Side by Side Comparison of: OTC vs Irwin Tools

If you don't have one of these you need to get one. You'll wish you had years ago. And for Heaven's Sake don't Loan It Out!

One of the best tools ever

I love these kind of wire strippers. I never expect them to last long, as all of the store-bought ones I've had in the past were cheaply made and would break after a few months. This one seems sturdier than the previous ones I've owned. I've only been using it for a few months but I've used it quite a bit, both with Arduino projects and setting up my 7.1 home theater system twice. Seems just as sturdy as the day I bought it.

Admittedly, I do not have experience with other similar wire strippers, only the traditional flat multi-tool that also has the cutters in the head. This is lightyears ahead of those tools. I have had no problems with it on any gauges advertised. The only wire that did not strip properly was the wire on a dollar store headphone. A few strands of wire came off on 1 attempt, the plastic stretched and was yanked apart instead of cut on the second attempt and the wire broke on the third attempt. So if you are thinking of using this device for wires outside it's design, you'll have problems.

It works just fine and feels solid in your hand. It just arrived today and I quickly used it to repair some speaker wires. I have an old, hole style stripper, but this one works about 100 times faster and more accurately.I had to strip several wires and then heat shrink them back together. This made the job much less time consuming. I will be installing a subwoofer in an enclosure later this week. The whole project entails stripping wires, heat shrinking, and soldering. This tool will come in quite handy. I highly recommend this product!

NICE NICE NICE NICE NIC!. i can not believe i ever did without these. man these work awesome & are very well made. all metal & little bit of thick nice plastic. i have heard people say they like these but wow they work awesome & are great for tight spots. i literally took my other two pairs out of my tool box the minute i used these. awesome product. well made. work wonderfully. thank you otc for making attractive & comfortable to use tools that work beautufully!

For those wondering, you can in fact strip 26 AWG, 1.27mm pitch ribbon cable wire with it, but only with practice. First, you need to set the adjustment screw to maximum '+' (fully tightened to the right), and your ribbon cable can't be wider than 7 lines. I practiced for about an hour with some spare 26 AWG multi-colored ribbon cable, and 7 lines was pretty consistently the limit. So if you have 10-line 26 AWG ribbon cable, you won't be able to strip all 10 lines with it in one shot. You'll need to separate out 3 of those lines at a minimum.

I'm used to using a cheap manual stripper where I need to choose the correct gauge hole. The problem with that stripper is it would cut most of the insulation but not all, forcing you to do the old twisting action to cut the rest of the insulation. Then as you pulled the insulation off you'd hope that you didn't cut one of the wire strands.This stripper is amazing! Just set the length of the strip and boom you're done. No checking the gauge or visually trying to strip the same amount. You're especially not hoping you didn't cut any wires. Just consistent strips everytime!

I'm not sure how I got by without this handy tool for my 73 years. I guess I struggled with a utility knife and the old fashioned wire strippers, which, although they worked okay, never really satisfied my needs.Although I'm an amateur, I perform all kinds of electrical handyman projects around my home. And, this is the "go to" tool for stripping wires of various sizes. Kudos to its inventor.

they work great. doesnt touch the copper just the casing, and is done in seconds. if youve ever had the old style were you had to guess the gauge and got it wrong, youll appreciate these strippers. I used a light duty extension cord to wire up my heavy duty work trailer. (contractor), and this stripper even stripped the outer casing of the cord. no more accidentally cutting into insulation you want kept pristine.

This tool is absolutely great, you actually feel the quality when you use it. I have bought this for my car audio project along with some 14 gauge wire and from I have seen so far, it is the best for the money.I was going to get the less expensive one - Noico - but after reading the reviews, I have decided to go for this one and I do not regret my decision.Note that this is made in Taiwan.

Starting to work on large wiring harness project I needed a good pair of wire strippers and this tool delivered!Stripper is super easy to use! Its almost impossible to mess it up!Every strip is clean, neat and precise; and did I mention that its fast! I'd say that it only saves a couple of seconds per strip but it saves a lot more time due to quality of the strip when it comes to feeding the wire into some terminal.This tool doesn't seem to discriminate between wire types either: so far I've tried it on anything between 8Ga solid copper to tiny 22Ga braided wire, even stripping shielded wire delivered professional results!This little gadget put Irving Tools on my map of professional tool manufacturer.If you are reading this review do yourself a favor and add this joy to your cart!

works great when there are a lot of wires to strip ,not cheap plastic either ,well made ,metal body

At first I was rather frustrated that it appeared that this device didn't work strip either 22 or 24 gauge. I read a few reviews and found others experienced much as I did. I noted that the "adjustment" screw at the top didn't seem to do much UNTIL I turned it to the point where the jaws began to draw tighter and became harder to close the handle. This would help to be noted that it takes some experimenting to find that sweet spot to have this work as one might expect. The added cutting blade below the jaw is a nice addition too.

It works okay...

Such a great tool that I should have purchased a very long time ago. I'm not a professional electrician or anything, but I do wiring around my house and help out friends....electrical, low voltage, cat 5e.6, etc. These things have save me a ton of time in fighting with wire getting it striped and so on. The only con on these that I've found so far is the tension. I've found that it's best to turn the tension as tight as I can get it for most wires (if they're solid), for any stranded wires I loosed the tension a bit. I've also found the small plastic measurement gauge piece just gets in the way. Most of the time, I keep it pushed down and out of the way.

Started using this in my engineering classes. Mage cutting wires and crimping a breeze. Especially in my logic design classes where some projects require an obscene amount of wires. This allowed me to keep each project neat and consistent with the cut of each wire.

They work great, quality is very good, the only issue is that you have to figure out what crimp to use for different connectors, it would be nice to have some drawings as an example of what crimp to use for different connectors.

This is a very interesting tool. It is a wire-stripping workhorse and also does crimping. Does what it says it's going to to and very well, too. It seems to be high quality compared to ones I've searched out in stores, which were more costly. It's very accurate and precise and does not miss. By that I mean it's never snipped off any wire strands beneath the casing like you can sometimes get.

Good quality wire stripper from Irwin tools. Almost every tool Irwin makes is of good quality very sturdy tool. While using this product I had an issue with not being able strip a wire. there is an adjustment screw in the middle that you have to turn to adjust the hold on the wire. Will buy again if needed

So far so good. It has done it's job perfectly on about 95% of the wires I've fed it. Bought this to replace a cheap auto store model, and could instantly see the difference in quality. I'm sure there are better models for professional use (and priced accordingly), but for average home use this should be sufficient. My last (auto store) one started twisting slightly leading to poor cuts, so I'm curious to see how this holds up and will update if it gives problems

I sent it back. If you use this type of tool a lot you want the $25 from Lowes.

This is a heavy duty wire stripper. Model 4467 works a lot better however it is made of all plastic unlike this model. Stripper does leave some teeth marks in the insulation after stripping

Works ok, not spectacular... Used for a new addition using 12 gauge wires and had issues. If wire not perfectly straight didn't work well at all.My 15 year old abused no name quick strippers work better. Tried adjustments with little effect. Works decent on thinner wires but to be honest doubt it'll get used much. I wouldn't recommend this unit.

It doesn't cut the insulation, it pinches it and pulls it off. Sometimes you have to do it twice to get the right length if you want a long wire on the end. It does not work well on old and hardened insulation. I expected the head to have cutters that fit a certain wire size and then pull it off.

This machine is ok. It will work (90% of the time), but it has an annoying thing. With some wire, the "stripped" plastic will remain in the machine and it will not necessarily come off unless you really shake the thing. If you don't eject that properly, the next stripping process may not work as intended, due to the foreign object being there.If you're careful, it will do its job relatively well. I've only used this with .22 gauge wires, so I don't know much about other sizes.I just wish I had brought the non-automatic version, for I almost always know the gauge I need to strip.I haven't used the crimping features because I have the VISE dedicated tool for that :)

I bought these strippers after seeing all the amazing reviews on amazon. I regularly flip homes so I do a fair amount of basic electrical work (changing out outlets, light fixtures, etc). For years I have been using the Monoprice Universal Cable Jacket Stripper (103354). It worked pretty well, but occasionally i would screw it up and cut through the wire instead of stripping the insulation so I thought I would give this a try.These strippers just don't work that well for me. Sometimes they work like a dream and it is everything I had ever hoped for. However, about half the time the self-adjusting doesn't grip down tight enough and the insulation just stretches out. All that being said, I do still use these over the other ones because they get the job done eventually, just not quite as easy as I had hoped.

If you handle Romex 12/2 alot and are stripping the yellow jacket to make it safe or installing outlets and switches, this thing works great for quickly removing the outer yellow jacket. However, we all know that there is a thin film of hard clear plastic over the individual insulators for the hot and neutral conductors. This tool fails frequently because the clear plastic is too hard and smooth for this tool to effectively clamp on and pull it apart. I have the clamping adjustment as tight as it will go and it still doesn't work well. However, as I stated above, it works great for removing the outer jacket and may be worth its weight in your bag just for that. I know we have all gotten fast at removing the outer housing but I'm telling you this is effortless.

I am an Industrial Electrician and use Klein tools for just about everything EXCEPT for these strippers/cutters! I have a broken hand and possibly cut/strip 30-40 wires on a given day (12AWG - 16AWG). The ability to strip the wire without me having to wrap the wire around my hand and tug for dear life to remove the insulation made it wonderful to me. The listing price is $35.00 but I got them from here on sale for 16.51 which is more than half off. These are wonderful and I'd recommend these bad boys to all my co-workers.UPDATE :I had to lower from 5 stars to 3 - I base my judgment on a few things.1 - I will not put this in my tool pouch. It's too large and to place it in and out would take as long as it would for me if I were to use my Klein's.2 - Romex wire it doesn't do well on. It's great on stranded copper wire.3 - The cutter is on the bottom of the tool causing you to slip the wire under to cut it.I would still recommend these Especially IF YOU HAVE A NYLON - CANVAS POUCH. If you have a leather pouch like I do, don't bother purchasing these unless you have enough room.They're great, but when on a mobile job site it's just not that practical.

It didn't cut wires! What's the point?????

out of adjustment

If they were around 7 dollars I'd say you get what you pay for..

The first time I used these I thought WOW, why didn't I buy these a long time ago. They worked well for a few weeks of light usage. But now they won't grip or strip anything. The adjustment does not appear to do much and you can't really take them apart to try to repair, so i'm disappointed in them.

I expected the metal version to work better than the plastic ones. I also expected it to work better since it has a wheel for adjusting tension. The metal teeth that are supposed to pull the insulation off the wire are very dull and don't adequately grip or rip the insulation from the wire. I've tried adjusting the tension with no luck I found these to be essentially worthless. The cutters under the jaws work. That's the only positive thing I can say about these. Don't waste your money.

Very nice, they feel solid and work very well.Unfortunately I have to edit this review. I used these a half dozen times without issue, then one day I dropped them off the 5' step ladder and the jaws refused to line up properly after that. Everything is encased in molded plastic so no way to disassemble and rebuild, I had to throw them away. I'm now shopping for a better wire stripper.

I'm doing a lot of small rewiring projects in my house, mostly with 14/2 and 14/3 Romex. This took 3-4 tries to strip 1 wire and didn't strip all the way back to the depth gauge. On some tries, this didn't even cut through the clear sheathing and just wrinkled it up, which just made everything take longer. It's much faster to just use a good, sharp, manual stripper.

I bought this wire stripper hoping that it might work on vintage style cloth insulated wire - I've been using a box cutter to strip it and that really wears on the hand after a bit. The stripper couldn't cut through the cloth insulation at all, so that just wasn't going to work. However, I still use all kinds of other wiring and would have kept it for that. I tested the stripper on a variety of wire gauges and types and it didn't work well on these either. It just tore at the insulation of smaller gauge wire shredding the woven shielding underneath. It roughly cut/tore the outer jacket of 16/2 AWG and couldn't leave a clean cut. I thought that I might have a defective stripper so I returned it for another. The replacement had the same results and I'm returning that one as well.

Meh. When it works, it's fine.It doesn't really "cut" - it just seems to grab the insulation (when it actually grab) and pulls it until the insulation breaks and begins to strip.So far, it mostly just slides off the coating of the insulation.I'm not impressed. I'll stick with this style Klein Tools 11063W 8-22 AWG Katapult Wire StripperThis set will probably just languish in the bottom of my toolbox until I need room for something else, then it'll "migrate" elsewhere.

I bought this when on sale on Amazon for about $13 and based on reviews, I was hoping it works great with the speaker wire and occasional Cat 6 cables, but to my disappointment, the unit I received was barely able to work with a 16 awg speaker wire (the transparent kind). It worked once in a while, but most times the claw on the left side (not the cutting side) doesn't work and the cable just get pulled by the other claw resulting in either an elongated insulation or nothing at all.Besides the main stripping operation, it has some secondary features like cutting and crimping. I have also tried cutting the same 16 awg speaker wire, and while it does the job, it wasn't what you expect from a wire cutter.Maybe what I got was a defective unit, but based on other negative reviews here on amazon, I think its a pretty common issue. If it works as advertised, it would be a must have for anyone dealing with stripping wires even on occasion, but for me, I just chose to return and not gamble again.

This tool is a clever idea, but it does not work on some types of common insulation, especially when the wire is stranded. Judging by the number of glowing reviews, this tool works well for many types of insulation and wire sizes. There is no real cutting edge utilized in this mechanism. It depends upon clamping the insulation, then pulling it in opposite directions at a defined point using blunt edges.. For THHN and THWN insulation, the outer, low friction layer and tough inner layer just don't cooperate. The former is pulled off, leaving the latter unaffected. The mechanism itself must be made by a single manufacturer, as a number of different brands use exactly the same one. In any case, I have returned this tool and exchanged it for a Klein automatic stripper that utilizes an edged cutter.

I confess I have a "thing" for wire strippers.Each one is designed for a particular application.It's the same deal with all tools. I have at least fourteen different hammers - from a maul used in splitting wood to a chrome-plated one used in making jewelery.I purchased a no-name version of this tool when working on a project in Eastern Europe twelve years ago.When I saw the IRWIN version I thought, "oh, boy!"Turns out in side-by-side testing, my crappy inexpensive made-in-Asia version stripped wire better. The only issue I have with the old tool is that the handles keep sliding off.... OK I lied. I do have another issue.You would think that IRWIN engineers would have extended themselves to put a mark on one of the jaw sides to indicate which part of the wire stays and which end spits insulation.On the old tool I used some White Out to mark the "keeper" side. Guess I will do the same on this one.If you have an old-style version of this tool that works, don't bother replacing it.

Cheap... Doesn't work half the time...

Broke after about the 6th use.Bought the klein version, no regrets, all metal no cheap plastic to break.

They worked well for a few uses. Then plastic inside broke. They were my favorite and am disappointed.

I had a couple of wire strippers made by another company, exact same design and lasted me for years. I bought two of these OTC 4466 with the hope they would be just as good, but they are not. They haven’t broken yet but they are flimsy and have a hard time stripping an 18 AWG. I can’t imagine using them on something thicker. These are a waste of time and money, stay away from them.

broke after one use

I ordered this based on some YouTube reviews and the reviews here at Amazon. I should have gone to the IRWIN tools website and read those reviews. This thing worked for the first ten wires of varying sizes within the 10 -24 gauge range. After that, I brought it to the jobsite to repair some electrical parts and run some longer wires and it didn't strip AT ALL. The teeth on the "grab" side of the wire don't have enough tension, no matter how much you adjust it so the wires just move around too much and the stripper side can't cut consistently. The wires are a jumbled mess after using this tool and are half-stripped, chewed up and totally unusable and have to be cut. I am honestly writing this review because I can't in good conscience recommend these as wire strippers I have been an aircraft electrician, avionics technician, and an electronics technician since 2003. It would have been nice to have such a dynamic tool at the ready which would have made my jobs a lot easier but it is too good to be true. I would recommend spending the extra money on a good set of Klein automatic strippers ($30+) or IDEAL custom strippers. The standard design of those I'm sure is made by other companies as well. Sorry IRWIN, this one is a flop.

at least in my hands this tool is worthless -- doesn't grab wire anymore -- jaws just slide down the insulation -- had it a year maybe used it 6-8 times -- bought it due to all the 5 star reviews -- proves again that all that glitters is not gold

I have tried a variety of wire sizes, and so far, I could get it to strip one wire. The adjusting screw had no effect.Since it came with no instructions, I cannot tell if I am doing something wrong. My old one finally died and I bought this.

Any self adjusting strippers seem to have issues. These ones straight out of the box had issues. Not for me, but works with solid, larger gauge wires.

I love Vice Grip pliers, but I don't love this tool. I've yet to get wire properly stripped. It may just be the approach taken by the tool's design as a one-size-strips-all wire stripper. The problem is in the cutter head. It's flat and the cutter head only contacts part of a wire's insulation. Depending upon wire gauge, it may be just a small proportion of the overall circumference of the insulation, so stripping it off is not so good. Might be okay on small gauges, but I have yet to get it to work there, too.

This tool was going to be used to rewire 200 fluorescent troffers for LED ballast bypass, which equated to stripping and cutting around 1000 wires. After attempting to strip 20 wires, it was clear that this tool was not the right tool for the job.I think the wires would not strip due to the design in the stripper tool. From the product photo, the left side of the tool grips the wire, and the right side clamps down to cut the wire jacket. However, if the wire jacket is too strong and the grip is too slippery, the tool will not be able to cut the wire. The wire slips, gets damaged, and you'll have to cut the wire and try stripping the wire again. The cutter tool is just not sharp enough to make clean cuts--maybe I received a dud? In addition, the right side cutter does not surround the wire jacket, it only cuts into the wire jacket partially and rips the rest of the wire jacket when the tool separates, so you do not get clean cuts.I ended up going with the Klein Tools 11063W 8-22 AWG Katapult Wire Stripper, sold here on Amazon as well. This tool worked for me, and I was able to complete the job at a much faster pace than using the Irwin tool.