommon Path.

Multi tool pliers factories