Review on Sperry Instruments CS61200P Electrical Circuit Tester by Michael Morgan

This thing works and looks pretty solid, but there are key flaws in the design. It looks like it was designed by a general industrial designer who focused on smoothness rather than a tooling developer to ensure it works in the application. Here are a few things: - A jack to jack adapter is required to get alligator clips to connect in the boxes. This set of two adapters is bulky, clunky and clunky. A separate adapter would be much better. Worse, the included alligator clips were too tight to open by hand - I used needle nose pliers. That's bad, but wait. This clumsy stack of adapters didn't work right away. The metal tabs connecting the Edison plug were flimsy, narrow, and too short. Because of this, they had to be in the perfect position to actually touch each other, and they weren't, so the clamps were completely non-functional. Keep in mind this is a test unit, brand new, so it took a bit of work to figure out what was wrong. I wiggled the needle nose pliers gently and I mostly got the adapter working. I then found that the neck of the adapter was too short to screw into outlets like outdoor spotlight housings do. So I couldn't use the tool for the whole walk. This is a design flaw - they made it slim but left out the core features. The plug module didn't fit in the outlets I tested because the ground pin was too big and didn't make a connection. I assumed it was an outlet. , and almost broke a socket. It took me a while to believe they sent a tester with a large ground pin, but yes they did. Being at home allowed me to roll/compress the pin a little less gently with a vise and caliper. This fixed the problem, but I'm glad I tested it at home - in the field I wouldn't have been able to fix it. - The main unit's switch is not recessed and feels very flimsy and light. Very easy to use in the tool box. But the suitcase isn't included, so what can go wrong? Yes, grasshopper; The switch in the tool box turns on, drains the battery and you fail the job site. This is an amateur mistake. You won't find this flaw in a professional tool - there's a wired magnetic pick-up for the fuse fields. It's moderately useful - not very targeted in my testing. There is a cable and cable management flange on the back of the device, but they are very tight and I usually have to try twisting the cable several times to get the sensor to fit the device. Otherwise he hangs up. The unit glows constantly when in the switch box and it's hard to tell which switch it is. The histogram is important. You can flip the switches for disambiguation, as that turns off the transmitter unit, but part of the beauty of the viewfinder is not having to do that. There is no case for the instrument, although you actually need one - and not just for protection. weak switch. The female adapter is oddly shaped, bulky and detached. So the whole package is hard to pack and hard to carry. I bought a tool bag that has all the parts together; before that I kept them in a medium peanut butter jar, which was actually quite good. It is important to note that this device only works with powder circuits. This could be a simple feature addition: a battery powered transmitter unit that uses AC power when available. The rest of the functions seem to work. So dear seller, if you read the reviews, you have a potential winner here, but it is packaged in such poor packaging that the merits are lost. In hindsight the price of your kit doesn't seem convincing - it actually seems very expensive considering I had to fix so many issues to get value. Best Regards, Flxblflyr