Saturday, November 01, 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"
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7 comments:
The fishing line dart gun looks like it might be unusually useful for things. I can see how this may be useful for unconventional places that we do things where it may be near impossible to get into an area quickly or without specialty tools or personnel.
I dunno, personally The Gun just replace the ole washer on a piece of string deal to me. Not that interesting.
I liked the battery tester, that actually could be fairly handy. Would be a nice addition to the tool collection here at CMU.
The die grinder and the knives are kinda eh... I mean the grinders kinda nice for being able to reach those few extra spots that are a pain to reach but still...meh.
I've thought about buying the dart gun a few times after working in particularly difficult catwalks. However, what it comes down to is that you still need to be on both sides of that cable, so a regular cable snake would seem to work. I think at that point it just becomes another, "hey check out this cool thing I have in my toolbox" and less of a practical item. I can certainly see its uses, but it seems to be really specific and probably not worth the 100 dollars when a 30 dollar snake will do the job just fine.
The dart/cable gun look really cool and I would have had plenty of uses for this in the past when running cables through ceilings. One of my friends would be interested in the battery tester. He is a heavy diesel mechanic and he would find this handy. The grinder looked interesting as well, but not as cool as the cable gun.
I had the opportunity to use a cable caster over the summer, let me tell you it made the job so much easier, most of the time. I was working on expanding an installed sound system in a drop ceiling and the parts of the job we could do 50' at a time with the cable caster were great. You do have to be cautious not to snag it on anything though. The gun mechanism could stand to be a bit stronger also to require less of an arc for longer shots.
I think the die grinder would be pretty useful. It seems like there's always those spots you can't seem to reach with a regular grinder, so you never get your grind finished. With this die grinder, you can do all the stuff you can with a regular grinder, as well as reaching those tough spots.
This week seemed to be convenience and knife week at the Toolmong Shop this week. The fishing dart gun was personally my favorite. Odd idea, but now that I have read about it, it seems more interesting and almost useful. It feels very Batman on some levels. Initially I was worried that this was something you would use to shoot cable to another point, but once I realized it was just a modified fishing real, I was somewhat disseminated. At $100, it seems a bit too much for something that will just be used to pull thread.
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