In case you haven’t noticed, when dealing with electronics, you’ll be picking lots of small things up, and it only gets harder when dealing with tiny SMD components. But whatever you’re working on, be it a breadboard prototype, or soldering the final touches to your next big thing, chances are you’ll want to handle things with precision. This is where it’s important to have the right tool for the job. And the right tool is usually a good pair of tweezers. But for electronics work, the pair that you use to get splinters out of your foot aren’t going to cut it.
You want a sharp, fine point to allow you to properly grab the designed part without touching other areas, and an ESD safe (Electro-Static Discharge) rating is a must. Low-quality tweezers may not be classed as ESD-safe which means they can cause static damage to sensitive components. With all of this in mind, we’ve put together a short guide on some of our favourite tweezers from Adafruit and Sparkfun which will serve you well for all kinds of projects.
Our Picks
We’ve put together the following products which we recommend as essentials for any electronics workshop. At only a few dollars each, getting a set of high-quality tweezers has never been easier.
- Fine-tip Straight Tweezers: As far as bread-and-butter tweezers go, these ones from Adafruit are just fantastic. They’re made of stainless steel, with extremely solid tips (that are also fairly sharp), with exposed steel for the tips and a matte-black finish on the rest which makes them easy to grip. They measure 135mm long and along with being anti-static (ESD safe), they’re also anti-magnetic.
- Fine-tip Curved Tweezers: These are the same as the previous model, however instead of straight tips, they have curved tips with a 120mm length. Combined, these two options from Adafruit make quite the pair.
- Straight Cross-locked: Next up, we’ve got two options from Sparkfun which are incredibly useful for holding things in place thanks to their cross-locked design. This means that they are normally held closed, which allows you to pick up parts and keep a grip on them while you use other tools. Whilst not quite as pointy as the Adafruit tweezers listed above, these still have a nice fine point which is perfect for dealing with fine components and parts and their anti-static coating ensures that they are ESD-safe.
- Curved Cross-locked: These are the same as the previous model, however instead of straight tips, they have curved tips. As mentioned before, it’s often handy to have a set of both straight and curved tweezers for getting into hard to reach places.
- Multimeter Probes – Tweezers: Lastly we’ve got something slightly different. These are an incredibly useful set of tweezers which have conductive tips which connect to probe attachments for a multimeter. This allows you to easily measure the resistance, capacitance, polarity etc. of components that are already soldered in place, without the need for the gymnastics which often takes place with regular multimeter probes.
So there you have it folks, some of our most popular tweezers which we use ourselves in the workshop, guaranteed to make your next project easier. Happy making!
