Best EDC Pliers for Daily Pocket Carry: Snap On or Knipex or Knipex or Knipex or Knipex? Knipex Wins

howdy folks doc here with last best tool and the question today is what is the best pocket tool for everyday carry or edc and there are a lot of different philosophies on this and what i've done is i've carried a bunch of these actually each one of them just a little bit to see some more than others because it was obvious whether or not it had use but what i want to do is address why i chose one over all of the others and why i recommend that as a general edc tool now all of the tools listed or shown here have a good edc value some more than others now first of all with edc there there tends to be a couple of uh kind of general criteria that that make it more edc compared to other tools you know a larger wrench or something now uh the absolute largest thing probably considered edc is would be a leatherman or some multi-tool but this is this is way bigger than what i'm talking about um a few of the traits of edc tools tend to be that they are fairly smooth uh streamlined sometimes we call them melted features they tend to slide in and out of a pocket without any trouble very useful now a pocket knife and a flashlight to me are classic edc's and uh i always have a knife with me and anytime i think that there's a chance i may end up needing a flashlight one of those is with me so then this would supplement that now um this to me i carried this for man i don't know 20 years probably look at that this is the unofficial olympic boot of 1988. that's when i got this um i used to ski race and we'd always get little perks but what this is is an actual swiss army victorinox swiss army tool because reichley was a ski boot brand uh from switzerland and and i loved this thing and it did great i moved up to this one probably in the in the 90s i liked it this is an orange peeler that actually came in really handy a good solid knife then you know i started moving to more specific tools this is my latest favorite small edc carry but there are some others like this guy here has got a rubber coating and that can be desirable in some cases especially you know it's if you're using it and your hands are wet or slippery or covered you've gotten a fish and they're covered in blood or something but generally edc tools we don't like a grippy surface and that's because most of the time they're riding around in our pocket they're sliding in and out we want a smooth tool other popular edc tools pens a lot of people have carry a pen notice it's got nice smooth melted features so it easily slides in and out of a of your pocket so let's take a look at some of these tools lightweight that comes with being small i'm going to eliminate wrenches right away unless your your i don't know your daily use of a tool pretty much is always a wrench that's that's going to be too limited in my book even adjustable wrenches this is a fun one but and a great one to play around with little heavy but not quite an edc so that narrows it down to stuff like this some of the utility knives are really going after that edc size smooth designed to slide in and out of a pocket or in this case a money clip a lot of people carry small screwdrivers that works as well but i'm going to talk about these guys right in here this one is very useful and for most of us we are you know we grew up using adjustable wrenches so we can do an awful lot with them but i think that's a little on the limiting side mainly it's a tool for doing what it's designed for what i'm looking at is what all can we do with a tool besides just the stuff that it was made for um vice grips a lot of people think these are very handy in the small size i could see that you know obviously the tool side but you know maybe you need to clamp an artery you don't have a tourniquet handy so you know reach in and use this instead of a hemostat probably not the best but it's going to work better than these unless you you know wrap a rubber band around the handle this might be the best one for it to mimic a hemostat but for other things you know basically i narrowed it to these this was my go-to for quite a while till i got more into the canipex this is a great general tool it does have really grippy handles now that's what you want with a tool but not necessarily with an edc tool so the grippy handles canipex this one also this is most grippy this is medium and then for a vinyl dipped handle this is pretty smooth so i would say this doesn't even count as really a grippy handle in our edc concern it slides in and out of the pocket just fine now these two are fairly large these two are small i've got a plier this is the plier wrench the standard cobra plier wrench cobra this snap-on it's it's great i it's a little big now um compared to the others and it's a little bit limiting believe it or not even though it does have a fairly large mouth there you can see it's so it's really handy if i thought that that was kind of the direction i was going to go otherwise i've narrowed it down to these now the problem here is this is a smooth parallel jaw so it works really well very similar to this smooth parallel jaws does what it's supposed to beautifully but it doesn't do a lot of other things so i can't grip stuff imagine i'm trying to grip a wooden dowel or some other material that's not you know a flat sided bolt or nut so this does have some limitations and it's got another advantage though that i will show you when i compare these two this is a little grippy i mentioned that's a little bigger what's my benefit i'm going to get about a 33 percent longer handle which translates pretty much into a 33 percent greater amount of force that i could apply if i you know move out to the edges here but do i really need that in other words does this have enough of a handle for the kind of work that it'll be doing i think so notice this there is a huge difference in thickness of of the fighting end of this the business end i like the thinner end now this is great for really gripping bolts but this is great when you move away from just grabbing bolts to other things like operating uh like tweezers and to test that you know i might put it up against something like this this is a kind of a hard paper comes with the milwaukee pack outs so i'm gonna just barely bite that hold down here and yank and then inspect what it did it made a fairly clean cut there what about this guy nice that one worked well plier wrenches they also uh let's move over here got to make sure i've got it in the smallest setting you can see that other things you like if i compare it to these snap-ons not bad let's try one here maybe you'll see a little bit better that is really gripping it strong little uneven on that one vice grips uneven um can't really do it with those so this one has a lot of use for really small precise tasks so i can do quite a bit with this thing that um i would consider edc tasks if i needed to get to hold something very precise to dig a sliver out uh to work with um with fabrics things like that i can actually do that with this uh the wide opening this one does go wider but that's generally not where i'm expecting to use use this tool so yes it does go wider but that's uh maybe the couple percent um i'm if this is not going to open up a fire ho or a fire hydrant you know it's i don't know maybe i should go try it i i just don't think i've got the strength here and the size so i didn't really lose that there i don't think i can operate any large large plumbing devices with this thing but i will probably have it in my pocket because it's lighter it's smaller it's smoother it blends in i tend to carry it in this direction face down sliding forward this tends to work fairly well you can hold it almost anyway in your pocket it doesn't seem to have an orientation other things kind of need an orientation and the other thing i found is i was much faster to use this just simply because of the way it was designed this even though it's as simple as a button that requires a little bit more dexterity and sometimes when you're using these things for other things other jobs you know like whatever it is it's just so much easier to use this arrangement so that makes it a lot faster which means you're more likely to grab it and pull it out of your pocket and use it this one is great i think it's too limited it's definitely a small tool kit winner so you want to keep that so if i had to order these guys it's probably what you're waiting for um this is my first number one i think that's a great edc plier the next step would be this one uh the next would probably be this followed by this and why this guy because a lot of times you're not really planning on using your edc player for a whole lot or you've got a couple of jobs so just having something this does work with slivers it does work with fabric i mean a lot of the basic stuff that that that this guy does except it doesn't hold on to non like nut or bolt surfaces very well there is a lot of leverage there you know so you can do stuff and then this one this is kind of more traditional that would be my next one you can see it's a little smaller when it's in it's it's slipped joint that again would be one more thing to work with it's just not as handy a lot of times we want just like our knife you know that you you do the stuff and then you put it away and you move on flashlight turn it on turn it off put it away you know this pull it out you know grab stuff do whatever you know you need to manipulate put it away but if you start having to manipulate it a little bit more yeah this is also not the most useful front end this guy no i wouldn't carry this as an edc tool this is definitely a small tool kit tool but for an edc unless there's some specific thing you keep encountering some specific task it's more cute than functional as edc same with this even less so this has even fewer up fewer jobs that it can do it's just small and cute little screwdrivers they're great but you know that is really you know other than maybe some sort of a you know a striking implement this isn't anything beyond a screwdriver um utility knives are great but i'd rather have a good fully functional nice easy to deploy pocket knife so anyway that's what i discovered as i was carrying these around trying them on different things that this guy right here is my favorite and i think most as far as as pocket carry edc the most usable tool of the bunch and with that doc out

Channel: Last Best Tool

Views: 32,126

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Id: m9b1DD7E8qA

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022