You’re right, in that they are smaller than the ones I had seen.
Nevertheless, I suspect you’re not familiar with flush-cutters.
They will also incise skin extremely precisely, and used carefully can easily grab a tiny, slippery splinter as the jaw leverage is considerable. Furthermore, they’re significantly slimmer. Look at the picture of the shear cutters in my first link. Those jaws are maybe 2 mm thick on their pivot side. The type of tool you’ve shown appears to have much bulkier jaws, three to four times as thick on their pivot side.
I’ve no doubt the ones you show are effective and would work. I do doubt they’re superior to certain flush-cutters for the task, and am inclined to think the flush-cutters are somewhat more versatile and easier to use.
I have a pair of hemostats and having used them for, um, “stuff” I can say that they wouldn’t work for yanking the splinters out. They just don’t have the fine enough tip on them for this.
And astro, I’m not looking to cut hunks of my flesh out. I can do that with the fingernail clippers. I’m trying to avoid that.
If you use a blade (pen knife, or exacto knife) you won’t be cutting hunks of flesh out, at least if you do it correctly. You’ll just be widening the opening enough that you can get the tweezers (whichever kind you find that works) in to pluck it out. You can also delicately slip the edge of the blade under the splinter/sliver and lever it out in some cases as well. This should (usually, anyway) leave a flap of skin that you can put back over the wound (after antiseptic is applied) so it can heal. This way you can leave it unbandaged for the most part when not at work. My dad worked in a place where he brought home teeny tiny bits of wire, probably a lot like the slivers you mention, and he’d have to take slivers out of our feet fairly often, so I am very famaliar with the idea. I’ve done it on myself as well, when I picked up splinters or glass slivers. This method also works with the tiniest slivers of glass too, it’s spotting them that is the PITA. (Luckily they are reflective, and you can often spot them that way. I’ve had some I had to “feel” out via the twinges given by very gently scraping the area.)
In fact, I haven’t had a splinter yet that they couldn’t handle.
Of course, you could simply leave them in :). I have a couple of visible black spots on my hands from slivers of aluminum that are still there from my machinist days fifteen years ago. Good for loads of laughs at parties. (and as for why I don’t use the Sliver Gripper on them – they don’t bother me, so I let sleeping dogs lie.)
I have never found a splinter I could not remove using a pair of splinter tweezers.
They are a pair of tweezers that have precision ground tips so they ends prefectly match. What is not shown in the picture is that the pair I have have an attached magnifying glass, so even pieces of metal too small to be seen with the naked eye can be removed.
Work like a charm.
