Heavy Duty Kitchen Shears
Multi-purpose cutters
[This review is from an edited transcript of our interview with Gareth Branwyn on the Cool Tools Show — MF]
When I moved into a house in 1999, the owner left it filled with tools from the 1950s. Everything was very high quality. In the kitchen’s top drawer there was a strange pair of scissors, called “nutcracker scissors,” because they have a serrated area inside the handle that looks like it was made for cracking nuts. It actually isn’t. It was made for twist-off bottle tops, but you could also crack nuts with it. The scissors are basically a kitchen multitool of the 1950s. They’re really optimized. Everything is thought through, and they have a lot of little gadgets on it. There’s a bottle opener. There’s a little tab on the thumb hole, which I eventually learned was for lifting the seal on Ball jars. On the outside of the finger hole there’s a flat surface. I think that’s just a little hammer for maybe tamping down the jar lid before you do canning.
[Kevin has a similar pair. Here are his comments, also from the episode]: “They live in our kitchen drawer. We use them for cracking crab, for anything you need to crush, for opening bottles, for cutting through things that you’re gonna eat. Sometimes we use it instead of a knife — we’ll cut things up instead of a knife, like shearing vegetables.”
12/7/16Wiss KSRN 8" Kitchen Shears ($26)
