Does anyone know what the original purpose of sprue nippers was before they came to the eye of modelers?
Was there an original purpose? Anyway, they look very much like the cutters used to snip off excess lead length on electronic components after soldering them in place. Just my guess.
I’m tempted to say the large (flush cutter) nippers were adapted decades ago from one-off fabrication/electronic repair/craftsman/maintainence cutters, and the small tweezer-like ones were indeed designed for modelers (not necessarily Model Railroaders, but Model Planes, Cars, Ships, heck any such modeling work). Now I have to prove this…
And of course I found nothing about the origin of sprue cutters, except that a form of them was used to nip off casted lead bullets from the mold true during the US Civil War era (I guess it makes sense - they are really just shears, and it’s much easier to snip the bullets off the mold tree (well, sprue) than to carve them off with a knife)