Laurence Edwards switched from a £30 Kevlar lanyard to Chinese-made retractable ones at £14.99 for two, after losing a Leatherman in the field. He compares the materials and construction, likes how they feel, but won't endorse them until he tests them for a year.
One of the number one questions I get asked on my YouTube channel is, where do I get my retractable lanyard from? Well, I've gone and bought myself a new pack of retractable lanyards, and I think they're going to replace my old lanyard design. In this video, I'm going to give you the full rundown. So the reason I've gone out and bought myself some new lanyards is completely non-related to my hive tool. I lost my Leatherman. Absolutely devastated that I went out and lost my Leatherman because I needed it the other day and it wasn't where I left it. So what I've gone and done is I've bought myself a new Leatherman tool. I bought myself 3 Leatherman tools. I will do reviews on those on future videos, so if you're interested in those, definitely hit the subscribe button. But what I needed at the same time was some new lanyards, and the old design, I couldn't find it on Amazon or it wasn't in stock. I think it might actually be back in stock now, but I saw another one on there that had very, very good reviews, so I thought I'd give it a go. And I've had a play around with these lanyards for the weekend. And they look very, very good. And the big thing about them is as well, they are so, so much cheaper than the previous version. So I'll link you out to the old lanyard at the end of this video. It's a very good lanyard. I've had mine for about 3 years. It's made of Kevlar fiber on the actual retractable extension piece here, and it's still going really, really well after 3 years. But it is about £30. However, these ones here, they're 2 for £14.99. So even if I break them after a year or 2, I'd have to get through 4 over that same period of time— double-checking the maths— in order for them to be better value. So I thought I'd check these new ones out, and I'm really, really glad I did because they look very, very good indeed. So this is how they come in the packet: 2 retractable lanyards, freshly made in China. But you know what, they're really, really good. I'm so happy with these. So what you get is a retractable clip like that, or a locking clip like that, Really nice and strong. That's all made of metal there, and then elements of this here are made of plastic. Definitely a little bit cheaper than the other one. But what I really like here is that the fact that this piece here is metal, it's woven metal, that is going to last for a long, long time without snapping. And okay, the spring might go, the mechanism might go, and I'm not endorsing these at the moment because I don't know how good they're going to be. But from my first play around with it, I think they're really nice. I can't actually see where they would break. I'm kind of having to go like this. They seem really good. If you've not seen my videos before, what I like to do is kind of put them on my waist bit like that in my pocket, and then I just have them hanging around. And then I've always got my hive tool that I can use, and it's ready, and I never leave it anywhere. That's the big reason that I started using these retractable lanyards, because I'd go through like 20 or 30 hive tools a year, and then I'd pick them all up in the winter when the grass died down a little bit. I'd never go back to not having a retractable lanyard hive tool because I think they're so useful. And It's really the lanyard bit that was letting me down with all the original ones. They were so weak, so flimsy, whereas this one here seems to be very, very good. I'm quite happy with it. I will update this in like a year's time. Like I said, I'm not endorsing it now. I'm not saying go out, buy this one here, it's the best one, it's not going to break. Might break in a week's time, and then I would look very foolish indeed. But it's got really good reviews on Amazon, very, very high scoring on Amazon. People seem to rate it well. And from my first impressions, I think that's going to last a long, long time. So I'll stick the link up if you want to have a look at it, you can. But if it breaks, don't come back to me saying it broke and you said it was good. I've not tried and tested it yet, but you will see this in lots of videos because I'm going to use this for my Leatherman. So I'm either going to have it here or I might have it a little bit lower down as well, like that. I've got 2 different Leathermans coming and I'm going to rely on these to keep the Leathermans close by so that I can use them without having to stick them in any pockets, because that's when I found I lose them. 25-year warranty on Leatherman products is no good if you keep on losing them in the long grass. So retractable lanyard hopefully is going to fix that job for me. I will update this review in a year's time.
