I often look around my house and see countless little tools that have made my life meaningfully better. Sometimes these get turned into a grandiose blog, but often they are straightforward and there isn’t much to explain. One of those tiny, unsexy little tools is a pair of pliers, the PZ-58 Neji-saurus by the Japanese company Engineer. It is not to be confused with the different Chinese company of the same name that sells tools for electrical engineering on Aliexpress that are shockingly good and dirt cheap. The Neji-saurus will grip on to anything, and I am shocked at how often I use them. They are my favorite pliers by a wide margin.
Engineer sells several models of screw extraction pliers: tools designed to remove stripped and damaged screws that have been rusted beyond salvation. The PS-78s are more expensive and feature a crimper for bare wire terminals. The PZ-60 are longer and get into hard-to-reach places. But the PZ-58s are the ones I have, well-built and with a grip that won’t quit. The way they do this is simple – by having bidirectional serrations facing opposite directions and a curved tip. These tiny details make the grip you get on rusted parts feel godly; screws just fly off like magic. The handle never slips in your hand, and it even features a wire cutter at the base of the clamp, meaning you don’t have to reach for a pair of flush cutters as often as you normally would.
The Neji-saurus has been a buddy to me in countless situations over the last year. I have used it almost every single time I have done repair on my candy cab (I swear I’m almost done). When the screws that came with the Arctic P14s for my DIY air filter proved weak and anemic, I used it to screw those bad boys in. When I needed to shut off the water in my toilet and discovered that the shutoff valve had been removed, these things handled that no problem. You do need to be slightly careful when using them, as they can tear something up if you aren’t careful, but when that’s not a going concern, which is often in DIY situations, the PZ-78s are my buddy.
There are other pairs of screw extraction pliers out there now. I’m sure I could compare all of them and offer a complex meta-analysis of which one is the best. But also, I have no reason to go beyond my Neji-saurus, which I paid slightly over 20 bucks for. They are a wonderful product that you can be happy with for years, a level of price to performance that is perfectly satisfying. Engineer also achieved this feat with the SS-02/SS-03 solder sucker, the desoldering hand pump that has loyally served countless DIY electronics nerds over the years with its iconic metal body and anodized red plunger cap. Let’s give it up for Engineer; those rusted ass screws won’t know what hit them.
