Do You Need a Dedicated Knife If Your Multitool Has a Blade?
The post included a photo of a Leatherman Wave+ with a bronze pocket clip and a question that gets to the heart of EDC loadouts: if your multitool has an easily accessible blade, why carry a dedicated knife as well? The poster grew up carrying both, still does regularly, but has lately been using the Leatherman blade as the knife it was designed to be.
His reasoning is about attention. Treating the multitool blade as a backup he never used meant babying it, while treating it as the knife meant actually cutting with it. Once that switch happened, the second knife in the pocket looked less like insurance and more like weight. That is a common trajectory for anyone who has carried both for years.
The replies supported it with their own history. One owner said the whole reason he moved to a Skeletool was to stop carrying both, having realised that ninety percent of his multitool use was pliers and a screwdriver, and that the Skeletool covered nearly all of it. Others confirmed the Skeletool blade is genuinely good and that the bit driver earns its place. The dissenting note was practical: the tool would be perfect with scissors.
The case for carrying both still exists, and it is about what a multitool blade is not. It is usually shorter, thinner and ground for utility rather than for sustained cutting, and the handle ergonomics are compromised by the folded plier arms. For cardboard, food or rope in volume, a dedicated folder is simply a better cutter, and no amount of convenience changes the geometry. One reply described carrying a Benchmade Adamas for exactly that reason, with the multitool in a back pocket for jobs that do not need the bigger knife.
The verdict depends on your cutting volume. If your knife use is a few packages and some cord a day, the multitool blade is enough and the pocket space is better spent on something else. If you cut for length, a dedicated folder still earns its place, and the pairing works best when the two tools are chosen to be different rather than redundant: a substantial folder and a light plier-based tool, not two medium knives.