Leatherman's new 5-ounce stripped-to-the-bones multi-tool is called the Skeletool, a moniker its makers claim has nothing to do with the dastardly Skeletor, evil fictional nemesis of He-Man, one of the masters of the universe.
But by the power of Grayskull, I disagree.
Looking something like a cross between an oyster shucker, a pecan cracker, or the most functional shiv an incarcerated inventor has ever devised, the Skeletool combines the menacing looks of an arch villain and sleek functionality that Leatherman has come to embody.
It has an interchangeable set of driving bits, a knife that folds open one-handed, and it pivots on the wire-cutting pliers. It'll obviously be a holiday hit after its mid-November release, and that's when we'll finally put the true question to the test:
How does this thing match up against the Sword of Power?
I used to hear our old Senco Air-Free cordless nailer from the other side of the job site, sounding its characteristic whirrr-POP as it wound up to fire off another nail.
As its Ni-Cad battery lost its juice, that whir got longer and the pop got weaker, until eventually it just spat nails disgustedly onto the floor.
DeWalt's new brad nailer still uses a NiCad battery, but it fires 800 2-inch brads on a single charge--enough to easily hang a roomful of crown molding. Here's hoping the 18-gauge, 18-volt gun can keep up with the ones still tethered to compressors.
The moldings on brownstone doors in my part of Brooklyn have intricate, tightly packed profiles that would have likely been milled on-site by a worker wielding a molding plane similar to the Stanley 45 shown above.
Our friend Nate at South Slope Woodworks uses that same plane to reproduce and restore said doors, changing out its soles to cut the same complex profiles carpenters carved out 100 years ago.
"You have to use the old tools to understand how the work was done, and to compare how the modern tools measure up," Nate says.
See those green blades in the foreground? It's a router bit Lee Valley claims can clone the exact moldings the Stanley planes produced a century ago.
I've been planning (code for procrastinating) a bathroom remodel in my house for some time now.
Well, earlier this week my wife and I sat down at the table to make a plan. With a ruler and graph paper, we started plotting where we wanted things to go. A couple of minutes later, I'd worn down a perfectly good eraser and made a heck of a mess out of the graph paper.
There's got to be a better way, right?
There is. And it's free. Hey, wait a minute, did you say free?
You’ve got to hand it to those forward-thinking engineers at Black & Decker. They’re not afraid to think outside the box—sometimes way outside—when designing innovative new tools.
Who could forget the one-handed reciprocating HandiSaw, the light-saber-like Bright Bar, or the shifty-chucked Rota-Driver? Well, they’ve done it again.
This time, it's one of the funkiest multi-tools I've seen in quite some time.
If you've ever gone shopping for a new kitchen appliance, you've probably ended up feeling the way I do: after a while, everything looks the same.
Chrome and stainless steel start blending together and all those "special" little knobs and buttons just start becoming irritatingly similar. Even those nifty, relatively new warming drawers have been looking a little humdrum to me these days.
But yesterday, I had the pleasure of coming across something I'd never seen before: The Lift Oven.
There's something wonderfully honest about seeing a slab of wood, knots and all, fashioned into a piece of furniture with the shape of the trunk ringing the rough edges.
And there's something just plain wonderful about the phrase Slabs for Sale. It appears on the website of Urban Hardwoods, a Seattle company with over 18 pages of ash, walnut, redwood, and maple that have been reclaimed from urban trees that would otherwise be burned, chipped, or headed to the landfill.
So let's review: a mound of mulch, or the western walnut writing desk shown above. I think Urban Hardwoods is doing the right thing--hope I'm not going too far out on a limb to say so.
The two parts of a hole saw--and two of my favorite words in woodworking--are the central arbor and the circular, serrated mandrel. Mandrels of different diameters twist onto the arbors, you chuck the arbor in the drill, and the boring begins.
The arbor and mandrel are meant for each other, but the two have a way of getting separated in the bottom of the toolbox. Now, though, I've found a way to keep them together forever.
