gerber dime review
Chris Maxcer

Gerber Dime Review: Great Price-to-Value Ratio

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Our Gerber Dime review is pretty straightforward: The Gerber Dime offers one of the best values for a small-sized keychain multitool going today. It contains most of the tools you might need on a daily basis, and better yet, you can usually find it at a sweet sub-$25 price point.

The Gerber Dime is designed first and foremost to fit the keychain multitool niche, but it’s also suitable as a small everyday carry (EDC) multitool.

The Gerber Dime Review

The built-in pliers are stainless steel and are spring-loaded. They have built-in wire cutters, as well as textured bite surfaces suitable for grabbing and turning small nuts. The end of the pliers has a slightly different sort of design — instead of textured tips, the Gerber Dime uses two flat edges. They come together with enough precision that I can see using them like tweezers to remove slivers.

Even so, the Dime includes a set of small slide-out tweezers.

In the closed position, the Gerber Dime has a flathead screwdriver and a flat, edged “crosshead” driver, which is like half of a phillips screwdriver bit. It works all right, but for serious multitool needs, it doesn’t work as well as the more dedicated phillips heads you get in full-size multitools.

The Gerber Dime includes three cutting tools: a standard knife with a utilitarian design, spring-loaded scissors, and a tiny-but-stout blade designed to safely cut and score plastic packaging.

The knife and scissors do what you expect them to, but this new packaging-oriented blade is at first confusing, but once you put it to work, it’s surprisingly handy. Basically, anytime you run into that nasty and thick clear product packaging, you don’t have to dull your knife blade to cut it open. The packaging tool breaks through the plastic then lets you drag a slice through it. It works pretty well out of the gate, but if you know what you’re doing, you can hit it with a sharpening stone to give it a sharper edge. Think of it like a box cutter for tape and plastic.

Depending on who you are, the always-open bottle opener might be the best feature of the Gerber Dime. Sure, most guys I know can figure out how to get a bottle of beer open without a dedicated bottle opener, but we also would just rather open the bottle and get on with hanging out and having a good time.

Check pricing on the Gerber Dime at Amazon.

Gerber Dime Review: Fit and Finish

green gerber dime keychain multitool
The Gerber Dime comes in a variety of colors at a compelling price point.

The Gerber Dime comes in Black, Green, Red, or Purple . . . except the Green and Red versions only sport color on one half of the handle. The other half is black. Overall, the fit-and-finish is pretty solid. All of the action coming out of the box is pretty tight, but it loosens up with use — and a dab of oil if you have some handy.

The fit-and-finish and overall design has some pros and cons. First, functionally, the tools work great for their sizes, and the overall build quality is fantastic for the cost.

On the downside, the cool-looking design of the handle the near pliers end results in the handles colliding with one another when you open the pliers (but don’t touch when you close the pliers). This creates little scuff marks on the finish. Other multitool designs avoid this by having completely rounded ends, but Gerber seems to have chosen this design in favor of the more visually appealing closed look.

Either way, if you use the Gerber Dime on your keyring, it’s going to get scratched up. I count this as a minor annoyance — one that I’m willing to overlook when I find the Gerber Dime on sale for less than $20.

Gerber Dime Review: A Keychain Multitool Contender

All-in-all, the Gerber Dime is a solid contender for a spot on your keychain, and if you want a good multitool you can trust for light multitool work, especially at a compelling price point, it’s easy to recommend the Dime. If you just want a small and lightweight multitool EDC knife, the Dime is also a good choice. (For other small EDC options, check out our Gear Guide: 22 Best EDC Knives for the Money.”)

The Gerber Dime weighs 2.2 oz and is 2.75″ long when closed.

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