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2016 IDEA Award Faves: Crescent Grip Zone Pliers

Everyone likes shiny chrome for their bathroom fixtures. Problem is, that material and finish don’t jive with plumbing tools, which are designed to deliver the massive amounts of grip needed to loosen a fixture. If you’ve got a pair of channel-lock pliers with serrated jaws, removing something as simple as a sink aerator requires using a strip of leather (or your belt, in a pinch) to avoid marring it.

Thus the clever designers of the Crescent Grip Zone pliers decided to incorporate the leather, or rather, a rubbery material into concavities within the handle itself. 

These are not intended as finger-purchases (though they could perhaps be used that way); rather, once the user slides the jaws to the max-wideness position, the concavities align, allowing one to securely grip cylindrical shapes with the rubbery stuff.

One thing that had me puzzled was this image showing the prongs on the ends of the handles in action:

I’ve never needed channel-lock pliers on a painting project, and plumbing contractors and painting contractors are often on different teams, so I couldn’t figure out why you’d build this functionality into this tool. But the designers explain that the tips are primarily for a different purpose: “[The] exposed, steel handle tips…are designed to prevent the handles from being pulled off.” As a secondary measure, they “allow for reaming and prying.”

Congratulations to designers Justin Arsenault, Trent Kahute, Stephanie Lewis and Alex Troitzsch of Thrive, LLC; and Alan Anderson, Jonathan Beckwith, IDSA, Griffin Biering, Tobias Bridges, Randi Ligon, Zach Hays and Bob Thompson of Apex Tool Group, LLC.