Too Brittle To Be Worth Recommending, Choice Ties 17 Inch Extra Heavy Duty Cable Ties

The Good: They can work well
The Bad: Brittle, Expensive
The Basics: Choice Ties 17 Inch Extra Heavy Duty Cable Ties are useful, but break too easily to be truly useful.


When I moved from New York to Michigan, I was on my own. My wife had made the trip before me and set up shop in Michigan, so I was responsible for getting our pets and all of our possessions to Michigan. That meant that I had to rent a U-Haul. Unfortunately, the “fine folks” at U-Haul ripped out the underside of my car when putting my 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid (reviewed here!) up on the trailer I rented. I had no idea that the crunching sound the car made when the worker put it on the trailer was the bottom shield of the car getting separated from the bottom, nor did I know that the tearing and subsequent clunking was that plastic shield (which protects the engine from all manner of crap coming off the road) dragging along the road as I tried to drive the car. With the local U-Haul affiliates unwilling to take any sort of responsibility for writing up and paying for the damage to my car (or just getting this problem repaired, considering I had paid for the insurance when I rented the U-Haul and trailer!) I took the only recourse open to me: I made a car repair. For the last six months, my car’s front has been held together with zip ties (cable ties). Last weekend, there was a big snow here in Michigan and the last of those ties broke off, so I had to find replacements. I went with Choice Ties 17 Inch Extra Heavy Duty Cable Ties.

Choice Ties 17 Inch Extra Heavy Duty Cable Ties are 17 1/2" long black plastic cable ties that are 3/8” wide. They have a blockish end through which the cable tie is fed and in that block, there is a simple latch that “locks” the tie to itself and prevents any backward slippage. Choice Ties 17 Inch Extra Heavy Duty Cable Ties come locally in packs of 25 for $8.59. That struck me as pretty expensive, but given my need, I bought them anyway.

Unfortunately, after repairing my car with only eight of the Choice Ties 17 Inch Extra Heavy Duty Cable Ties, I am down to ten cable ties. What happened to the other seven? They broke. Even though I was going around car parts that were well over the minimal diameter the cable tie could accommodate and the cable ties were binding parts that exerted far less pressure than the 175 lbs. that these ties are supposed to withstand, they snapped, their locking portions cracked off and they broke even before I could cut their tips off!

Losing almost half of the ties one is attempting to use is terrible on the quality front, but to be fair to Choice Ties, the eight that are in use on my car have held perfectly. I’m not waiting until they snap to find less important uses for the remaining ten; if I can’t trust most of a product to work, I am not buying it again and I am certainly not endorsing it for anyone else to use.

2/10

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© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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