Tool Review - Xuron bent nose tweezers

I mentioned in my Bead&Button Show Aftermath post a few weeks ago that I came home with a new Xuron tool - the 450BN bent nose tweezers.  As with the other tools Xuron has been kind enough to give me samples of, I'm posting a review so you can see how neat they are.

Here's a full-length shot of them:

The most important part of tweezers is how well they "tweeze" - how tightly they close.  I've had some really crappy tweezers that wouldn't hold pony bead, so I was excited to see the Xuron tweezers closed:

Yup.  There's no daylight showing at the tips.  That's a good sign.  Each tip is under 1mm wide from this angle.  Maybe a half a millimeter.  It's hard to tell with the rulers I have.

Let's take a look at them from the side:

The jaws are a little more than 1mm wide from this view.

I really like the bent nose on these tweezers.  A few years ago I bought two new pairs of pliers - a chain nose and a bent nose.  For some reason I find it so much easier to work with the bent nose pliers, and I reach for them 95% of the time.  Perhaps it's because I can see things better while I work and seem to have more control.  The other 5% I use the chain nose pliers to justify my having bought them.  :)

Since I brought these tweezers home, I've been using them in place of the bent nose pliers to see if they'd measure up.  I've primarily been using them to open and close loops of earring wires.  I've been a little nervous on the ones with harder wires, but it's been just fine.  The black earring wires I used with the Loosey-Goosey stick spiral fringe earrings and the Faux-Mobius loop spiral earrings are more malleable, so the tweezers worked perfectly, especially when I closed one of the loops too much.  I inserted the tweezer tip into the loop and pulled it back out a little.

The best thing tweezers are for is placing tiny and/or hard-to-control objects like flat-back crystals.  I showed you them in use in yesterday's purple riveted bracelet.  Here's another look at the tweezers in action:

Since then I've played around with the tweezers and some much smaller crystals.

I got a really good grip on the crystal and took pictures of it from a number of different angles:

That sucker didn't slip once, even though I was fumbling with my camera taking pictures one-handed and rotating the tweezers.  I'm really confident that they'd be good for placing crystals in crystal clay projects.  Yes, you'd still have to be careful to not nick the clay with the tips, but that's the case with any tweezer.

As tweezers go, these are top notch.  True, tweezers aren't the most exciting tool in the world, but if you have a crappy pair, they can be very frustrating.  If you do a lot of crystal clay work or need to place tiny, tiny things in precise places, give the Xuron bent nose tweezers a try.  You can find them online, or you can e-mail me at traci@creative-pursuits.biz, and I'll see if I can hook you up.