I carry a plastic spork from Light My Fire when I’m backpacking, and it’s long enough to reach the bottom of the pot. Even it has more features than I need–I’ve never needed the fork on the trail, and the serrated edge on one side of the fork just makes it uncomfortable to hold while stirring.
This CRKT model wouldn’t do me any good. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t even be long enough to reach the bottom of my lexan cup. And I’ve never needed any of the other items on the trail. And it’s hard to imagine where I would encounter a hex bolt with enough clear space around it to use this spork. The outline of this spork basically forms a triangle, which means there’s always a corner jutting out to stop rotation of the wrench.
CRKT rolls out a lot of designs like this. They’re clever about cramming things into a piece of flat steel, then calling it a multi-tool. The SpareTool is a good example. It includes the ubiquitous hex wrenches and bottle opener, a pry-bar, and a removable screwdriver bit that you use with the hex wrench. But in practice, the screwdriver bit just slides through the hex-hole, so it’s somewhere on the spectrum between tricky and useless. The bottle opener is almost cutting-sharp, and imperils your hand when using the knife blade. The knife-blade is chisel-ground, so it’s good for some tasks but not others. And the pry-bar… I never encountered a task where it was the right solution.
These things are gimmicky enough and cheap enough that people think, “What the heck, I’ll give it a try.” And when they find out that these are useless for almost every task, their low cost makes them easy to set aside. I guess there’s no penalty for flawed design with products like this.
