Preveiw: The Full-Snouted Chalk Hog
By Sean O'Hara
This year we’ve seen many tool manufactures making great strides in chalk and chalk lines. Pros will tell you this has been a long time coming. We ourselves have seen our fair share of blue-stained toolboxes from snap lines that couldn’t hold their powder. C.H. Hanson claims the way of the future is more chalk and a beefier housing. Meet the Chalk Hog.
It’s a heavy duty snap line with an 8 oz. screw in bottle attached to the rear of the unit. It includes a filler cap that covers the large hole and allows the snap line to be applied as a normal one would — without the bottle.
The ‘Hog ships in two sizes. The smaller of the two features a pencil sharpener while the largeer one has a heavy-duty handle — perfect for grabbing when you’re wearing work gloves.
The bottle system looks good, but the extra chalk just means extra extra spill potential to us. Almost all snap lines leak a little, but with a beer-can-sized extra chalk load lurking in the drawer, we might advise caution.
We do applaud C.H. Hanson for calling it like they see it and naming the hog after what it looks like. Though I admit I’d have never have suspected that a snap line plus chalk bottle would look like a swine.
The Hogs are all over their website, but sadly C.H Hanson but doesn’t list the release date. If we had to guess, though, we’d expect ‘em soon.
Chalk Hog [C.H Hanson]
July 27th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
I think these have already been released. I have seen these (or something very similar) at my local big box lately. Although the big 2 don’t list them on their web sites.
July 27th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
They look too large to fit in a tool belt, and that’s where I use mine from 99% of the time. I’ve never had mine leak, though the refill bottles are a different story — those little caps have a tendency to pop off when stored in a well-jostled toolbox.
July 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Chalk Hog 150 is available and as Ray noted, available at Lowe’s. The Chalk Hog 100 will be available shortly.
Actually, the bottle application reduces chances of spillage and even under heavy use, the Chalk Hog 150 hasn’t leaked.
The ability to mark a mile longer is due to a felt “cleaning” pad housed where the line is drawn from the unit. This allows for a cleaner line when extracting the line, the snap line itself has less extra residue, and thus, the retrieval produces less waste.
The entire unit is held together with only four screws and extremely durable.