Best tin snips | Straight cut Stanley & Bessey or Malco snips?

• Off-Set – A pair of offset tin snips are much easier to use, you can visually see the difference between and off-set and standard pair by the blade, and offset pair can cut around corners with less chance of jamming and getting stuck.
• Blade Joining Nut – The nut that holds the to blades together should have something in place to stop it loosening, but at the same time, lets you tighten it up as maintenance if you need to.
• Straight left or right cut. Green colored tin snips are known as right cut snips, red-handled aviation snips are for cutting left corners, and straight cutting tin snips are yellow for cutting straight lines.

Best hand tools for cutting metal

Straight cut tin snips can cut through metal quickly and efficiently. They are especially useful at making straight cuts, and they don’t cause dimpling in the material being cut. The cuts you can achieve with straight cut tin snips are pretty smooth, making them excellent choices for finishing work.

Some straight cut tin snip blades are too long and bend out of place and then stop cutting. So keep in mind that a pair of straight-cut tins snips with a longer blade inst necessarily better, unless you are cutting something like thin tin or plastic.

Cut straight lines fast.

Corner cut tin snips are better suited for shaping and corner work. Coppersmiths and custom metalworkers often use corner cut tin snips in conjunction with straight cut tin snips for precision work and cutting out intricate shapes in metal.

But better known as a pair or left or right-handed tin snips. If the color of the tool is green this indicated a right-hand pair. And red indicates a pair for cutting corners to the left. You can still cut straight lines with either pair.

Get a pack of off-set snips for cutting corners.

On a budget? Get only a single pair of off-set snips.

Seamers really do come in handy.

Seamers are primarily intended for bending light gauge sheet metal. They can also be used to make cuts into sheet metal with the addition of a cutting blade.

Keep in mind that you will lose a bit of functionality when using a seamer in this manner. Furthermore, you risk breaking the tool if it is bent beyond the normal limit. Seamers are best used for bending metal tabs in a tidy fashion, most used for making up flashing details.

Want to cut sheet metal faster?

Electric shears are a metal cutter that can come as dedicated tools or as drill bit attachments. They can cut through metal pretty quickly, and allow you to cut straight lines much more easily as compared to tin snips or nibblers.

Electric shears like the Malco Turbo shears are also ideally suited for cutting roofing material hidden under ridges. Important to know that there are 2 different metal cutting attachments made by Malco, a standard pair for sheet metal cutting and a dedicated pair for cutting corrugated iron.

Malco even does an attachment for cutting fiber cement sheets, if you are a builder you might not know about this and it could be a handy tool to have.

Electric metal cutting shears

Electric shears are useful tools for making faster straight cuts into sheet metal. They are often presented as a more efficient alternative to tin snips, enabling users to cut through corrugated metal with minimal effort.

There are dedicated electric shears power tools like the popular cordless Milwaukee option, or you could also purchase a metal shear attachment for your impact driver instead, as a more cost-effective option.

Check out the Malco TSHD Turboshear that could take the place of most nibblers or tin sniping jobs when it comes to cutting corrugated iron.

Is a dedicated electric nibbler a more consistent cutter?

Electric nibblers can cut through metal in the same way as a hand nibbler, but they are much more effective for roofing jobs as they are a power-driven tool.

They do cost more, so you might want to hold off on buying one unless you have to do a lot of metal cutting work. Even with electric nibblers, it is necessary to finish up with tin snips for corners and detailed areas.

Click here to read my nibbler review.

Here’s a cheaper DIY alternative

If you have an impact driver, you could get a nibbler attachment that expands its capabilities and allows you to use it to cut through metal sheets in a similar way that a nibbler does.

Nibbler attachments are a good option as they are much cheaper and do the same job as a dedicated nibbler, however, they are good if you only have to do occasional and a small amount of metal cutting work. For trade use they are under-powered.

A nibbler drill attachment can pair well with an electric shear. You can use an electric shear to cut the bulk of the straight cuts, and then use this nibbler drill attachment to cut around steep corners.

The CaNibbler is a good option for this.

Popular metal cutting jobs done with tin snips

Tin snips are best suited for metalworkers and DIY’ers that want to make accurate cuts. Even though snips are relatively cheap tools, they can make clean and precisely-controlled cuts that even costlier devices would have difficulty doing.

One of the best uses of tin snips is to clean up edges that you first cut with a nibbler. For example, you can quickly cut roofing material to about half an inch longer than the intended length or width.

After installing the roof, you can then trim the excess with a good pair of tin snips if it is a visible and seen cut edge.

Tin snips are also useful for cutting large pieces of sheet metal. For this purpose, however, you should make sure that the sheet is large enough so that you can twist the off-cut away and keep the snips on a straight path with-out the blade jamming.