Needle-nose Tweezers: Matching the Jaws

While excavating the top of my workbench and putting things away, I managed to drop my favorite needle-nose tweezers… which, of course, landed point-down on the concrete floor:

Well, that gave me an excuse to match up the jaws. If you take a close look at most of your tweezers, they’ll have jaws that don’t quite come together evenly, so you’re trying to grab things with a single point instead of between two flat surfaces.

A brief session with coarse and medium diamond files produced this pleasing result (with a mm scale for size):

Much better!

Another trick that works well: grab a piece of fine sandpaper in the tweezers, scrub sideways, and repeat for the other jaw. That’ll flatten out the jaws, make them reasonably parallel, and put the scratches in the direction that helps the most when you’re pulling something. Works best if the jaws are already pretty well aligned.