Disclaimer: I was provided with a complimentary Touch Tester in return for my honest review. I received no monetary compensation for this review, nor am I endorsed Touch Tester in any capacity. All thoughts and opinions expressed herein are my own and not influenced by Touch Tester and/or its affiliates in any way.
I suck at armory. Despite being in the sport for 30+ years, my ability to fix a weapon is limited to replacing tip screws and contact springs.
So, imagine for a second you could take an ohmmeter, test box, and a lamé testy thingy (whatever that’s called) and compress all into a single device that fits in the palm of your hand at a fraction of the price of its competitors, and you have the value proposition of the Touch Tester.
The Touch Tester was created by Academy of Fencing Masters parent Scott Krotz, who built a prototype as a “little side project to tinker on” and quickly turned it into a market disruptor and essential tool.
After using the Touch Tester at length for the last month, it’s a device I can recommend with zero hesitation, and I think you’re going to love it too. Let’s talk about what makes this little gadget so special.
Design/Aesthetic
The Touch Tester is a tiny box. At 3.6”x2.5”x1” and weighing in at an even 4 ounces, it’s small enough to fit in your pocket and comes with a basic protective case to shield the screen.
The backside features a fleching fencer over the letters “TT,” a nice logo and design.
The unit is housed in what appears to be sturdily 3D printed plastic. It’s a durable feeling unit that feels like it could withstand a few unintentional drops, but perhaps not a Gronk spike on a metal strip.
On the top and left side of the unit are your body cord inputs: for body cord testing alone, you simply plug your body cord into both ends of the unit.
To test your weapon alone, you plug one end of the body cord into the part of the unit clearly labeled “WEAPON,” and the other end into your weapon’s socket.
The touchscreen on the unit is perhaps one of its biggest opportunity areas. It’s a 320×240 LCD TFT screen. At 3” diagonally, it’s large enough to display what it needs to. However, in certain lighting/ viewing angles, the display can appear muddied. You have to be looking at it directly to avoid blurring. When I tap on the touchscreen itself, there’s a certain kind of paper flimsiness to it that makes me slightly concerned over its durability over time, but I haven’t had the unit long enough to test its longevity.
The current 320×240 TFT gets the job done, but its limited resolution and narrow viewing angles leave room for improvement. Upgrading to a higher-resolution IPS panel (e.g. 480×320 or 800×480) would deliver crisper visuals and better color consistency from multiple angles. Adding a capacitive touch layer would provide a sturdier, more premium feel and enhance long-term durability while remaining cost-effective.
While less of a deal-breaker, the unit is not battery powered. However, if your phone has USB-C, you can simply plug the Touch Tester into your phone and use your phone’s battery to power the device (it includes a USB-C cable). Touch Tester tells me that they are building future units that are battery-powered. Seeing that most of us have our phones on us at all times and most new iPhones and Androids are USB-C, this is more of a minor inconvenience, at worst.
All in all, I don’t have an expectation of sleekness for an armory device. It’s a simple aesthetic that isn’t going to make the ghost of Steve Jobs wake up in envy. With improvements to the screen and perhaps a battery powered option for the next iteration, this little felluh will be well on its way to perfection.
Testing the Tester
Let’s talk user experience. I’ve always believed in the philosophy that “a user experience is like a joke. If you have to explain it to someone, it’s not a good one.” Luckily, the Touch Tester is extremely intuitive to pick up and use, and they have a bunch of useful video/quick reference guides on their website just in case.
The brilliance of Touch Tester lies in its ability to diagnose granular problems in your equipment before they cost you a bout. A $20 test box is going to tell you if the circuit can complete and if the light’s going to go off. What the Touch Tester does is visualize your body cord and weapon resistance with graphs and provide a diagnosis based on the state of your A,B, and C lines. Actually, for this reason, I hate the thing, because it removed my blissful ignorance from competition and made me hyper paranoid about the state of all my gear. I tested three random body cords from my bag only to find all three of them were no bueno. It gives you different diagnoses that are crystal clear to armory idiots like myself:
- High resistance values – cord may be breaking
- Cord may fail weapon check – very high resistance (with a graph spiking in the c-line)
What this device does exceptionally well is that it allows you to select the body cords from your bag that are in the best place to perform, rather than simply passing a baseline armory test and playing electrical Russian roulette with your gear. The visualization of each line is the key differentiator for your athletes that likely aren’t carrying ohmmeters in their bag. Best of all, for those competing on the international circuit, this will give you assurance that your gear is FIE compliant or not.
Testing a foil/sabre cord is equally easy. Simply plug the two prongs into the B and C lines and then attach the alligator clip to the A line, and you will be able to run the same diagnostics as you would in Epee.
Lamé testing was easy as well. You plug the body cord into the weapon-side port of the Touch Tester, plug in your foil/sabre attach the alligator clip to your lamé, and then touch around the lame to check for potential deadspots. It might be better in the future to offer an attachment that allows the user to drag a diode across the lame to test (just as armorers do) instead of compressing the tip to test.
Another nice feature to have in the future would be the ability to store diagnostic data on the device. That way, I could track gear degradation over time and if I’m noticing a downward trend, I could repair/replace my gear before it hits rock bottom.
The weapon testing function yields similarly impressive results. You plug in a body cord to the top of the touch tester, press down and hold onto the tip, and it will emit an Atari-like beep when it goes off. Much like the body cord, it will give you good diagnostics for identifying issues (or confirming the gear works).
At a tournament last weekend, I was passing it around with teammates who used it to check gear, realize things needed swapping, and adjust accordingly. Every single person who tried the Touch Tester swapped equipment, realizing that not all of their gear was in as good a place as originally expected. None of us won, but that wasn’t Touch Tester’s fault.
With this device, you’re going to know precisely what is wrong with your gear to be able to go an armorer for repairs (or fix it yourself if you’re not a neanderthal). Packaging it all into a tiny device presents an evolution in a fencing bag’s necessities that we haven’t seen since the invention of the banana.
Pricing
The Touch Tester retails at a reasonable $199.99 that is currently discounted to $149.99 for the holidays. It’s not terribly expensive, nor is it cheap. The difference is, you’re paying for portability and the ability to provide visualized diagnostics. With generic test boxes, they’ll tell you if the circuit is complete or not.
| Fencing Test Box Brand | Price |
| Touch Tester | $199.99 |
| Generic Amazon Brand | $19.99 |
| Prieur Foil & Epee Test Box | $59.00 |
| Favero Professional Testbox | $1319.00 |
| Favero Standard Testbox | $99.00 |
The Bottom Line
At a fraction of the price and size of professional testers, Touch Tester should be in every competitive fencer’s bag. It’s not just about catching failures. It’s about competing with confidence, knowing your equipment is dialed in perfectly. For anyone serious about the sport, this is an essential investment that will pay dividends every time you step on the strip. For this reason, I highly recommend the device.
| Things I Like | Opportunities |
| -Portability -Ease of Use -Doesn’t just provide diagnostics, but provides actionable insights -Fraction of the price of professional testers with all functionality -Works well across all three weapons | -Touch screen is flimsy and opaque at certain angles -Not battery powered -Doesn’t store any diagnostics -Could use some slight adjustments on the lame testing front |
TouchTester is offering a $10 discount to TFC readers. Simply use the code “TheFencingCoach” at checkout.
You can order from their website here: https://www.touch-tester.com/
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