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• Bunion pliers stretch out small areas where a shoe is too tight.

• Pliers for screwing water hoses onto the back of a washing machine while awkwardly balancing over the top and trying to reach down where you can’t see properly.

• Hog Nose Ring Pliers

• These appear to be the pliers-equivalent of an alligator wrench. Pretty hard to find, which likely means they don’t work very well.

• I’m not sure if these are toys or not. They seem a little lightweight, but they are entirely functional slip joint pliers.

• If someone comes at you with these pliers, expect to lose a tooth. Distressingly, there are a dozen different shapes available depending on what specific tooth is going to get ripped out of your face.

• Fencing pliers include a hammer for putting in staples, a spike for taking them out, curved crimping jaws, and cutters on the side for cutting heavy fending wire. Unusually, they also have a pair of gripping jaws on the handle side of the joint.

• These pliers are for pulling leather straps in various types of leather work. The turkey waddle is a brace that lets you use leverage to pull harder.

• These pliers are very specifically for bending metal bars (round, flat, square, whatever) into rings. They are commonly used in jewelry making.

• Break spring pliers are really three tools in one, all dedicated to getting the springs in car drum brakes on and off.

• These pliers can be long or short, squeeze or cut. The handles flip completely around to the other side to expose a second set of jaws. Nifty.

• These look like large end cutting nippers, but again looks are deceiving: they too are crimpers, for making bulls less aggressive.

• These pliers are for reaching around and squeezing a sheet metal seam on the back side (for example on the inside of the fender of a car). They are also the most ridiculous-looking pliers I’ve ever seen. They just make me laugh. Jar-Jar Binks?

• These pretty fishing pliers have various indentations and cutters along their blades, for dealing with hooks, weights, and whatnot.

• These electrician’s pliers barely still qualify as pliers rather than wire cutters.

• Fencing Pliers

• General-purpose bent-nose needlenose pliers.

• Bent nose pliers with especially narrow, smooth jaws.

• These ultra-wide pliers are for bending sheet metal air ducts, forming lips and sealing seams. I bent a lot of copper sheeting with these to make the custom-shaped gutters and soffit panels on my round house.

• These pliers grip a thin strip of glass to snap it off after scoring with a glass cutter.

• Hogring Pliers

• These tools let you bend each tooth to a precise angle when “setting” the teeth of an old wood saw.

• Hot Plate Pliers

• Hot Lid Grabber

• Antique fuse puller.

• These pliers with their elephant-style nose are for reaching deep into an engine to crimp hose clamps on rubber hoses.

• Pliers for adjusting eyeglass frames.

• Long-reach tongs for grabbing fish hooks.

• This garlic press is at the very low end of the pressure spectrum. It has no more leverage than a simple pair of pliers.

• Crimping is not just for sheet metal. These look like bolt cutters, but are actually crimpers for squeezing electrical connectors tightly around wires.

• Ordinary snap ring pliers usually come in sets of two, because you need one that opens and one that closes when you squeeze the handles. Interchangeable tips let you reach different types of snap rings.

• These look like ordinary medium-long needle-nose pliers, but apparently they are specialized for the application and/or removal of hair extensions. What a world we live in.

• Hog rings are not just for hog’s noses: they are useful for connecting wire cage panels and other things. These pliers close the rings.

• Parallel Jaw Pliers

• These always-exactly-parallel-jaw pliers are meant for jewelry making, not wrenching. They have relatively little leverage, and are made for delicate manipulation, not brute turning.

• Saw Tooth Setting Pliers

• Pliers or not pliers? I had to use Google Translate to read the Chinese text to learn that this is a tool for holding a fine but strong wire used to saw through the adhesive holding a cell phone battery in the phone. Silly me, I used dental floss last time I needed to do this.

• Soft-Jaw Pliers

• Soft-jaw pliers protect the shiny chrome surfaces of fancy plumbing fixtures.

• Sheet metal pliers, but with a vise-grip body.

• Jewelry makers use these to form rings (of six different diameters) in wire or thin flat bars. I use them to bend a brass strip for one of my mechanical model kits.

• Tile cutting pliers have a tungsten carbide scribing wheel and a set of jaws that press down on two sides, and up in the middle, creating a bending force on the tile after it’s been scribed.

• Special tongs for gripping the rims of hot plates and bowls.

• This is one of the tools I use to stump people: no one has figured it out yet, except one friend who is a professional construction worker. These are seam sealers for crimping standing seam roof joints.

Do you have a better example of this kind of tool? Let me know by leaving a comment, and include a picture of it if you can so everyone can see!