MORE THAN A TOOL : SWISS ARMY KNIFE HAS MADE ITS MARK.

Byline: Jeremy Bagott Daily News Staff Writer

In 1992, an adventurer strolling through a snow-covered clearing in Scandinavia plunged into the freezing waters of a pond after what he mistook for solid ground gave way beneath him.

Keeping his head, the Finlander extracted a shopworn Swiss Army knife from his pocket, popped out one of its screwdriver attachments and jabbed it into the ice in front of him. Using it as a pick, he pulled himself back onto a thicker section, saving his neck.

A year later, Donald Wyman, a heavy-equipment operator in Pennsylvania, was saved thanks to a similar knife. He used it to amputate his own leg after it had been crushed by a log, trapping him in a remote wood in teeth-chattering temperatures.

Another man used one of the blades to cut himself free of the burning wreckage of his light plane.

That such an innocuous - almost comic - pocket whatchamacallit could inspire lofty testimonials and, at the same time, disgorge a woolly bugger from the maw of a Dolly Varden trout or handle the field extraction of a cork from a bottle of Barolo, speaks highly of the Swiss Army's procurement savvy. Pentagon, take heed.

The uses of the knife are fabled enough, but less known is that four knife manufacturers have been vying for years to carve out a chunk of the market.

Continuing to evolve, the familiar red knife - with versions made by Victorinox, Wenger, Imperial Schrade and Buck - has been improved in recent models with such gadgets as a retracting pointer, a divot replacer, a sailor's shackle key, a ski-wax scraping tool and even a tracheotomy blade. Indeed, a tracheotomy was performed with one aboard a U.S. Air flight a few years back.

But the knife may always be seen by a certain segment of macho outdoorsmen as, well, falling short in the masculinity department, possibly having to do with the neutral nature of the fighting force from which it derives its name.

This link to the Swiss non-pugilistic past might be best illustrated in a stanza recited recently at a local outdoors show by a wistful-looking fellow in a fishing cap:

Its tools are strong, tempered and true,

Its case, bright and rubious,

But would the Swiss win a war with it,

Is a point altogether dubious.

Of its four makers, only Victorinox and Wenger, based in the cantons of Schwyz and Jura, respectively, carry the Swiss pedigree - each having supplied Switzerland's National Guard-style army with 50 percent of its utility knives since 1908.

America's Buck and Schrade are two fairly recent entries onto the Swiss knife scene. The Bucks carry Wenger blades and the Schrades feature German stainless steel.

A nice thing about Victorinox's Fisherman is its unique fishhook remover. But sadly - tragically, some would say - the corkscrew has been sacrificed on it, as it has on Buck's FishTale.

Differences between the brands are often subtle - Wenger employs a springless scissors; Schrade, a one-piece tweezers; and Buck, a more formidable handle.

Some of the models contain implements that may only seldom - if ever - come into play, such as tool that removes cotton wads from aspirin bottles.

When one of the big models, like the Wenger Tool Chest Plus or Victorinox's SwissChamp, is unearthed by a team of archeologists in some civilization yet to be born, one feels sorry for the guy tasked with figuring out the use of the cotton-ball remover.

CAPTION(S):

Drawing

Drawing: no caption (man in lake holding Swiss Army Knife )