List is full at this point at 14 pairs of pliers. Well, I guess if somebody wants to send me something to add they can PM me for shipping details. As it were, I've already spent around 300 bucks on a tool type I already owned several of and felt well served by!
One that would be of academic interest, but not interesting enough to spend my own 35 bucks on: Vietnamese Wiha 32808 to compare with my excellent Swiss pair.
Totally understand.
And yeah, I just recently got several of the new Vietnamese Wiha pliers (but not the 8-inch needle-nose), and I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality. The outsourcing of manufacturing is usually a cost-savings move that comes with a reduction in quality, but with the Wiha's, it actually seems like they put that cost savings right back into the quality of the pliers.
The finish on them, in terms of the machining around the head of the pliers, the chrome plating, and the handles, is probably some of the nicest I've seen out of all my pliers, including the Knipex and Kleins. It actually makes me wonder if the motivation for Wiha was that they wanted to step up their game and paradoxically found that the only way they could do that for a reasonable price point was to move production to Vietnam.
To go through your specific wish list:
This is all really great info, thanks for this.
Interesting idea, thanks! I have a luggage scale. I'll see what I can do. I don't have a torque gauge for your second idea, though.
The second idea can be done with the luggage scale as well. Since torque is just force multiplied by distance, the torque can be calculated using the force measured by the luggage scale.
You could affix the nut/bolt at a specific angle such that the pliers are exactly horizontal on the nut, and then pull exactly downward on the plier handles using the luggage scale until they start to slip. With the force from the scale applied at 90 degrees, the torque would just be the luggage scale measurement multiplied by the distance on the handles of the applied force from the center of the nut.
Why would you use a standard distance, though? Shouldn't the force be applied where the handles naturally direct the user's force? I'm willing to be convinced.
I completely agree. My thought is that it depends on what you're trying to test exactly.
The main reason that I suggested the standard distance is due to all the reviews I've seen where e.g. someone cuts wire with a 200mm cutter from company A, and a 180mm cutter from company B. Then they conclude that company A makes better cutters because of how much more easily they cut, ignoring the fact that physics had anything to do with it.
Assuming you have all the same sized pliers, that point is moot.
The other reason would be to isolate what you're trying to test. Gripping strength is going to be the combination of force and friction:
* The applied force will be the leverage of the force applied at the handles on the jaws of the pliers through the pivot point, minus losses due to play in the joint and flex in the arms.
* The friction between gripping surface and the part will be the result of the texture and material of the gripping surface multiplied by the surface area of the jaws that actually makes contact with the part.
I agree that you most want to test the result of all of these together with the design of the handles, and so you'd want to apply force where the pliers are designed for force to be applied.
However, the reason you might also want to test the friction in isolation, for example by controlling for applied-force-distance, would be to test the effectiveness of the knurled pattern on one pair of pliers versus the cross-hatching on another.
My suspicion is that cross-hatching reduces the gripping strength of the pliers head-on, because you're replacing some of the surface area of ridges that are perpendicular to your pulling force with ridges that are instead more parallel with your pulling force.
However, my guess is that this is a good trade-off because it probably increases the friction relative to a straight-knurled pattern as you rotate the pliers such that the pulling force is now at an angle.
In other words, I'm guessing cross-hatching is worse than straight-knurled in an ideal scenario of pulling at a zero-degree angle, but that cross-hatching is probably better in anything other than the ideal scenario.
Another way you could account for this possibility though, would simply be to perform the first test I described, where you pull the sheet metal straight out, but to also perform the test by pulling the sheet metal away from the pliers at an angle (say 30 or 45 degrees, or even 90 degrees - imagine the real-world scenario where you reach the pliers down to some part and need to pull the part outward instead of upward toward you).
Sorry, that was a really long explanation. Probably would have been easier to draw it out and take a picture than to describe.
