Saturday, August 29, 2009
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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9 comments:
I think I now have a new favorite web site.
The item that caught my eye was the Utility knife. Yes, I do have one, and mine is just standard, run of the mill knife, it can house a few extra blades, but those blades do occasionally break. The knife that they are advertising would be very helpful if you were doing lost of repetitive work, and needed those extra blades regularly. For my purposes, the knife would not be worth the cost, but for a craftsman, it would definitely be a tool that would be worth those ten to twelve dollars.
This weeks Toolmonger seemed to contain the tow different ends of the useful/not useful scale. I know it's odd, but the fact that Dap now has a new quick dry formula is just awesome. I had to to a lot of work with Dap this summer, and my biggest issue was that the humidity in the air played havic on the dry time, so I'm hoping that Dap 3.0 dries a little faster given that it's water ready in about three hours. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the SpeedPack Utility knife. For years I've been a big fan of Kobalt's utility knives, mostly because they're quick change with seeming dangerous or over designed. This whole clip system just seems a little excessive since even an generic utility knife takes a minute, maybe two to change blades in. With these fancy ones I always have this horrible image of the blade flying out of them powered by some bizarre spring system. This SpeedPak's clip system just makes that mental image all the more real to me.
The only tool that i found useful to me was the utility knife it looked like it was very easy to change the blade and it would be fast to do so. Every thing else seemed like it would not be useful for me at this time.
So unlike the others who posted above me the thing that caught my eye was "The Official Goo Of The 21st Century." Can someone really make that claim? Seems a bit extreme to me that a goo is so official. I guess this goo does seal and waterproof in 3 hours which is pretty sweet!
The utility knife is very interesting. I would like to get my hands on it to see how it feels, and how easy it is to change out a blade. I have a couple of folding utility knives, one from when they were introduced a few years ago. They have flooded the utility knife system now. The blade change on those units is fairly fast, so this one must be lighting speed to claim to have a fast blade change.
I don't know much about tools, so this website was really interesting! That utility knife looks really useful, and very efficient! I'd also be really interested in trying out that Official Goo of the 21st century. But, I'm with Katherine on this, how did they decide it was the "official" goo?
I'm not sure how I feel about the utility knife. I own an iteration of that device with the reload-able blades and, while I have found it useful, i have found it equally dangerous. Because the blade itself can be easily removed, it is easy for it to fall out when trying to extend the blade from the knife. At that point I wonder which is more important, safety or laziness?
While some of these items seem to have something that makes the special and indispensable, I felt like some are just an example of what a flashy loook and advertising can do. Many of the features in SpeedPak Utility Knife seem like features that already exist in other knives and while I understand in the beauty and freedom of having choices I find myself wondering how useful this really is. The Dap 3.0 on the other hand, seems like a product with an innovation that could legitimately make a big difference to those who use it. Having used caulk before mostly for small scale projects I can see how incredibly convenient it would be to have a product that would dry and be completely waterproof in 3 hours.
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