Just swapped my old wire strippers for an auto-adjusting pair and saved 20 minutes on a panel job in Wichita
I was using the same cheap manual strippers for 5 years and finally tried the auto kind, and the difference was huge, has anyone else made that switch and noticed the same thing?
...and it's one of those things where you kick yourself for not doing it sooner (classic, right?). The auto-adjusting ones just grab the wire right without me having to fiddle with a dial or guess the gauge, so my hands cramp way less now. I swear, those 20 minutes saved add up fast when you're doing a whole panel, it's like the tool finally works with you instead of against you.
Man I gotta disagree on the auto-adjusting ones. Every pair I've tried feels like they're stripping the insulation instead of cutting it clean, especially on those thinner gauge wires. You get that clean snip maybe 60% of the time and the rest is just mangled copper. Plus the mechanism inside those things gets gunked up with dust and small wire bits after a few months and then they don't grab right anymore. Give me a good pair of manual strippers with a gauge wheel any day, I'd rather spend the extra 10 seconds dialing it in than fighting a tool that thinks it knows better than me.