These sub 8-pound nail guns are comfortable to use and surprisingly powerful.
Skil recently announced a new wormdrive saw that they say is 4 pounds lighter than their Mag77. That grabbed my attention because the Mag77 is one of the lightest inline saw around .
It’s not easy to earn a place in my tool bags. Here are 11 tools that make the cut.
A few weeks back I wrote about Blaklader work pants, but I've also been wearing the company's Two Fisted Fleece Jacket. I prefer it to the regular fleece I used to wear because it's resistant to wind and water, and has a number of construction-specific features designed into it...
The last few years I've been hearing a lot about Blaklader, a Swedish company that makes work clothes that are designed to be functional, durable, and professional looking. Tools of the Trade asked me to try some of these clothes out and I have been wearing them for about a year. Here's what I can...
My crew recently formed and poured the foundation for a 4,200 square foot custom home we would later be framing. It was larger than the homes we normally build - the perfect opportunity to try out a tool I had seen at the JLC LIVE tradeshow...
My crew and I used to hand-nail framing hardware, but as codes changed and we had to install more and more of the stuff, it became impractical to nail by hand.
Like other contractors who comply with OSHA fall standards, I've had to ask myself: how am I supposed to compete with crews that don't use fall protection?
Here in the Northwest, rain is the biggest problem we have in the winter. But it gets cold too – not as cold as other places, but cold enough to make it hard to operate a caulking gun. I used to warm the tubes by putting them on the dashboard or under the heater when I drove to work. It worked okay...
I'm always looking for faster techniques or tools to speed things up and found the V-Line clamp by accident. It is designed to...
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Several years back I read a story about gang cutting rafters – so I started doing it on my framing jobs. Gang cutting means setting all your rafters on edge on racks and using specialized saws such as...
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It rains a lot in the Pacific Northwest and we can't stop working just because it is wet. I don't mind working in the rain, but I do mind being uncomfortable – so for me, good rain gear is an important part of my tool kit.
For this article we tested four higher-voltage saws – 36-volt models from Bosch, DeWalt, and Hilti, and a 28-volt model from Milwaukee. We used them while framing and siding a house and for building a deck. Later, we performed a test to see how many cuts each saw could make per charge.
Fifteen years ago, when I started out as a framer, Skil was the only real choice for carpenters looking for an inline saw. Since then, a lot more companies have started making these tools and now there are quite a few to choose from.
Like many carpenters, I enjoy listening to music at work. When I was starting out, there were only a couple of options: Leave the truck radio on with the door open (and risk having to jump the battery later on) or listen to a bad-sounding boombox that was held together with duct tape and had a wire...