Diagonal Cutting Plier (6")

Six inches is the general electrical and electronics size, and its main work is cutting wire and cable to length, trimming conductor ends, snipping cable ties, cutting the tails off crimped terminals, and cutting small pins and nails flush.

The word flush is worth pausing on. Because the cutting edges sit close to the outer face of the jaws, this tool can be laid flat against a surface and cut a protruding wire almost level with it. On a circuit board, a terminal block or a finished assembly, that is exactly what you want and no other tool does it as neatly.

The spring open design pushes the jaws apart after every cut, so a run of fifty cable ties takes fifty squeezes rather than fifty squeezes and fifty pulls. The jaws are fine carbon steel, hardened, with two-colour anti-slip PP handles — hardening being the specification that matters most on a cutter, because a soft edge dents on the first hard wire and thereafter crushes instead of cutting.

The buyers are electricians and electronics technicians, auto-electricians, appliance and equipment repairers, panel builders, general maintenance, and hardware dealers.

One thing destroys these faster than everything else combined, and it is worth stating plainly: cutting the wrong material. Hardened steel — spring steel, piano wire, nails, screws, hardened bolts and steel strapping — is harder than the cutting edges, and attempting them chips a notch out of the jaw. That notch is permanent, and thereafter every cut through that part of the edge fails. Use bolt cutters or an end cutter for hardened material and keep these for copper, aluminium and mild steel wire. Cut with the wire well back in the jaws where the leverage is greatest rather than at the tips, and keep the pivot oiled. Ask on WhatsApp for a price, or for the 8" for heavier cable.