I know what stainless and carbon steel is, what are the others on this site, what is the difference? Other than the obvious/price!

http://www.ofrei.com/Dumont-Style-2-Tweezers.html

Thanks,
Ed

Ed,
The Dumostar are the high tech steel alloy, super hard & 100% non magnetic. The INOX are French low grade tweezers, I found HiTech cheaper and better then INOX.
You should also have a medium set of Brass tweezers for handling all parts and screws as they don’t scratch, take practice to use correct pressure, when mastered they stay in shape a lot longer.

Chris,
Thanks for the reply. I have a start-up tool list and the only tools I have chosen so far are the screw drivers. Most of the tool sites do not give a very good description of what the differences are amoung certain tools. I guess they are used to dealing with watchmakers that know what they want.
As I narrow my searches I know I can count on the folks here to guide me along.

Ed

I would say get brass tweezers medium point, one set of No3, 2 sets of No 5, maybe a set of 3c and a set of 00 for pinning (short strong stubby tweezers). get a good loupe I use a double 4 & 7X (11 combined power), the type that clips on the side of your glasses, if you don’t wear glasses, take a pair of sunglasses and remove the lens so you can attached to the frame, Boshce & lomb use to be the best but are now Chinese so don’t be fooled by brand name.

I may have to try this "brass tweezer" thing. Did you learn that in school? Was that something that was recommended? I've always used brass tweezers when moving things (plates) around from jar to jar in the cleaning machine or from one basket to the next. I hadn't considered using it as a general purpose tweezer though. I've always been most comfortable with the #5SA for most work and the #2 for larger heavier pieces.

The use of brass tweezers is recommended method for handling parts where possible, they do no scratch . The new Horotec carbon tipped (replaceable) tweezers that are even softer extremely light, great for handling and placing hands, dial etc.

I'll order some and try them out. Perhaps they could replace my #5 tweezers. I need the strength of the #2 tweezers for handling barrels and putting barrel arbors into place and heavy pieces (on 16/18s watches).

putting barrel arbors in place is far easier if you hold the arobor in a pin vice, less damage more control and no pinggggggggggggggg

The Bergeon pin vice set are expensive but worth every penny

Bottomline: I now recommend these tweezers.

For over the last 1 1/2 years I've been using "Bronze Asco P5" tweezers.

Mr. Chris Abell is 100% correct, these are the tweezers to use for watchmaking. I have three steel tweezers that I still use but they are pretty much exclusively for hairspring manipulation or one very fine pair of tweezers I use to hold roller jewels. Other than that 95%+ of the time I'm using the bronze tweezers.

Some points about them that I've observed:
1. Hard to scratch the watch parts with them, including the precious decorated plates. That's a huge plus.
2. Actually grips parts better than steel. The slightly softer bronze holds pieces better. That's a huge plus.
3. Only downside is they need to get bent back so they have tension more often and might be sharpened a little more often. That a minor minus.

Frank,
I am still working with the steel tweezers .
Where did you purchase the bronze tweezers?

I got them from Jules Borel.

Thanks.

Just a follow up on Chris's post on the pinvice for barrel arbors. I just started using the Bergeon barrel arbor holders instead of the pinvices. These things are heavy duty. I wasn't sold on them, but the AWCI required them. Now I really like them.