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Leave a comment below! Or click on an individual tool to see more or leave a comment about that tool. |
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| Picks are like bent awls, but they are used quite differently. They can be used to pick gaskets and washers out of fittings, press in tabs to separate connectors, poke your eye out, hook onto wires you can’t otherwise reach, and so on. |
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| This could be classified as an awl, a gimlet drill, or a rattail file, depending on which part of the tool you look at. It’s generally useful for making and enlarging holes in wood or leather. |
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| Awls, awls, awls. These are for scribing, marking, and poking holes. |
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| This is a modern leather sewing awl, but it’s functionally no different from one you could have found thousands of years ago. |
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| Awls |
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| This pair of tools is used to repair puncture holes in tires. The straight rasp is used first, to clean out and rough up the inside surface of the hole. It’s more of a reamer or rattail file than an awl. The second tool is used to pull a rubber plug down into the hole and leave it there. It’s like an oversized sewing awl. |
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| A single silicon wafer may contain hundreds or even thousands of individual chips, all made simultaneously and then cut apart. This tool uses a diamond-tipped scribe to score lines between the individual chips, allowing them to be snapped apart. It’s like an ultra-precise glass cutter. |
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| This tire repair kit includes a rattail file to rough up the hole and a sewing awl to push a rubber plug through it. |
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| These delicate and elegantly-shaped tweezers are for dealing with skin conditions I don’t want to talk about. |
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| Felting needles are a specialized form of awl with forwards-facing barbs. If you push one (or a group) into a ball of wool, the barbs push some of the fibers in, tangling them with the others in the ball. After many, many repetitions, the ball becomes a much smaller, denser mass of felt. |
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| Awls |
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| Bent awl or pick. |
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!