Knuckle Removal was Action too big

[John Delacour]

At 3:51 PM -0500 8/2/02, Marcel Carey wrote:
>There is a special pair of pliers one can use to remove knuckles. 
>They look like big cutters and they work just fine. The way their 
>blades work is that they litterally pull the knuckle out ot it's 
>groove. Fast and easy.

About the first tool I ever bought when I started action work in 1973 
was a pair of 6" end cutters with an almost perfect 3/8" circular 
hole between the jaws.  I very slowly and carefully ground down the 
jaws and filed up form the hole to make my first pair of 
flush-cutting centre pin nippers.  I still use these exclusively for 
all centring and they are beautiful.  Not only are they perfect for 
centring, you'd think they'd been made for removing rollers (Am. 
knuckles).  One squeeze and the roller is out of the shank without 
the slightest damage to the shank.

Most high leverage end cutters (I have a nice pair of old English 
ones and an American pair) don't have this perfectly sized hole, but 
it is quite easy to file the heart-shaped hole down in the direction 
of the handles to make the hole round.  The jaws can then be ground 
flat on top.

A good pair of end cutters is not cheap, but I get almost all my 
tools from junk shops and second-hand tool stores and adapt them to 
my needs.  A suitable pair for modification should cost anything from 
$0 to $1.  Even an ordinary pair of pincers could be adapted to do 
the job.

If they published my pictures of broaches in the Journal a couple of 
months back, you'll see my nippers there.


Anyone interested enough to download *3 megabytes* of tiff files can 
get the pictures at:
<http://www.eremita.demon.co.uk/images/broaches.zip>

JD