It’s been a busy week here at Toolmonger. If you’ve been spending time in the shop — you should! — and you haven’t had a chance to keep up with Toolmonger this week, we suggest you start with these posts, which our readers helped to select:
Socket With Butterfly Wings
It looks like EZ Red designed their butterfly sockets for fasteners on which you’d normally use a flare wrench but can’t get the wrench around the fastener. Just wrap the butterfly socket around the fastener and when you close it, stick a 1/2″ ratchet or breaker bar into the square drive hole to turn it.
Preview: Stanley Virax M20 Plus
A pressing machine squeezes fittings together to make solderless joints in copper, stainless and PEX tubing even with residual fluid still in the pipe. It’s wicked handy and it’s what many pros use to fix leaks in modern pipes. Stanley VIRAX now launched the first of its pressing guns into the U.S. market.
Leatherman Charge ALX
We’ve seen different versions of multi-tools for ages, but they rely on a simple straight-edged pocket knife to do most of the real work. Leatherman’s interesting Charge ALX model is a little different. It does away with many of the old issues multi-tools faced, like those Phillips drivers.
Hot or Not? Festool MFT/3 Basic Multifunction Table
Festool’s MFT/3 basic multifunction table looks like a piece of thick pegboard with some legs from a card table. It’s more than that, we think. It also comes with rails and a lot of options and $475 sticker shock — standard.
Easier Molding Installation On Bullnose Corners
Bench Dog has a new product that can help wrap molding around bullnose corners. Designed to work with 3/4″ radius rounded corners, this trim gauge slips over the bullnose and indicates where each joint needs to land to get a professional-looking three-piece corner.
Help us choose next week’s Top 5!
We’d appreciate your help in choosing next week’s Top 5, which’ll be featured here, elsewhere, and in the podcast as well. While you’re reading TM this week, look out for the “Interesting Post” button at the bottom of the article:
When you see an article that piques your interest, click the button once. You’ll return to the same page, but TM’s software’ll score your click for future reference. We’ll check in on the totals before selecting next week’s Top 5.
Somewhere behind a desk sits an engineer with a very creative head on his shoulders. Whoever it is, a bright solution for sanding odd surfaces came off his desk in the form of Gator Grit’s sanding sponges. Essentially rectangular prisms of closed cell foam, their outsides are coated with an abrasive very similar to sand paper. For concave surfaces, that can be pretty handy. Trying to get big mitts on the inside of some surfaces can be a real treat, and these can take the sting out of it.
I like flashlights, OK? Some — hi honey! — might even say I have a bit of OCD regarding flashlights. Whatever. In any case, my flashlight fascination probably started when I realized you could use them to read under the covers after your parents declared lights out. Later on, I remember upgrading my clunky D-cell flashlights with that marvel of technology, the krypton bulb.
Did UPS just drop off another tool that you ordered because it was in a Toolmonger post?
If you have an odd-shaped yard or certain plants that need more water than others, the Noodlehead Flexible Lawn and Garden Sprinkler allows you to point 12 “noodles” to precisely the right place for optimal watering. Product literature indicates that the three holes in each noodle give you six feet of coverage, up to 20 feet away, under normal water pressure.
