Tool of the Month (or summer)

Okay- I started to write this in June- but then the house took over and I never finished it. So my idea of tool of the month, will not be exactly every month. But here’s this month’s choice.

My last tool review of the nipper is still a favorite of mine, but this month it was a toss up between the shop-vac, gorilla ladder that I borrowed from a friend, and the circle saw/worm drive. Hopefully there won’t be a correlation between writing about my favorite tools and their longevity! We’ve used all of these quite a bit during the demo and they’ve made the job much easier. But I think the circle saw is my favorite tool right now. (The Bosch jigsaw that Kensington Bungalow reviewed may be a future tool choice!)

We’ve got a Bosch Worm Drive:

I guess it’s not a circle saw. Nick says it has something to do with the way the power goes from the motor to the blade. All I know is that we were able to cut through the linoleum, mis-matched subfloor, old laminate leftover glue and the ruined fir flooring without cutting through the original sub floor. This made for a lot less dust and the floor demolition went pretty smoothly. Now if we could only find a tool that would carry the debris out to the dumpster!

So here’s what I’ve seen that makes this tool great: You can set it to cut at a specific depth. This way you can cut through just what you want to- that’s why we still have a subfloor in our kitchen after cutting away the top layers that we needed to pry out. It also let us make a cut in front of the fridge, allowing us to leave the fridge supported until we reinforce or replace the subfloor to support it in another part of the kitchen.

Now that we are past the demolition stage of this project, we’ve used it quite a bit. Mainly for cutting pieces of plywood to frame out where the fridge, oven and cabinets will be since we are not running radiant heat under those parts of the floor.

Here’s why I think this is a great tool:

It cuts clean and is powerful. I haven’t seen it get stuck. It’s portable and reliable. It’s easy to figure out. I can use it & am not afraid of injuring myself.

The one drawback is that it’s pretty heavy, but that’s why it is so powerful. Nick says the next to the sawzall it’s the manliest tool he owns…