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Hello, my name is Gus and this is Q Source's "On the Bench."
Jim LaFrance of Excelta Corporation is back to talk about the wide variety of common and specialty tweezers available from Excelta.
My name is Jim LaFrance and I'm sitting here at Q Source on Long Island, our favorite distributor.
And I'd like to talk this morning a little bit about the evolution of tweezers over the last twenty-five years.
Tweezers were first made in about 1889 and they were standard metal products like this [showing 3C-SA-PI Precision Fine Point Tweezers].
So when we talk about tweezers most people think of a metal tool that's pointed.
Over time, applications changed and these pointed tweezers didn't do the job quite as well.
For instance, with the advent of working under more magnification we make miniature tweezers [showing M-5-CO Cobaltima Very Fine Point Miniature Tweezers].
These are about 2 3/4" long and have the same style and numbers as the standard metal tweezers.
They're very tiny and can get under a microscope very nicely.
With the advent of wafers, people needed ways of picking up a wafer and not touching it. So wafer tweezers were invoked about 1980.
And this particular one here [showing 591-SA 5-Tooth Wafer Handling Tweezers] has five feet on it, that means it's a 5" wafer tweezers and can pick up a five inch diameter wafer.
Today, we have components that we cannot mark or scar with metal tweezers and possibly scratch.
A lot of people are using soft-tip tweezers and most of these soft-tip tweezers have replaceable tips.
They come in four different materials, this happens to be a Carbofib material [showing 159B-RT Small Carbofib Tip Tweezers].
It's static dissipative and soft and, like I said, it has replaceable tips. The tips come in different sizes.
You can also buy it in a copolymer material, which is cleanroom safe; PEEK, which is a high temperature material; or white Delrin.
With the advent of surface mount when you pick up a little chip capacitor and squeeze too hard it flies across the room.
These surface mount tweezers [showing 103-SA-PI S.M.D. Paddle Tip Tweezers] were developed about 10 years ago, and they feature a paddle on the tip.
What that paddle does is allow you to pick up a square or rectangular component and squeeze it as hard as you want and it will never fly away.
You can drop the tweezers and the tips won't bend and also when you're soldering it acts as a better heat sink. This is really great for surface mount.
Now for people who are making hearing aids and very tiny electronics and need to cut very tiny wires we've developed a line of cutting tweezers.
This is probably the largest one [showing 15A-GW High-Precision Angled Head Cutting Tweezers] and they'll cut 30A-WG soft wire and smaller and they'll get into very tiny places.
Hearing aid industry is a good application for this.
We've also taken standard tweezers and to make them more ergonomic we've dipped them in a cushioned material [Showing 00-SA-PI-ET Straight Strong Point Tweezers with Ergonomic ESD-Safe Grips].
They also are static dissipative 2 x 10 to the 7th ohms per square and they also protect the operator from heat.
You're doing a lot of soldering, the heat tends to travel up the tweezers and this cushioned grip protects the operator from the heat.
So there are a lot of different tweezers aimed at specific applications.
The best thing you can do is contact your local distributor, Q Source, and ask for some demos on some of these new types of tweezers.