How a Ratty Old Fiat Helped Inspire the Leatherman Tool

I got my first Leatherman tool in 1996 when I graduated from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. A few years later, I somehow convinced my mother I needed another one. I still have both, my original Super Tool and the later Wave variant, complete with mini Maglite flashlight in a combo holster. Both live in a backpack that comes with me on every MotorTrend road trip and event, along with other essentials, just in case. I didn't know it when I got the tools, nor did I know it when I started at MotorTrend, but I had a rusty old Fiat to thank for these do-it-all tools.

"Our nickname for that Fiat was the Little Monster," company founder and CEO Tim Leatherman said in an interview with MotorTrend.

Yes, there really is a Mr. Leatherman. It's not just a clever name for an outdoorsy tool.

The story begins just before the Fiat enters the picture. Leatherman and his wife, Chau, had graduated college and decided to see the world.

"It was a budget trip," Leatherman said. "It was a sort of a 'What are we going to do with the rest of our lives?' trip. We wanted to see different cultures. See how life was under different cultures and different political systems."

The original plan had been to backpack and hitchhike across Europe, but that didn't last long.

"When we got to England, my wife had a friend there who loaned us a car," he said. "We were able to borrow her car to drive through the United Kingdom. It was quite nice. We decided that having a car would be nicer than using buses and trains and whatnot.

"When on these budget trips to Europe, the young people seem to network with each other," he continued. "Somehow we found out that Amsterdam was the easiest place and the best place for foreigners to buy a car."

After a few days sightseeing in the Dutch capital, the Leathermans began looking in earnest for a car they could afford.

"We were actively searching for a car," Leatherman said. "We checked out used car lots. We checked out newspaper ads. One night we'd kind of just given up our search for the day. We were walking along the street, and we saw a car parked there with a 'for sale' sign in the window. It was this Fiat 600D."

The Fiat 600 is often mistaken for the better known 500, which came out two years later. The slightly larger 600 was also rear-engine, but with a water-cooled design. The 600D model was introduced in 1964, nine years after the 600 first went on sale, and featured refinements such as front-hinged doors and a 4-horsepower bump to a whopping 28 hp.

"I've got quite a bit of documentation on it," Leatherman, an inveterate note keeper, said. "It was a 1969 Fiat 600D. We bought it in 1975. We think we bought it from the original owner. At that time, they used guilders in Holland. He wanted 875 guilders. We ended up paying him 800. In dollars—I have the exchange rate from that period—that was $302."

Adjusted for inflation, that's just over $1,500 today. Priced at roughly $7,300 when new, this 6-year-old car had seen better days.

"It was not in perfect condition," he said. "We kept a diary during the trip. The diary entry says that shortly after I bought it, I had to fix the brake lights and do some other work on the car. But the basic car itself, it worked.

"I do remember some repairs: some electrical issues, radiator hoses, working with the heating system, loose screws and nuts, making adjustments on the carburetor. Probably the biggest problem during our trip was that we were in Eastern Europe going down through ... I think we were in Bulgaria. At that time there were no services. [It was] very difficult to find any services of any kind. I looked to my right and I noticed my wife was getting shorter. We did a little bit of investigation, it turned out that the undercarriage of the car had rusted, and her seat was settling through the car, going down toward the pavement.

"We couldn't find anyone to do any welding on the car, so we just moved my wife to the back seat. But then when we crossed the border into Turkey, there was a kid with an oxy-acetylene tank on almost every street corner, so we stopped and got one of the kids to weld up the seat. My wife was able to move to the front."

While hand tools couldn't have fixed the rust, those that Leatherman had on hand weren't great for fixing the car, either, nor were they ideal for fixing bad plumbing at the cheap hostels and pensions where they were staying.

"I had some basic tools in the car, and during the trip, I was carrying a Boy Scout-type knife, which is fine for what it did," he said. "But there were often times when I wished I had a pair of pliers. As I say, that was a 'What are we going to do with the rest of our lives?' trip. So I was actually taking notes of ideas as I thought of them. One of my notes in essence says, 'Add pliers to a Boy Scout knife.' When we returned from that trip, that's the project I decided to undertake."

What Leatherman thought would take a month to develop into a working prototype took three years. Chau supported them financially while he worked out of her brother's garage perfecting the first multitool, which he called "Mr. Crunch." Armed with a patent and a prototype, Leatherman went about trying to sell his invention, only to spend the next three and a half years opening rejection letters.

Seriously dismayed by his failure to sell his rechristened "Pocket Survival Tool," Leatherman was ready to throw in the towel before his college friend Steve Berliner stepped in to lend a hand. (Berliner is the co-founder of the Leatherman Tool Group and currently serves as secretary and treasurer to the board.) In late May 1983, the Leatherman Tool Company received an order out of the blue from outdoor retailer Cabela's for 500 Pocket Survival Tools. From that $12,000 order, a company was born. It has gone on to introduce more than 30 models sold in roughly 80 countries worldwide.

Always the DIYer, Leatherman himself has used his own creations to repair the cars that came after the Fiat.

"I am a little bit of a legend, I guess, within my company for wanting to keep my cars as long as possible," he said. "The car I had before the one I have now was a 1988 Nissan Stanza Wagon. I bought it used in 1990. It had 20,000 miles on it. I managed to continue to drive it for 20 years before it finally gave up the ghost [at] 120,000 miles.

"[I fixed] the usual types of things: loose screws, loose nuts. I remember once the handle was coming off the gear shifter. I used a Leatherman tool to screw it back in and get it tight so I could continue to drive the car.

"I remember once my wife and I went up into Washington [from our home in Portland]," he continued. "We were coming back late in the evening and there was a snowstorm, so we had put on chains. One of the chains broke. It was a cable chain, and it had wrapped itself around the tire. It was really bad conditions. What I was able to do to extricate ourselves from the situation was, take the Leatherman tool, get down on the ground, reach way up under the car and use the wire cutters to try to cut the cable. I succeeded. That was one of the few times I've overused the tools to do that, so the tool suffered a little bit. But we were able to cut the chain, and we were able to continue our journey home."

He's far from the only one to fix a car with a Leatherman tool. The company keeps an archive of letters they call "Tool Tales," testimonials from owners. Among them are stories like the man on safari in Africa who fixed the distributor on the guide's van while lions watched, or the traveler visiting the Philippines who effectively rebuilt his junky rental car's electrical system. There are also numerous stories of people whose cars ended up sinking in freezing water, run off a road into a river, or falling through a frozen lake, who used their Leatherman tools to cut seat belts, break windows, and as makeshift icepicks to pull themselves and their spouses out of the water.

And what about the old Fiat? Unfortunately, it didn't get a happy ending like those Leatherman owners.

"We drove it 20,000 kilometers [more than 12,400 miles] over a period of seven months," Leatherman said. "We drove it all the way to Tehran, Iran, and back. We had come back from Iran. Had crossed Turkey again. Had gone up through Yugoslavia. Taken the ferry over to Italy. We were driving along in Italy, minding our own business. We noticed a car coming toward us from our left. The car ran a stoplight, crashed into us, and ended up totaling the car. We were pretty shaken up. Pretty sore the next day and had headaches. But other than that, we came out of it all right.

"We actually had insurance on the car. After the accident we filed a claim, and the insurance company settled with us for 265,000 Lira. I have the exchange rate at that time, it was $300 and some cents. So we were able to drive for seven months in Europe, over 20,000 kilometers, for $2."

To hear more about the Leatherman story and hear testimonials from customers who credit their lives to their tools, watch this short documentary on YouTube.