People who keep snakes, lizards, spiders and scorpions often use rubber-tipped tweezers to handle their pets, or their prey. The rubber tips allow a good grip and prevent damage. But they tend to wear quite a bit, especially if like me, you take them into the field. This is an easy and cheap method to coat the tips of your tweezers again, this time with silicone.

Step 1: Materials

You will need your old tweezers, silicone kit, and some petroleum based thinner. The color of your tips will be that of the silicone you use.

Before you start, remove the old rubber tips from your tweezers, and clean and de-grease the tips.

Step 2: Mixing Your Silicone Soup

Mix about half thinner, half silicone into a small container. Mix by shaking vigorously. No, shake a bit longer. No, even longer than that. The silicone has to have the thickness of liquid yoghurt, and be without any lumps. So keep shaking ;)

NOTE: The tips of your tweezers will be coated by dipping them into this mixture, so if you want e.g. 4cm of the tips coated, your container should be at least 4cm deep with the mixture.

Step 3: Dip Your Tweezers

Once your silicone solution looks good, you can dip the cleaned and de-greased tips of your tweezers into the mixture. Make sure they don't touch the sides of the container! Keep the tweezers with the tips down at all times!

Once dipped, you can hang them to dry. It usually takes several hours, I usually leave them to dry overnight.

NOTE: if the solution is too thin, you can leave the tweezers to dry for an hour, and then dip them again. That way you will still have a nice thick layer of silicone.