Tool Reviews: Regal 19605 4.5" Diagonal Pliers

If you walk into a Home Depot or other hardware store, you can often find bargain-bin diagonal pliers for about $3.  These pliers are nothing fancy, but are usually sufficient for most basic jobs.  At Ace recently, I bought a pair of Regal diagonal pliers, model 19605, for about the same price.  Unfortunately, the quality of these Regal pliers is far below that of whatever bargain brand pliers hardware stores typically stock.

In theory, the Regal pliers seem like an average pair of 4.5" diagonal pliers.  The handle has grip, the plier jaws look sharp, and the pliers have spring tension.  But after using them just once, you can tell that very little care was put into manufacturing these pliers.

Even out of the packaging, the pliers already look used.  The handles look dirty, the jaws are scratched, and there are chips in the metal in three different places.  It's not just a bad pair that I got -- I checked out the other pliers that were in the same bargain bin, and they all looked similarly scuffed up.  It may have just been a shipment of cast-offs, but they definitely don't give me a good first impression for the Regal brand, and they sure weren't worth paying full price for.

The plier jaws don’t line up evenly with each other.  You can see space in between them when they are all the way closed, which means for very small things (like wires) it won’t cut them well.  Even just using the tip of the pliers, where the jaws do line up, the pliers are not sharp enough to cut a lot of things.

The closing action on the pliers is not smooth.  The pivot point looks like it wasn't forged smoothly, so when you use the pliers they stick for a moment as you squeeze the handles.  Lubrication on the pivot point didn't help at all.

I give these pliers half a star (out of 5 stars).  They barely function well enough to justify not throwing them in the trash, and they are certainly not a pair of pliers that you will be excited to keep in your tool box.  This is the pair that you toss in your trunk and forget about, just in case you ever need them.  But even for that purpose, you could easily find better pliers for the same price (or cheaper).  Amazon.com currently lists these pliers for $8.66 -- the picture shows the 6” pliers instead of the 4.5” pliers -- which is far too much to pay for this low-grade tool.