QuadHands Workbench | Helping Hands Soldering Stations | Soldering Iron Helping Hand Tool with 4 Magnetic Arms | Designed for Soldering Tools | Steel Base for Welding Table Top with Locking Grips

Great tool, high quality materials and a pretty good design. I wish the aligator clips were a little bigger, they have a hard time grabbing xt60 connectors, but thats easy to work around by using 3.5 mm banana connectors plugged in to the xt60 for better grip. The metal nuts that allow the aligator clips to rotate are hard to get tight enough by hand, so the clips can spin on you if you are working too fast. A little goo to the nut or some diligence fixes this issue. These are better than other options, and made in the USA. Well worth the money.

Just what I need.

It has a nice heavy base it wont slide around on you. The clamps are covered with rubber tubes so it wont scar wires.

All the high ratings for this are deserved. It is far more substantial than the usual and being able to move the place where the arm comes from is a benefit also. The only area it could be better at is what seems to be an insoluble but common or pervasive problem with these types of things that seems to be a combination of lack of full annealing and backlash. Hard to name it correctly, but what happens is that if you are soldering especially you want a very tight fit and if you try to position the two parts with almost anything like this, when you let go it moves. Yes, we are talking here about perhaps 10 - 15 thousands of an inch, but, for soldering, that is too much. The parts MUST be in contact, not just very close. Maybe someone should work out a fine tuning arrangement for this type of thing, where you can place the pieces approximately together, and, after you let go, you can turn a dial to take up the new slack. This is, nonetheless, by far the best of this type out there and if I had bought this first (like 35 years ago) I wouldnt have bought the 4 or 5 others that never really do work.

This is an excellent product for soldering or general hobby. Excellently made, finished and quality. A personal touch with the enclosed business card. The packaging is excellent. Thank you!!!!

Does exactly what its supposed to do. The arms can be moved anywhere so its very versatile.

Love using this to hold multiple objects while I solder. The only issue is that the arms tend to bend back some making it hard to keep things lined up. Overall I give it 4 stars because it does help a lot.

Absolutely the most useful tool Ive purchased in a long time. Solidly built (love the heavy, firm base) and the magnets and grips are the best quality. I use it for my macro photography -- the multiple arms allow me to configure just about any type of gripping need. I highly recommend it for photographers looking for a new approach to small-scale shots. I had a small issue when I first received the product (one of the base magnets was missing). I contacted the seller and was treated as if I were their only customer. They immediately rushed a magnet to me, included a personal letter of apology, and threw in an extra arm to compensate for the minor inconvenience. WOW! Where I come from thats how you should treat your customers! I swear to you I dont work for them -- I just appreciate quality, attentive service.

This works perfectly when photographing small objects in a light box.

Im honestly quite shocked to realize I absolutely hate this thing. I mean, its got all the ingredients for a product Id love: incredible reviews, Made in U.S.A., quality materials, great customer service (so Ive heard)--hell, I even like the logo and color scheme. I was totally in love with this product before it arrived. I even ordered an extra 16 hand to go with it, just in case a 5-hand application presented itself at some point in the future. Unfortunately, the honeymoon phase began fading the moment my QuadHands arrived, and after only 29 days, were officially separating. As I unpacked the thing, I found the included paper that said something about the QuadHands coming with optional padding for the magnetic bases, to prevent scratching the base plate. This was odd, since all five hands already had pads permanently affixed to their bases and there was nothing else in the box. Adding to my confusion, the 8 hands had different pads than the 16 hands. The pads on the 8 hands were of a plasticky material with the QuadHands Q logo on them. They looked pretty nice and slid relatively well across the base plate. In contrast, the padding on the 16 hands (incl. the extra one I ordered) was a thin silicone-like material with a much higher degree of surface friction, which made it nearly impossible to slide across the base plate. In fact, the adhesion between the padding and base plate was stronger than the adhesive holding the pad on, so the padding on the 16 hands immediately began coming off. As it did so, it smeared adhesive on the base plate, which only compounded the problem (i.e., now the 8 hands wont slide either because the base plate is sticky). But maybe this isnt a big deal. After all, how often do you actually need to slide the hands across the base plate? As it turns out, very often. The reason being: sliding the hands across the base is the most precise way of positioning your workpiece(s). This is because the flexible arms do not stay exactly where you bend them--they rebound slightly back toward their original position. The rebound is slight, but on the scale of precision soldering work, its miles apart. Heres a concrete example... Im building an FPV racing drone. I have a small circuit board (flight controller) that I need to solder several wires to. I use 2 (QuadHands)hands to hold the flight controller in place and a third hand to hold a wire. Now, I just need to position the wire onto the solder pad. I bend the arm on the wire hand until the wire is touching the pad, then I let go. The arm immediately rebounds, leaving a gap between wire and pad. To get the wire where you need it, you have to bend the arm past that point and hope it rebounds to where it should be. This is much more difficult than it sounds, mostly because the amount of rebound is not constant. Depending on how you have the arm bent, it could spring back 1mm or 1. And in some cases, its not possible at all (for example, you cant push a wire through a solid surface and hope it rebounds). What you soon realize is that its easier to position the wire on the same plane as the solder pad, then slide the wire arm into position. Sliding has no rebound, so it stays in position when you let go. That makes it an essential feature of this product, and thats why the 16 pads refusing to slide is a deal breaker for me. More generally, my basic gripe here is that its exceedingly difficult/frustrating to position 2 objects so that theyre precisely touching. The last annoyance Ill mention is the height. This isnt the products fault, per se, but rather a detail I never considered until I used the QuadHands. When doing fine soldering work, chances are you rest your forearms on your workbench, and your workpiece is relatively close to the surface of the workbench. Well, the QuadHands holds your workpiece more like 6-8 in the air, which forces you to either perch on your elbows or hover your arms in the air. Both of these options--I found--felt awkward and made my hands much shakier than usual. You can bend the 16 arms to hold something close to the base plate, but the 8 arms arent quite long enough and struggle to stay in position when fully bent this way. In short, the QuadHands tends to hold my workpiece higher than is natural/comfortable for me to work on. Ultimately, Ive decided to return this, and in a weird way, Im actually kinda sad about it. Its so rare to find highly-rated American-made products on Amazon, and theres a huge part of me that just wants to own this thing and proudly display it on my workbench, even if I never use it. But the last time I pulled one of the 16 arms off, the magnet stayed behind, stuck to the base plate, and thats when I finally admitted to myself: this just isnt going to work. ***UPDATE March 23, 2018*** Wow. Okay. This relationship just took a radical and unexpected turn. You know how sometimes your ex shows up on your doorstep, swears theyve changed, and begs you to take them back? Analogies aside, the gist of it is this: my previous QuadHands erroneously shipped with 2 kinds of pads. Mark (the company founder) reached out to me via the comment on this review AND--get this--via a personal letter included with a brand new (i.e., correctly padded) QuadHands! What!? He even mentioned some tips for increasing precision and reducing rebound. Simply put, Marks response to my review has turned this from a 2-star experience into a 5-star experience. In fact, 5-stars is an understatement. Mark didnt just restore my faith in his product, he restored my faith in humanity and my sense of national pride. No exaggeration. This was customer service on a whole different level. At the end of the day, Im happy. The QuadHands is back on my workbench, and its everything I had hoped for and then some.