I saw that pic earlier in this thread and wondered how / where you got the cool brass driver, Holzinger258. I'm sure I'm not the only one with "driver envy" over it. Brilliant. It looks really good and gave me the idea of buying brass key blanks to file down. I understand your reluctance to use the Colt tool - the largest driver is too small, it's likely not going to be softer than the screws, and it'll get in the way on the lanyard (large size likely for advertising). Both the freezer key and a key blank are prettier than the 1 cent solution, but neither are as cheap and easy to come by. I've been looking into a custom punch to make penny drivers, but while they would make construction a cinch, they are astronomically expensive compared to the current recipe.

Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I'm hoping the 1 cent driver solves the problem for some folks here of getting into your 17 in the field. In my world-view, in a survival situation, whatever you have on your person is what you've got. IMHO any driver solution has to be on the 17's lanyard. That puts it on the knife's "person," so to speak. In that case, if you have the knife, you have the driver to open / close the handle. This is one reason I like the 18's screw-off cap - no need for a driver. And as much as I love a full tang, in my experience, the 18 is one tough knife. An advantage the 17 has with a driver on a lanyard is that a wounded / malfunctioning / frozen hand can fumble / drop the driver and it just hangs there waiting to be picked up again (we've all been there). If you drop the 18's cap you may have a problem. For all you astronauts out there, IMHO that's an advantage over the 18 except the problem of screws floating away in zero-g... don't laugh, this is *the* spot on the net to find out everything about the 17. I still like my 18, but I'm not likely to be going into space with it any time soon :-)