How to Use Pliers as a Tool

On behalf of tvlesson.com, I'm Steve Anthony, a carpenter here in South Florida. In this clip in shoptools101, we’re going to talk a little bit about the variety of pliers that are available to you. Most people think of pliers, this is what they think of, this is your most common everyday variety of pliers use for gripping, twisting. It also has an ability for it adjust to open a little wider. For those larger projects, you can clamp onto a piece of pipe with that quite easily.

But there are many different types of pliers in addition to this. This one, you may have seen before. This is electrical pliers. It’s used very often by electricians for crimping wires together. It also has wire cutter built-in to this as you can see right here. Be careful with that. Keep your fingers clear. It can pinch quite nastily. So electrician’s pliers, it’s very handy to have around the shop. And channel locks are also very versatile especially for getting into tight areas. As you can see the channel lock, it is so named because it locks into a channel to make the jaw wider. Open it all the way, slide the lock open, now you can clamp onto a larger pipe. They came into variety of sizes as well. So you can get a lot done with a couple of channel locks around the shop.

Now very specialized pliers are known as vice script. Now these particular guys, you set the depth of the jaw with this screw at the end and when you have that set, it clamps on and lock into place. As you can see, these are held on by this grip and push the lever down here to release. And as I mentioned, you have depth guide settings. And here we have a couple of different sizes of needle nose pliers, good for getting working on small projects, getting into tight areas, available in many different sizes. And a very versatile tool called the diagonal side cutter also known as dikes. Good for prying up nails, loose nails and wood, also for cutting wire and small bits of plastic tubing.

So there are some of the pliers that you might want to have in your shop if you're putting together tool set. On behalf of tvlesson.com, this has been Steve Anthony. Thanks for watching.