On the Bench This Morning: Elenco TL-15 Test Leads from Amazon I bought these recently as I really needed some new ones and they allowed me to fill out a minimum order on Amazon; the cheap Chinesium ones I got when I first arrived here in the GWN have been hacked & spliced a half-dozen times now.
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0002JJU46/I've had these leads before; I was a repeat offender with both my Sperry and before that my OG Fluke 87. So when I saw them available as a add-on for CAD$9.51 (USD$7.26), I dropped them in my cart because to me they were a known quantity that hadn't changed (aside from natural rubber to silicone insulated wires) for probably 2 decades.
Well... just soze y'all know... not so much any more. No longer the decent quality hard plastic probe handles (easily repaired as the tips were just a light press fit) but cheap Pliovic wires and molded vinyl handles (with square-oid fingerguards
) that I couldn't pull apart at all; I had to give up for fear of breaking the probe or the screw-on alligator.
I've decided to keep them, however; the tips are decent, sharp, and appear pretty heavily chrome-plated, and the alligators are better than average & do appear to have decent threaded inserts. I'm pretty sure I'll get $7 worth of use out of them, even if I can't repair them.
Not so much at CAD$20.60/US$15.73 as they show now.
For those who are curious, the little magnets held in place with Kapton Tape is an experiment; they do seem to hold the alligators quite well, but I'm not sure how well they'll hold up vs epoxy or hot-glue.
That brings me to my last point... my horribly hacked old test leads. Both of them have been spliced inside the handle like the red one 2 or 3 times, and then there's the hastily-solder-patched tip that got broken off. We all know how these got this way; you "patch them up quick & dirty to get by" and then you forget to order new ones. Five or six times.
So... here's a call out to all our TEA members. Dig around in the back of "that drawer" or bottom of "that toolbox" or "that bag" and find your ugliest, most heinously & shamefully hacked, patched, booty-fabbed-back-together probes and post a pic. The only requirement is that you be willing to admit & describe how you actually used it that way... even if only ONCE. Extra points for ridiculously long in-service like mine of over 6 months since the first patch.
mnem