**image courtesy of a patient cat and a steady hand. No cats were harmed durning the writing of this post.

Image above: “Using bent-nosed pliers to test if your cat is pointy.”

I’m learning how to work with gems and silver. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, and, well, no time like the middle age to do something. There’s a number of specialized tools, and they’re cool, so, why not share.

Bent-nosed pliers are the first I want to share. At first, they seem like an unnecessary complexity to what is basically the Platonic ideal of a tool: pliers. Two sticks, held together with a hinge, giving you a levered mechanical advantage that you can use to pinch something and thus manipulate it in various ways. We’re going to be talking a lot about pliers – you have to hold stuff a lot when you’re making jewelry.

But, bent nosed pliers have a trick, and it’s a really good trick. They let you hold things at angles that would be very difficult with normal pliers. (Of course, this seems intuitive once we discuss it – they are, you know, bent.) See this picture here.

I can come in from the right side and hold something down to the surface that’s parallel to the handle of the pliers. The only way you could do that with conventional pliers would be to grip the handle such that the jaws were pointing down towards your pinky.

Like this.

or this.

Neither of which is comfortable. Once you start using them, the bent-nosed pliers rapidly become a favorite. I’ve replaced most of my regular plier usage with bent-nosed. I’m not going to drag you through all of it, but it turns out it becomes easier to grip things along more surface area, which reduces chances of denting and scratching and provides a more secure grip.

These tools don’t have a lot to do with AI. There’s certainly metaphorical comparisons to be made – things about looking at problems differently, or taking an orthogonal (heh) viewpoint. And i do think that those are valid reasons to look at real tools.

But, really, I’m just showing them to you because they’re cool and surprisingly useful.

Regardless of what my cat might think.