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That’s some knife

ORANGEBURG: You would not want to use it to carve a turkey, but if you need to push a cuticle, measure a tyre tread, clean a golf club or adjust a bicycle spoke, this is the knife for you.

A Swiss Army knife that weighs nearly 1.4 kg has been inducted into the 2008 edition of Guinness World Records for “most functions on a penknife.” At the time, the knife had 85 tools; the latest version has 87 tools and at least 115 uses, according to the American distributor that announced the induction.

“Basically, they took every implement they ever put in a Swiss Army knife and combined them in this one piece,” said a spokeswoman.

The bristling behemoth has a dozen or so blades, saws and cutters; a dozen or so screwdrivers; and the toothpicks, key rings, magnifiers, fish scalers and nail files sometimes found on combination penknives.

But it also includes a laser pointer and a flashlight. And it has a wrench just for the spikes on a golf shoe; a tool just to open the case of a watch; and a screwdriver specifically for gunsights.

For the extremely avid gardener, there are four different blades for grafting one plant onto another: the grafting blade with a hooked end, the grafting blade with a narrow belly, the standard grafting blade without a belly and the narrow grafting blade without a belly. The “belly” is a bulge along the blade, said a company spokesman.

The knife, manufactured by Wenger in Switzerland, looks like a bunch of different pocket knives placed side-by-side and soldered together. At 22 cm by 8 cm, it is big for most pockets. And at $1,200 (about Rs. 48,000), it is pretty much a collector’s item, but 450 pieces have been sold in its first year.

On the Net, the company, Wenger North America, is at http://www.wengerna.com Guinness World Records is at http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com — AP

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