What Kind Of Sorcery Is This?

[zoidberg]

Last night I was looking through the Different Swisstool plier heads , the truth thread and followed a link from the first page to the SwissTool plier jaws thread where this post caught my eye.

EDIT This is another suggestion, but I think it's secondary to the reason that J-sews has offered.

Maybe the orientation of the halves of the tool might have been changed so that a right-handed person has a better view of the wire cutting blades when cutting or stripping a wire.  If I'm cutting or stripping a wire with the wire in my left hand and the tool in my right hand, I would tend to view where I'm cutting by viewing the tool from the left side.  If I did that, I could see where the top blade of the cutter was meeting the wire easier with the newer version.  With the older version, the bottom blade would be on the side that I'm viewing, but would be partially obscured by the wire that I'm cutting.

Uh....  I hope that made some sense...

Seeing as I had a Victorinox Spirit and a Leatherman within reach I compared the two. What I saw made me grab another Leatherman and then yet another. I only noticed because the Leatherman I picked up first had the replaceable wire cutters. Then today while taking the photos I was thinking about how scissors work. Thought I had better check those out too. I'll let the photos do the rest of the talking.

[ducttapetech]

I wonder if this is by design or just the way they were happened to be made?

live from Nate's mobile

[Syph007]

The vic pliers used to be the same as LM, but they changed them for the reason they mentioned.  More force on bolts is usually put in the counterclockwise direction.  So imagine you are gripping a bold with the end of he pliers, the Vic one doesnt stress the pivot, but pushes the halves together.

The scissors dont have the same use case, so I dont even think it matters which way they are.

[zoidberg]

The vic pliers used to be the same as LM, but they changed them for the reason they mentioned.  More force on bolts is usually put in the counterclockwise direction.  So imagine you are gripping a bold with the end of he pliers, the Vic one doesnt stress the pivot, but pushes the halves together.

The scissors dont have the same use case, so I dont even think it matters which way they are.

    Look again, at the wire cutters...

[Syph007]

The vic pliers used to be the same as LM, but they changed them for the reason they mentioned.  More force on bolts is usually put in the counterclockwise direction.  So imagine you are gripping a bold with the end of he pliers, the Vic one doesnt stress the pivot, but pushes the halves together.

The scissors dont have the same use case, so I dont even think it matters which way they are.

    Look again, at the wire cutters...

Ah! I missed that lol.  Does seem kind of random. 

[enki_ck]

OK, that's interesting.

I just did a quick check with a few multies I had here.




Over-Under: LM Freestyle, all the Juices, Pulse, Skeletool, Vic 91mm, Wenger 85mm (yeah, I'm counting those two ), Charge, Squirt PS4, Gerber Dime

Under-Over: LM SuperTool300, Vic Spirit, SOG Paratool.

[zoidberg]

Quick recap in an attempt to spark more interest.

Group one.
The Charge TTi and most other Leatherman and Gerber tools have the standard plier config and wire cutter direction.

Group two.
The Crunch, Spirit, Swisstool from 2005? onwards and SOG tools have the reverse plier config and wire cutter direction.

Group three.
Leatherman tools with the replaceable wire cutters have the plier config of group one but the wire cutter direction of group two.

Is the Victorinox Spirit the only tool with reverse pivot scissors?