Its a pair of scissors – big deal. Despite their apperance, these scissors may surprise you. They have hard stainless steel blades that are really tough. How tough? Well, they can’t cut through steel wire, but they can cut thin PCBs. They can also cut through annoying plastic clam shell packaging. For hacking and general heavy duty cutting tasks, there is no equal. They can really take a licking. Here are some ideas for using them:

• Tiling lots of circuits on a prototype PCB and cutting them apart for big savings.
• Cutting annoying plastic packaging that everything seems to come in nowadays.
• Cutting cardboard. Most scissors are ruined if tried for this use.
• Cutting just about anything too tough for most scissors.

They are not recommended for these materials:

• High tensile steel fencing wire
• Steel bolts
• Plywood (1/8″ ply may be okay though – I haven’t tried yet)

Sure, the handles are plastic and if you try to cut something really hard such as 5mm plywood, they will probably break. For anything less, they are outstanding. When also considering the low price, they just can’t be beat.

Heavy Duty Scissors by Provide Your Own is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.