Common Cabling Tools - Wire Cutters

You can, without feeling very guilty, use a regular set of lineman's pliers to snip through coaxial and twisted-pair cables. You can even use them for fiber-optic cables, but cutting through the aramid yarns used as strength members can be difficult; you will dull your pliers quickly, not to mention what you may do to your wrist.

KEY TERM: aramid

Aramid is the common name for the material trademarked as Kevlar that's used in bulletproof vests. It is used in optical fiber cable to provide additional strength.

So why would you want a special tool for something as mundane as cutting through the cable? Here's the catch regarding all-purpose pliers: as they cut, they will mash the cable flat. All the strippers described previously work best if the cable is round. Specialized cutters such as the one shown in Figure 1 are designed for coax and twisted-pair cables and preserve the geometry of the cable as they cut. This is accomplished using curved instead of flat blades.

Figure 1: Typical wire cutters

For fiber-optic cables, special scissors are available that cut through aramid with relative ease. Figure 2 shows scissors designed for cutting and trimming the Kevlar strengthening members found in fiber-optic cables.

Figure 2: IDEAL DataComm's Kevlar scissors