Leatherman tools come with a 25-year warranty, which is 100 times longer than Harbor Freight’s 90-day warranty. Is that a win?
(We’ve seen some claims online that the Gordon multi-tool has a lifetime warranty; Harbor Freight’s PR team told us that it’s only 90 days, either in-store or online.)
Here’s one way to think about it: A warranty is like a type of insurance, and in this case the insurance essentially triples the cost of the Leatherman Wave in comparison with the Gordon 20-in-1, an equally useful tool. Leatherman is, in a sense, pricing in the cost of all future repairs and replacements for anyone who buys a Wave.
Some owners will use the warranty often enough to get their money’s worth within 25 years, but the nature of insurance and warranties is that most people will not. Will you use the tool hard enough to be one of those winners?
And how confident are you that the warranty will be honored in that 25-year period? Leatherman has a great reputation, so you can probably feel pretty secure in that regard, but there’s no such thing as a guarantee. You’re also on the hook for shipping costs if you need to send the tool back to Leatherman for a repair or replacement.
After 15 years as a professional product reviewer, I’ve seen too many warranties go unhonored to believe that they’re worth paying extra for, personally. The way I look at it, insurance is a necessary evil to guard against a financial calamity. A broken multi-tool does not fall into that category. If I need to replace the Gordon 20-in-1 in a few years, I’ll be cranky, but I won’t miss a mortgage payment.
A fair counterargument is that the Leatherman Wave could be worth the premium if it’s more durable than the Gordon 20-in-1 and you rely on it as part of your livelihood, or out on the trail, or in any other scenario where it’s a big problem if your multi-tool fails.
We know for sure that Leatherman makes very reliable products. But we won’t have a good sense of the Gordon multi-tool’s durability for quite a while—it came out only in May 2024. I can’t find any obvious reasons to believe that it’s a throwaway, though. Doug and other experienced multi-tool reviewers haven’t been able to identify any concerns with the Gordon model’s design or build quality. Such flaws might exist, but it’s nothing obvious.
A handful of reviews on the Harbor Freight site claim that the Gordon model’s pliers snapped after light use. This could be a design flaw, or it could be a quality-control problem on limited units; we don’t know. Looser quality control is a reliable way for manufacturers to keep the cost of production down. Several Amazon reviewers have claimed that the pliers on their Wave broke, too, so the pricier tool isn’t immune from problems, either.
