CMU School of Drama


Saturday, October 04, 2008

The Week in Tools: Toolmonger Top 5

Toolmonger: "It’s been a busy week here at Toolmonger. If you’ve been spending time in the shop — you should! — and you haven’t had a chance to keep up with Toolmonger this week, we suggest you start with these posts, which our readers helped to select"

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alright, I have to say this. I love fubars. I think that despite all the jokes you can make about never actually needing them, they are amazing tools when you actually know what they're supposed to be used for. I use a normal fubar to speed up my building of platforms, and once I block out all the jokes about not being able to hold wood without a tool, I build close to twice as fast as I normally do. That being said, I'm surprised that the fubar needed to be upgraded. The original one is pretty indestructible as far as I can tell, and well, the fact that they've "beefed" it some worries me. Fubar aren't light, so I'd be worried about the trade of of versatility for that extra structural integrity.

dmxwidget said...

The Stanley Fire tool/rescue fubar looks cool and practical. It could be useful for a strike application. The right angle reciprocating saw cutter looks useful and practical. The board bender looks useful as well. The drill bit tools is useful, although we never use drill bits that small.

Sam Thompson said...

The board bender is a great idea, and practical, but if you've got a pipe wrench lying around, then you've got your board-bender. You don't always have to buy a specialized tool for every application. Oftentimes you have what you need, you just haven't figured out how to use it yet.

Anonymous said...

I own a fubar too and i'll be damned if that thing don't come in handy all the time. Part wrecking hammer, board twister, wonderbar, etc.. I usually keep having to go chasing after the thing to keep it from wandering away. That being said, the bigger version is insane to me. Ammerman hit my concern after reading the article dead on, in that it's gotta be heavy. One of the problems i found my smaller fubar is it's to heavy sometimes. Lugging around the big one is probably like a sledge and a half.

BWard said...

now where's the wood stretcher and the dowel straightener?

sam's comment about the pipe wrench is something i haven't thought about - it's something i can see myself doing in the shop at some point.

the drill chuck that allows smaller bits to be used in drills is nice too, but i'd rather see one that allows a 3/8" chuck to accept 1/2" bits. we seem to run into that problem a bit more often than smaller ones