Wire cutter design?

[ddogu]

I'm not sure if I can correctly express this problem I'm having from time to time but this has been bothering me lately, so here I go:

I have a LM Wave which I use almost daily. I owned a Rebar and Skeletool CX before that, all -except for the Rebar- had the same wire cutter design in the pliers. In fact, AFAIK all multitools with pliers have the same wire cutter design: Two "teeth" facing each other  that "run on one another" when you squeeze the pliers shut (umm, okay, English is not my mother tongue, so please bear with my excessive use of double quotes). I mean, the teeth cutting the wires "slide" on one another and do not press on one another like they do in side cutters. (In my experience side cutters always cut without problems as long as they are sharp enough.)

This wire cutter design keeps causing the wire -or the part of the wire that has not been able to cut off at the first try-  to get stuck between the teeth and that clumps the pliers. You have to wrestle with your MT to free the teeth from those wires and open the pliers again. This makes you feel like the sad MT user who just wants to have a beer but ends up holding his MT with that badly designed bottle/can opener in one hand and a  beer bottle with a pierced cap in the other, foams of beer wetting his sad fingers...

My question is, why don't the manufacturers produce tools with wire cutters that have the side cutter design which seems to be much more efficient? Because they want to include hard-wire cutters -which seemingly MUST have the current design- maybe?


I can make a video, if what I tried to point out was not clear to understand, sorry about my poor language skills.

[zoidberg]

Materials and cost could be a couple reasons for the difference between anvil (sidecutters) and bypass (general MT) designs.

The Leatherman Wingman has anvil cutters and while I quite liked them most other people didn't.   

Gears on SOG MTs help a lot when wire gets jammed.

A good thing with bypass cutters is if they get damaged you can often restore them back to a working condition.

But sadly as the plier head loosens up the cutting performance with softer wires gets worst.

[sLaughterMed]

Not really what you were looking for, but I feel like this is relevant. back in 2008-2009, SOG made a side cutter multitool prototype based off the PowerLock, called the PowerCut. SOG had a lot of issues with this prototype, causing it to not be manufactured. I wrote an article for the Multitool Encyclopedia about it here: http://wiki.multitool.org/tiki-index.php?page=PowerCut


Additionally, the Gerber MP1 has side cutter wire cutters, although it is a tad expensive.

[ddogu]

Thank you for your responses, guys. Glad (and sad at the same time) to see I was not the only one who had issues with the design.

I'm checking out the wiki and the MTs you mentioned 

[kaput]

Not the only one.

And they all kind of have their own positives and negatives. And of course kinda brings you back to its a multi tool, a dedicated pair of wire cutters will more typically outperform the multi, but you won't have your knife, file, awl etc etc... So   

[ducttapetech]

Another thing to thinks about is that the wire cutters on multis are designed to cut a wide ranged of wire. Everything from copper wire to barbed wire. Which in turn, won't make them best at cutting  certain wires.  Kaput said it perfectly,

And of course kinda brings you back to its a multi tool, a dedicated pair of wire cutters will more typically outperform the multi, but you won't have your knife, file, awl etc etc... So   

[Poncho65]

Another thing to thinks about is that the wire cutters on multis are designed to cut a wide ranged of wire. Everything from copper wire to barbed wire. Which in turn, won't make them best at cutting  certain wires.  Kaput said it perfectly,

And of course kinda brings you back to its a multi tool, a dedicated pair of wire cutters will more typically outperform the multi, but you won't have your knife, file, awl etc etc... So   

That is a very good point We tend to believe our MTs can do anything (they do a lot don't get me wrong) but they aren't meant to be treated like dedicated tools as most of us, myself included think they should