Bypass Hand Pruner Abusive Lab Test

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Felco 12 pruner

How We Tested

Celery’s fine structure showed how cleanly a blade could cut. Twine and chicken wire dispensed abuse.

Precision: Clean cuts help plants heal. We snipped celery and shrubs—then peered closely.

Sharpness: How sharp is sharp? For a hard test, we sliced 3/8-inch nylon/poly rope and No. 18 mason’s twine.

Durability: We cut blade-dulling chicken wire, then sliced more celery to judge the abused blades’ precision.



Felco’s handle rotates for easy squeezing, but it has too much play and is difficult to keep under control. It cleanly cut our celery and branches. These weren’t the sharpest blades of the batch—they took the most effort to slice twine, and left the rope with frayed edges that made it look like it’d been cut with a saw. While chicken wire left the other pruners chipped and dull, the Felco’s blades proved durable, surviving with little damage. But celery cuts were more ragged after the wire.



The handle’s force-multiplying gear allowed us to make more cuts without tiring our hands. But the blades hacked the celery and crushed stem edges. While these pruners didn’t cut the rope cleanly, they didn’t jam and were easy to squeeze. Twine snipped with two cuts or by twice dragging the line over the open blade. The chicken wire proved most damaging to the Fiskars—We could feel each agonizing crunch as the blades bit through the metal mesh links. The celery, obviously, suffered.



The test’s most precise cutter was also the least powerful—its blades made the smoothest celery slices, but had a tough time biting branch bark. This was the sharpest tool we tested—the blade bifurcated the twine in a single pass. And while chopping rope took several squeezes, the blades left the cleanest cut. Although the A.M. Leonards seemed to chomp through the wire with ease, a postmortem examination revealed the blades had taken considerable damage.

Bottom Line

Fiskars’ pruners cut with the least effort, and no tool could top Felco’s blade durability. But the best all-around performer was also the least expensive: A.M. Leonard’s 1286.

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