Recently I had some soldering to be done on delicate and plated plugs. Normally I use Helping Hands to, for instance, hold the wire and plug. Due to the delicate nature of the gold plating on my plugs, I didn’t want to risk damaging them with the bare crocodile clamps and wanted to cover them. I used some (clear, 4mm) heatshrink tubing that I cut to length and put over each jaw of the clamps and hit it with a heatgun. You do have to keep the clamps open somehow (a tie-wrap works wonders) to prevent the clamps from punching through the heatshrink while it’s hot.
If done right, you will end up with this:
Mouthguards on the crocodile clamps
Still very much a clamp, but much safer for delicate coatings and platings.
Quick edit to a quick mod: it has come to my attention that these are more commonly named “Third Hand” or “Third Hands”.
Sebastiaan Swinkels 