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I bought a few of these Kobalt self locking tapes. I thought I was going to like them but I don't. The design is unique. The tape stays where you pull it out to, until you press backward on the black lever. The red slider provides a more definite lock. This is fine if you're holding the...

Chervon owns the Skil brand, and they market Skil as a homeowner brand and Skilsaw as a pro brand. This division apparently goes back to when Bosch briefly owned the marque. There's a lot of confusion around this, even here on this forum; I've seen people rhetorically asking why pay $700 for a...

Here are the HF selections for 24t 6.5" blades: And here's HD around the corner: The Hercules looks like a closer comparison to the Diablo. I'm wondering how we got to the point where HF is charging more than the name brand. That Hercules blade doesn't even have the usual "Compare to [x]...

Not an HVAC guy by any stretch, but I don't mind trying to figure things out, so here's the story. My second floor AC stopped working just as the weather got warm here in northern IL. It would run a bit and then shut down before making any difference. No codes showing on the blinking LED from...

I have a 7.25" corded Makita, and I like it a lot. I don't have a 6.5" saw, and I'm considering getting one, maybe the DeWalt 20v. For those of you who have both sizes, which do you find yourself using more? I mean, if the material requires the larger saw, obviously that's what you have to...

When speaking of one of these: ... what are you inclined to call it? Jigsaw or sabre (or saber) saw? I'm old, and I grew up calling it a sabre saw. I don't anymore, because the manufacturers call them jigsaws now. It took a while to adjust. I'm not entirely certain, but I suspect "jigsaw"...

I put my new DeWalt cordless jigsaw into service. Of course I tested on scrap first, and I found the cuts weren't 90° with the saw on the preset detent, and they weren't consistently off; some cuts were farther off than others. Poking around at it, I discovered the issue. The metal foot skid...

So today I scored a killer deal on some DeWalt at Lowe's. The promo is, buy a 4Ah XR battery and charger kit for $199 and choose a free tool from a list of a dozen or so choices; or a kit of two 5Ah batteries and charger for $299 and pick two free tools from that list. I took the $299 deal and...

Seems like almost every compact flashlight (read: 2 or 3 AA cell size) on Amazon has multiple modes. Strobe, SOS flashing, all sorts of stupid stuff. My requirements for a flashlight are simple: emit light when I turn it on, stop emitting light when I turn it off. I don't want to cycle...

I glued together a big wooden block to make a stand for kitchen utensils. Kind of like a knife block, but with 1-1/8" holes to fit the handles of spatulas and spoons and so forth. The idea was to make it out of jatoba scraps, but I had the bright idea to use something cheaper for the core of...

From https://xkcd.com/.

I have a 20v DeWalt drill and impact set, perhaps 15 years old, came with the black batteries. Recently bought some new batteries, the yellow ones. The batteries slot in, and the tools operate, but I get a strong ozone smell from them when I do. Is this normal?

I have a pair of Purdy brushes I've been using since the 1990s. Obviously I clean them thoroughly after each use, and make sure they're clean all the way up to the ferrules so they never get choked with paint. But sometimes I see Chinese knockoffs that look like Purdy or Wooster, with good...

I usually have a good memory for details, and typically I can remember where and when I purchased any tool. But these, I have no idea where they came from or how long I've had them, and it bothers me: The rail doesn't match my others. I have no email record of buying anything like this from...

Typically I keep a 40T blade on the table saw for general purpose cutting. For some time now it's been a Freud Fusion blade. It's served me well, but on the latest project I found it was burning its way through the cuts; might be time to replace it. I cut a lot of jatoba, which is hard on...

I have a Delta 12" "sliding" miter saw. (It doesn't actually slide, it has hinged arms instead, but that sort of device.) It's new Delta, not the old school brand. Recently I had a project requiring about 60 short repetitive cuts, and by the time I got toward the end of them, I noticed the saw...

To be called handmade, does something need to be made using only hand tools? If not, is any kind of power tool OK, or are there limits? Like say, using a power drill is still handmade, but using a planer isn't? What's your opinion of what makes a piece "handmade?"

I had a 1/4" deep socket fall off an extension into the engine bay the other day, which led me to try to find out why. So I spent a little while plugging the extension into different sockets, and the socket into different extensions, looking for where the slop was. And I found something...

Maybe it belonged to someone named Phillip?

Considering a new bench planer. Currently I have a Dewalt DW734 that's starting to act up in weird ways. Looking for something comparable. The DW735X is well regarded but I don't want to spend that much. I'm considering this Delta 22-590X unit: It checks all the boxes for me. Four post design...