Customizing tools has been a part of my life since I was a little kid. Between my Dad and Grandpa, there was always some wrench being modified for a particular use, or some scrap being made into the one off tool you needed. My Grandpa was a welder, a mechanic, a builder, and a Jack of all trades, so he often had a job to do without the specific tools needed to complete it. Somehow he’d always have 90% of them, but the other 10% he’d either figure out how to live without, or make. It’s no wonder then that my toolbox has several wrenches, pliers, and other tools that have been customized to perform a specific task, often times for a specific vehicle in fact. For me, it was not only a matter of needing a tool right then, but also the fact that the specialty tools I made were usually too expensive for me to shell out good money on. But taking on old wrench out of the misc wrench drawer is cheap, relatively immediate, and arguably more fun.

So you can imagine that I tend to like seeing other tool customizations, or hacks, so I can file them away into my database of fun tool projects for later. In fact, I have a whole pile of them I want to try out when I get the new shop space done and I’ll be sharing all of those with you guys too. But I digress. This video is of particular interest because it is so simple and yet so useful. Vice Grips, or locking pliers, are super useful but this hack can make a pair even more handy than before, no pun intended.

Check out the video, it is short and sweet but will have you nodding as you see in your head how you’d use it.

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