I was making a little tool today from the spring from a binder clip. I heated it cherry red, and then bent it and filed it into shape. I then brought it to cherry red and quenched it. That made it so hard it just snapped off so I made another, brought it to cherry red, quenched it then polished it with 1000 grit sandpaper and heated it to straw yellow. It worked really good, nice and springy, but hard, but it was just a hair too long.
And that brings us to the old Fuller 192-5 Japanese needle nose pliers i found in a grab bag of tools from the thrift store. I squeezed the pliers way harder than I should have and I wouldn't cut through. So being stupid I lined up on the grove from the last attempt and squeezed really hard. It STILL wouldn't cut through. Then I realized I was being an idiot and was destroying a perfectly good set of pliers.
But when I looked at the edges of the blades, nothing. No chips. No big holes. Perfect. And that's the point of my long winded story. These things are not just ok. They are really good. The metal wire was tempered a bit from the quenched state, but was still hard to cut through and was hard enough that it snapped off cleanly at the groove they cut in rather than bending or deforming, and was in fact so hard I had to clean it up with a diamond file because the normal one wouldn't cut. But the cutting blade of the pliers wasn't damaged at all. Im impressed.
And that brings us to the old Fuller 192-5 Japanese needle nose pliers i found in a grab bag of tools from the thrift store. I squeezed the pliers way harder than I should have and I wouldn't cut through. So being stupid I lined up on the grove from the last attempt and squeezed really hard. It STILL wouldn't cut through. Then I realized I was being an idiot and was destroying a perfectly good set of pliers.
But when I looked at the edges of the blades, nothing. No chips. No big holes. Perfect. And that's the point of my long winded story. These things are not just ok. They are really good. The metal wire was tempered a bit from the quenched state, but was still hard to cut through and was hard enough that it snapped off cleanly at the groove they cut in rather than bending or deforming, and was in fact so hard I had to clean it up with a diamond file because the normal one wouldn't cut. But the cutting blade of the pliers wasn't damaged at all. Im impressed.