Saturday, March 13, 2010
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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4 comments:
Glad to see the toolmonger post returning :) I've really enjoyed the 'made in...' series, and particularly look forward to the actual suggestions (now that they're done criticizing the myths) differences in tool quality are a big deal, but something I don't know enough about, so I'm interested in what they have to suggest. I'd also like to take a moment to grumble about these short screwdrivers showing up again. The problem I always see is that places with small tool inventories end up with a few of these, either from buying them or from multi-packs, and then all of the useful, full-sized screwdrivers get lost or walk away. Iterate a few times, and you have3 a toolbox full of tiny, uncomfortable stubby screwdrivers, and nothing else.
All hail the return of Toolmonger. The Micro Kerf Blade while being awesomely thin, strikes me as something that most people might have more issues with then long term benefits. Don't get me wrong, it's really impressive to see that their are saws out there that are this thin, but I imagine that it's probably a little too easy to break this blade. The article gave the impression that the hardening disks that sit at center do a good job of keeping the blade from bending while in use, but it these really seem to also limit just how much use you can get out of the saw since they look like they make the saw thicker then a normal saw blade.
Perhaps Wiha will finally get the interchangeable-bit stubby screwdriver done right, so many other companies have tried and I've yet to find one that doesn't feel like a set of compromises, none of which let it be a truly useful tool. There are certainly limits in what you can do when you're limited in length, but when the screwdriver handle is so short the handle needs to be correspondingly wider (at least for those of us with larger hands) in order to work well, if not then you're left with something that feels too small to control or to get a decent amount of torque with.
The Penta square is awesome. I can't even count how many times I've been working on something with a combo square and said "damnit!" and wished I had something more useful in hand. I sorta get the 22.5 angle, although personally, rarely run into using it.
I wonder if there would be a way to make a variable combination square -- I guess some framing squares do that, but something that indexes and allows for 0 - 90º? Anyone have ideas?
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