greetings beautiful nerds with apologies to roman mars
i love that intro i love that roman says hello beautiful nerds it's a good one so
i say hello beautiful nerds welcome to my cave i'm adam savage and i have a tool tip
in fact i have three tool tips for you today and they are all of the plier persuasion
um pliers grippers grabbers anything that you utilize with a handle like this and jaws like this
every maker ends up with dozens and dozens and dozens of different versions of these
big small for all sorts of specialty and general purposes and i am no exception in fact i have so
many i emptied out a tool cabinet and built a ladder just so i could see all of my pliers and
scissor based holding tools all in one location but today i want to call out three types of pliers
that you might not know about that have been a great boon to my ability to make things well
um the first thing that happens when you have pliers and again i'm just these are like the
herb pliers these are your basic stanley these are 84 097 stanley pliers this is like it does
not get more basic than this and everyone should have one of these probably find one just sitting
on the street they are completely ubiquitous but let's say you want to hold on to something
and you want to not mark it like on my glasses for instance if i wanted to bend the wire that's
inside the temple here i don't want to grab it with these pliers because i will mark it
well luckily eyeglass repair people had this need and thus was invented the eyeglass repair
plier so they have this metal fin here and it is faced with some uh industrial plastic like uhmw
uh or nylon or something like that uh and this allows you to grab eyeglass frames and manipulate
them slightly without marring them without marking them and without damaging them um
it is not a common thing that i need to grab something without harming it
but it happens a few times a year and thus this has become a really important uh bit of my
kit i have several different versions but these are by far my new favorites because they grab
super positively and the jaws are really really robust so eyeglass repair pliers for the win for
holding on to stuff without damaging it this is great for jewelry repair it's fabulous for
actually for fixing your glasses which i tend to do a lot actually yeah these are the chisel
now the next pair of pliers i wanted to cover are about bending stuff uh if you wanted to bend
something like this piece of coat hanger wire well the first thing you'd probably do is grab
a pair of needle nose pliers like these and you would make your bend with the needle nose pliers
and you know i look i've bent thousands probably tens of thousands of bends using
needle nose pliers over the years my leatherman also has fabulous needle
nose pliers that seem to be custom built just for the specific hardness of coat hanger wire
but one of the problems with needle nose pliers is they have these serrations on
their jaw and that gives them a proper amount of gription so that you can actually grab
something positively and affect it but if you're doing sensitive bending work like with
brass or gold wire or silver wire you don't want those serrations marking up your wire no enter
the jeweler's pliers now these look funny but the funny look is actually for a very very good reason
these steps are all different radii one two three four five six different radii
for bending here let's start with a fresh piece we'll cut that off and you can bend small radii
like that or you can bend yeah look how nice that is yeah or you can bend nice large radii
and the thing is oh look at that oh look at that that because the jaws grab so positively you don't
end up marring right because needle nose pliers they always have these needle nose pliers always
have the serrations for for the gription and that's really good for certain things but when
you're bending wire like brass wire or coat hanger wire you don't want to be marking up your wire
enter the jeweler's pliers with six different radii and a really nice positive grip these
things are an excellent addition these things are an excellent addition to your tool kit
the third pair of pliers i wanted to bring up are okay let's uh let's have a hypothetical
let's say you want to work on a little tiny screw maybe you've got to uh chamfer the bottom of it
or maybe you want to actually shave off the head and turn it into a flat head screw instead of a
cap head screw how would you hold on to it if you grabbed it with a normal pair if you grab it with
a normal pair of pliers well it can still move in those jaws no matter how tightly you grab on it
you can even get vice grips and you still won't be able to hold on to it super tightly
enter a pair of pliers purpose built for holding onto screws and they're called screw pliers
what is special about these well i open them up they they look normal they have
a wide jaw just like normal pliers do but when we look at the at the jaws
we notice they've got a space carved out of them
what what is that for i will tell you that is for grabbing and manipulating small parts
like screws look at that that is a super positive grip and if your screw is too small well you can
just go a size down here is the next size down by the same company these are made by
a company called engineer and these are the pz56 and these are the these are the pz57s
and these are the pz56s and i recommend having both sizes in your collection because when you've
got to do some work on the tip of a screw or on a tiny little part these are a fantastic
fast parts vise i can't even tell you i've been using these on an almost daily
basis since i got them and i had no idea they existed until about three years ago
yeah these screw pliers are super amazing um a lot of making is about how you grab stuff while you
want to work on it and if you had to hold on to something like this and like sand down its top and
put a slot there well i mean you could do that on a mill but like you're probably going to do that
on a belt center how are you going to hold on to it you're going to hold on to it with one of these
that does uh no matter how hard i grab i can still budge that i can still move that it's
still gonna jump out it's gonna and then i'm gonna mar the threads while i do it i mean i
can grab it this way but that doesn't give me all the freedom enter the screw plier yeah see that
i can grab the cap of this cap head screw and actually soften or manipulate or do filing on
the threads yeah these are fantastic i hope if i i hope these were useful to you um each of these
three types of pliers are so useful to me i am very glad to know about them and now you do too
thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip i will see you next time oh and sorry if
you know of any players that you haven't seen me use that i should know about please let me know