CRKT Eat’N Tool Review
I’m constantly honing my EDC key chain and was happy with the contents of it until recently. One of the most used items on my Keyring is a bottle opener. We all know that the best beers come with pop tops. After almost five years of opening hundreds of Guinness, Sam Adams, Red Strip, Yuengling and many other fine beers the soft aluminum of my free bottle opener wore out. First it became hard to open bottles, I had to really push hard to keep from slipping off the cap. So I started looking around for a replacement and this time I wanted bells ans whistles.
My first choice in my search for a new and improved bottle opener was Google. Digging through the web I found a few neat novelties. Zombies that open with thier mouth, Skulls but mostly I found junk. With all the junk I found some good choices. I came across the CRKT Eat’N Tool, Nite Ize S-Biner Ahhh, Gerber 22-01769 Shard Keychain Tool and Boker Plus Vox Access Tool to name a few of the best ones I came across. Each had benifits and drawbacks to my needs. Before making a decision though I decided to try one more thing.
Asking My Readers
So I went on the Survivalpunk Facebook page and asked my readers what they would recommend. This is where i got some great suggestions! The suggestions from there were: The AGS Spam Can/ Bottle Opener, LaRue Tactical Beverage Entry Tool Dillo, American Kami SharKey (gorgeous btw)Leatherman Carabiner and lastly the TAD Gear Skeleton key, which is now discontinued and I can’t find any trace of it(video here to drool). These were some very solid suggestions. I came very close to getting the Sharkey. Might still one day. Heck even at $100 I really wanted the Skeleton Key. Being cheap though I had to factor in price with functionality.
Local factor
If you’ve read here a while you know I like getting things locally. So the other day when I went into a local Surplus(ish) store and saw the Eat’N Tool there locally for $5 I decided that would be the winner. So it has partly impulse buy that I had spent two months thinking about. Now that I had made a decision it was time for testing.
Eat’N
So the main reason I went with the Eat’N Tool (besides seeing it in person) was for its spork. I bring my lunch to work and have forgotten eating utensils many times. The idea of an EDC eating utensil appealed to me a lot. How did it perform in eating? Decent I would say. The spork is so smooth that I had a hard time scooping up some foods. The tiny prongs performed much better than I thought though. I would say that as a back up eating utensil it does good enough. The smooth surface does make cleaning easy though.
Bottle Opining
Now on to the main reason for getting this thing. Bottle cap’s. When writing this article at 6am I didn’t have any beer handy. I did have an empty bottle and a bottle capper so I went through several caps testing how well it opened bottles. My first impression was that the bottom lip was too rounded to be any good. I had a few slip offs but nothing out of the normal. I quickly and easily popped off caps once I got used to the shape of it. I Held it with my thumb in the hollow of the spork.
Other Functions
I went around using the flat head screw driver on things around the apartment. It worked great for everything it would fit in. Things like light switch plates and what not worked great. You can get some good torque on it. I used the screwdriver tip as a pry bar to open a paint can and it worked great. I think using it as a pry bar might be my favorite function to keep from using, and breaking, knife tips. I looked around and didn’t have any bolts to test it on.
Conclusion
For five bucks I know have an EDC bottle opener, Spork and Screwdriver/Pry Bar. Good enough for me. It was the best combination of the price/Functionality equation. It was smaller and lighter than some options. It passes initial test of approval and I’ll continue to run it in my EDC system to see how it performs. While also working on designs of one to fill all my needs.
What do you carry to open bottles? Why did you choose it and how does it work? Let me know in the comments.
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