I had a similar experience with a cookbook I was gifted that turned out to be fake: the author had impressive credentials (top culinary schools, etc.) but when I went to find more information about her I couldn't - all I could find was the same "author photo" for sale on a stock photo site. The book was a cobbled-together collection of recipes, some incomplete, apparently collected haphazardly from around the web.

I left a review saying this on the book, and Amazon deleted it because they thought my review was fraudulent. Of course, the book at the time had a 5-star rating from fake accounts.

> So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again.

I wouldn't be so certain about that. I've found that there are a lot of sellers selling the same things, but they're not the same sellers under different names, they're just getting stuff from the same places. Often, for cheap things, the source is AliExpress (or Alibaba), or potentially cutting out that middleman and just getting them direct from the companies that sell on aliexpress/alibaba.

It's also been my experience that pretty much _anything_ that isn't a big name brand item being sold on Amazon can be found for much much cheaper on Aliexpress. The exact same product, just without the 1000%-2000% markup.

> I purchased some wire cutters a year or two ago from Amazon and they were fine for the speaker wire I was cutting... Until this year when I tried to cut a guitar string with them and found a perfect guitar gauged hole in my snips every time I tried to cut.

This is normal.

For instance, when I work on my bicycle, I have to use a $40 Park Tool to cut brake lines and shifter cables. The $40 tool delivers far better results than you could ever get from a conventional wire cutter.

$10 snips should be better than that!

I replaced them with $5 Stanley wire cutters that had 0 issue dealing with guitar strings.

So what happened is I was given a 10c piece of junk and paid $10 for the privilege of being ripped off.

inexpensive wire snips are usually only good for cutting copper wire, though. they aren't made of hardened steel, which is necessary for cutting the steel guitar strings.

I've trashed a couple of pairs of nice wire cutters by using them on guitar strings; you really need a pair of hard wire cutters rated to cut 2mm piano wire. StewMac sell a perfectly satisfactory pair for $12, but I'd suggest a pair from Knipex or Xuron if you do a lot of string changes.

https://www.stewmac.com/Luthier_Tools/Types_of_Tools/Pliers_...

https://www.knipex.com/nc/en/products/?page=group_detail&par...

https://xuron.com/index.php/main/industrial_products/11/18

Yep, came here to say the same thing. "Hard wire cutter" is a tool you need to own apart from "wire cutter."

If you ever try to cut a spring, you will get the same issue.

Yes. Here's a photo of my Lindstrom cutters (good, but for copper) and they show the diameter wire they're rated for. And these were not $10 snips.

http://imgur.com/a/Zk3LBCE

$10 is not inexpensive for wire snips though. Which is my complaint.

I worked in electronic sub-contract manufacturing for over ten years. We built products for coal mining, and test equipment for aerospace, and products for a variety of domestic and commercial uses. All of this involved use of a wide range of hand tools.

A few people have told you that wire cutters come in two forms: hardened and not hardened, and that if you wish to cut steel you should buy cutters that are rated for steel. The price does not tell you this information. The data sheet for the tool does.

Here's a pair of snips that cost over £50. I'd be displeased if you borrowed mine and used them to cut guitar wire. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0614766/

One thing you can't see in the images is that these cutters tell you what wire you can cut on them: https://imgur.com/a/Zk3LBCE

If you want to cut steel you need snips that specifically say they can cut steel. These don't have to be expensive: Here are some for £7. https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/cable-cutters/0732820/

$10 is nothing compared to the cost of high end, quality hand tools that will last. In the case of a expecting to cut hardened wire, the cutter needs to be of a good alloy and hardened adequately to hold an edge. $10 doesn’t buy anything from the knipex catalog, for instance.

Guitar wire should be perfectly fine to cut with $10 snips. The $5 Stanley brand snips that I got to replace my terrible ones work like a charm.

I recognize I don't have the heaviest duty cut-through-anything shears that I could have with more money, but where I'm mainly doing light jobs like speaker wire and guitar strings it's not a problem... unless the snips themselves are terrible.

I don't expect to have to replace the Stanley set unless they become rusty from disuse.

Guitar strings (or at least the ones I usually buy) tend to be a lot harder/tougher than your typical electrical wire (electrical wire usually ain't designed to be stretched to high tension and strummed/plucked repeatedly). Not that surprising that a $10 tool would have issues with them.

The $5 Stanley snips I bought later have no problem.

It was just me getting ripped off.

Ha ha, I had the exact same experience cutting guitar string with wire cutters from my local dollar store.

This will be your experience 99% of the time using cheap wire cutters on strings. They’re meant for soft copper wire, and strings have steel cores!

The $5 guitar string tool will work every time, though.

A good pair of dikes starts at about $80 and goes up from there. Don't use them to cut anything but copper wire. :)