The notion of promiscuity rarely enters the mind when reviewing tools, but there was something about the RakeHoe that just seemed a little, well, easy.
The tool, on one side, is a fine garden rake. On the other side, it's a hoe. That's right, a soil-shifting, weed-whacking, ground-grading dirty hoe.
You need a rake, you need a hoe, and you usually need them at the same time. Put them on the same handle, and there ain't much turf the RakeHoe can't turn.
Forget spiderwebs and screaming skulls--when I want to frighten the neighborhood kids out of their Halloween costumes, I reach for Crescent's 19-inch forged alloy nail-puller.
A simple hand tool by day, but at night it's as menacing as a bludgeon on a Hollywood set.
I could go scarier, I know. But who has room for a table saw by the front door?
Read on to see how I use the puller on the other 364 days of the year.
On the concrete-clad front walks in Brooklyn, the typical "rake" is often the side of a shoe, an old scrap of cardboard, or, if you're as sophisticated as Javier here, an actual broom.
Concrete doesn't treat the bristles kindly, though. Anything natural abrades quickly, and the synthetic jobs don't fare much better, as you can see below.
The problem, Javier explains, is that the leaves continue to fall, despite his best efforts.
"I sweep it up in the morning, but by the afternoon I gotta do the whole walk over," he says.
That's the claim being made, at least, by the narrator of this video. He has added a water inlet to a spinning CD magazine, and magnetically attached what appears to be the dullest circular saw blade I've ever seen.
I think Gizmodo summed it up nicely: It wouldn't spin fast or hard enough to cut through wood,
but it should make short work of the fleshy area
between your thumb and fingers.
As a side note, the video makes several mentions of the SkilSaw brand name. Though a hydraulic turbine would be quite, ahem, cutting-edge, the company's actual saws tend to run on old-fashioned electricity.
I like a clever reinvention of the rake, but sometimes the best way to upgrade a hand tool is to add a little bit of power.
Husqvarna's new $150 blower has plenty of oomph--you can set the throttle on "cruise control," blasting wind at a steady 170 mph.
Most blowers' handles are slightly offset from the air stream, putting a constant strain on your arm and wrist as you wrestle to keep it blowing straight. Instead, the 125B's handle, throttle, and outlet are all in line, so the 9.4-pounder naturally falls into a comfortable working position and reduces fatigue.
Because if you wanted tired arms, you'd still be using a rake, right?
This amazing feat of hammer-juggling comes to us via our buddy Wayne. It's in German, if I'm hearing correctly, but it spoke to me in the international language of amazement.
Amazing not only because steel hammers are continually flying at the performer's face, and not only because his airborne tools pound a nail in as many strokes as I can with a hammer firmly gripped, but because he does it all while wearing an unbuttoned flannel shirt draped from his elbows.
So for those of you at home with aspirations to juggle hammers, the accessory of choice is not a helmet, mouthpiece, or goggles.
Press events are generally the place to be for finding out about the latest and greatest. But very few have ever made me say, "Oooh, cool!"
Well, not out loud, anyway.
The end result of electricity company Con Edison's partnership with DC comics is one of the exceptions.
Taking me back to the days when I used to pretend to be Daily Planet investigative journalist Lois Lane, these energy and home safety comic books mix Justice League of America heroes in short and sweet action-packed tales.
As an added bonus, ConEd introduces a few characters of their own. More on the adventures Mikey Safetysocket after the link below.
$2.57 a gallon. That's what the citizens of St. Louis pay for gas, the lowest price nationwide.
But what if you could make even cheaper gas and save the environment in your own garage? Biodiesel Solutions offers the Fuelmeister II, which brings brewing your own fuel closer to home.
Step one, according to the press release: "Simply collect used fry oil from area restaurants, pour the liquid into the processor and the FuelMeister does the work!"
I couldn't do it. I'm just not cool enough for wallpaper like this—and I'm quite alright with that.
See, Germany-based company Surrealien has come up with this system for customizing already wigged out graphic wallpaper to bend and warp in relation to your room's picture frames, furniture and other furnishings.
The result? A quite disorienting experience worthy of Dadaists everywhere.
Craftsman has a well-earned reputation for producing power tools that are innovative, well built, and reasonably priced. Their new Li-Ion cordless sabre saw is no exception.
This high-performance, pro-duty tool is powered by a 20-volt lithium-ion battery that’s nearly 40 percent lighter than a similar size NiCad battery, has a longer run time, and can be recharged over 2,000 times. (Most nicads peter out after 1,000 or so recharges.)
I recently used this sabre saw (a.k.a. jigsaw) to cut some red-oak stair treads, and the motor never slowed or stalled.
