What are cross lock tweezers?

Cross lock tweezers are for all intense purposes regular tweezers, they are roughly the same size and are used for pretty much the same kind of jobs as standard tweezers, however, they have been engineered in such a way that the two metal pincers (that you would use to pick up objects with) cross over each other halfway down the shaft, therefore, reversing the pincers resting position from open (like on regular tweezers) to closed. This means that you have to release pressure from the tweezers to close its jaws and apply pressure to open them. For this reason they are also called self-closing tweezers.

There are pros and cons of such a setup, an advantage is that you can use the tweezers as a helping hand tool to grip and hold objects such as wires in place whilst you get on with a spot of soldering, a disadvantage is that the pincer's grip is limited to the force of the tweezers closed position which in many cases isn't that great.

Whether you find cross lock tweezers a help or a hindrance one thing is for sure, they certainly take some getting used to!