Aquascaping Scissors Head to Head Review

[PaulLB]

Does anybody known of an objective head to head comparison of aquascaping scissors?

I’ve had a look on this forum and google and there’s surprisingly little beyond personal recommendation and nothing very recent I can find. If you’re looking for a comparison of TVs or smart phones there’s a million reviews, but I can’t find anything comprehensive and up to date for aquascaping scissors - anybody out there know of anything?

I’m sure most of the cheap stuff on eBay is less than wonderful and ADA at the other end of the scale superlative, but there seems to be quite a few suppliers out there such as the following (I’ve rounded costs and looked for “wave” shaped scissors in this example):

Tropica £19
JBL £44
Oase £23 *
Fluval £15
Seachem Aquavitro £16
Superfish £13
Ista £14
Any others ?

* Oase didn’t appear to have any wave shaped scissors so I quoted price on curved model.

With the exception of ADA, from above list I figure it’s probably about £150 quid to buy one of each and do a review.

If I organised this would anybody be interested in the results and possibly in taking part in testing them? Perhaps we could mail the set of scissors between a bunch of us over two or three weeks and get a consensus amongst the group each person having tried each brand ?

Even better if anybody is in the market for any of these scissors that would be interested in taking them off my hands after the test even better - as I’m pretty sure I won’t need 7 pairs of scissors!

Let me know if you’re up for this or if I’m just wasting my time …..and money 🙂

 

[PaulLB]

I decided to go for the ISTA wave scissors (£13.99) in the end as they were almost a third the price of the JBL and a similar (smaller) size at 20cm long.


Arrived today and certainly a vast improvement over the cheap ones I got as part of a “aquascaping tool set” on EBay for about a tenner.

Time will tell as to how they stand up. I’ll let you know how I get on.

I’m still really interested to try some of the others so may well get a set of JBL ones to see what you get for almost 3x this price.

 

[Nick potts]

Any scissors I have to hand for me, be they kids safety ones or my JBL ones, all work the same for hacking back plants, small curved spring scissors for the carpeting plants, and tight spaces.

I do think quality tweezers/pinsettes are worth a little extra though, i use these and they are far better than the chunky, blunt ended cheap ones

 

[Aqua360]

I have the aquavitro spring scissors, affordable and great quality. And tropica wave scissors for the longer ones, no complaints

 

[keef321]

I don’t Know if I just had bad luck, but I had a pair of JBL scissors that rusted within a couple of months even though I dried them every time. I have a pair of DOA instead and have had no problems, they are great. I recently purchased some ADA pro scissors spring as a Christmas treat, and for my 60 litre tank they are soo useful (cutting hair grass, cutting awkward to get to stems on Buce etc). I have not had them long so can’t say if they fair better than anything else yet. The DOA scissors are still like new after 12 months.

 

[fredi]

I don’t Know if I just had bad luck, but I had a pair of JBL scissors that rusted within a couple of months even though I dried them every time. I have a pair of DOA instead and have had no problems, they are great. I recently purchased some ADA pro scissors spring as a Christmas treat, and for my 60 litre tank they are soo useful (cutting hair grass, cutting awkward to get to stems on Buce etc). I have not had them long so can’t say if they fair better than anything else yet. The DOA scissors are still like new after 12 months.

Not sure if they are claimed to be “stainless”, but not all “stainless” is “created even”, a lot of it is chinesium, 304 should be ok 316 is better, much of the steel sold as “stainless” is stainless in name only