A day spent sanding is a day spent in hell. Unfortunately I like my projects to come out looking good. Over the last few years we’ve spent hours upon hours “in the grit.” Gator products are normally what get stuck to the bottom of the sander or wrapped around a block. One of Gator’s newest creations is the Ultra Power paper with Black Zirconium.

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Make your paint and other finishes last longer with a two-second blast of Bloxygen before you seal the container. The heavier-than-air, pure argon sinks to the surface of the liquid and displaces oxygen, which can cause the finish to cure in the can. As a result you’ll have less skinning, thickening, and spoiling.

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If you’re planning to make cutting boards, bowls, spoons, or any other project that’s going to come into contact with food, you don’t want to finish it with stain and polyurethane.  Instead you need to use a food-safe alternative like Behlen’s Salad Bowl Finish.

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A good finish is as important to a furniture project as its construction. You’d be surprised how much trouble that statement has gotten me into over the last few years, but it happens to be true.  The first reaction I get to it is, “Not every project needs a finish,” and that’s also absolutely true — however, that particular statement is often the battle cry of the lazy.

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What do you do if you need to sand a curved project that’s too big to get to your oscillating spindle sander — an assembled piece of furniture, for instance?  Most of us aren’t big fans of hand sanding, so this Grizzly Handheld Pneumatic Sander looks pretty appealing.

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My current truck is a ‘93 and I live in the Rust Belt, so the body’s getting rough. Hopefully I’ll be able to spend some time cleaning things up and installing patch panels to get things looking a bit better, but other emergencies keep popping their heads up, so for now I’m keeping up on my tetanus shots and hoping for the best. This new aerosol version of Eastwood’s Rust Converter looks like it might work to my benefit.

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I remember it like it was yesterday;  it was junior high shop class, and we’d been assigned to bring in some of Dad’s tools so we could coat the handles with a protective cover. We all dipped our tools in the Plasti Dip, waited a few seconds, and then the magic happened — when we pulled the tools out, the handles were covered in a protective coating. Dad still has the tools almost thirty years later, and the magic coating never fell off.  Plasti Dip is still going strong, and now you can coat your tools in whatever colors you want.

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Tired of collecting old wax sticks to repair furniture scratches?  FastCap’s SoftWax kit contains twenty wax colors, as well as a furniture-safe WaxWedge and a buffing pad, all in a hard case.  You can apply the waxes straight-up or mix ‘em to get the perfect color.

The SoftWax kit starts at about $25, and you can get refills for $2 per color or $20 for the whole set.

Softwax [FastCap]
Street Pricing [Google]
Via Amazon [What’s This?]

You’ll see checkering most often on firearms, where a good grip on a tool is highly desirable, but you can add this “finish” to any project you want to look beautiful.  As with so many arts, artists seem to be divided by their choice of media, wood and metal being the most popular.  If you’d rather do it yourself instead of paying an artist for a slick checkering job, you can check out some DIY books and videos on the subject.

Checkering files run $30 and up on the street, and groove-cutting tools are similarly priced.

Metal Checkering Files [Brownells]
File Street Pricing [Google Products]
Wood Checkering Set [Wood Carver Supply]
Checkering Tool Street Pricing [Google Products]
Checkering Book Via Amazon [What’s This?]

Finishing a wood project often takes longer than building it, so it sucks when some of these difficult-to-apply finishes don’t wear well.  In the Toolmonger shop, Danish oil has become one of our favorite methods — it’s easy to apply and looks great afterward — so we decided to try Watco’s latest formulation, a cherry stain, to see if it holds up to what folks have come to expect from the line.  We weren’t surprised by our results.

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This great how-to video up in Skil’s “Vid Zone” covers the basics of refinishing hardwood floors.  It shows you what to look for and how to take care of nail heads, worn areas, holes in the floor, and other problems you’ll run into when tackling this type of project.

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Toolmongers’ll sometimes buy a cheap-ass tool on purpose — because we just need to get the job done once, and the tool quality won’t affect the project — but if we really need the tool to work right and it just doesn’t cut it, that’s not cool.  My paint runs any time I paint anything, so the Run Razor looks like a tool I need, but the only review on Amazon says it’s too cheaply made to be worthwhile.

Street pricing is around $6, so even a super-duper version built to the finest German-watchmaker precision couldn’t run more than about $25.

Is the Run Razor a “hot” commodity? Are there any hot alternatives? Let us know in comments.

Run Razor [Motor Guard]
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Via Amazon [What’s This?] [What's This?]

As wood projects go, you’ll probably never deal with any bigger surface than wood floors, and sanding them with a hand tool, powered or not, is a huge project.   To hide as much scratching as possible you’ll want to sand with the grain — which is impossible with the big rotary floor machines — but the SL-8 straight-line floor sander will do the job nicely.

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Recently I posted about these opaque paint-can lids designed for easy pouring, which might be ideal for a job that only uses a couple of colors. But if you happen to work with an interior designer or other colorful sort, you’d probably prefer a see-through paint-can lid like Encore Plastics’ Stack-N-Pour. Though it doesn’t look glass-clear in the pictures, it should at least help tell the difference between red and orange — even if the difference between seafoam green and periwinkle still escapes most of us.

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Sure, DIY truck-bed liners can protect your truck-bed interior, but they can also protect lots of other stuff, from industrial machinery to that functional but ugly toolbox you picked up at the flea market. You can also apply bed liner to surfaces that need to be non-slip, like helipads. Regardless of which brand you go with, you’re getting the same basic product: a polyurethane base, usually color-tinted, with recycled tire chunks suspended within. It sticks to nearly anything, even itself, making for easy repairs.

So have any of you found extraordinary uses for this stuff? How has it held up in your truck bed? Tell us about it in the comments.

Durabak [Official Site]
Herculiner [Official Site]
Lava-Liner [Official Site]

Venturing into “As Seen On TV” territory, I found a fun finish. This two-part stainless-steel-doped epoxy can turn all your furniture into the space-age stainless I keep seeing.

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We didn’t make this up. The Australian company that makes this product gave it a badass name that’s up there with Stanley’s Fubar — Shithot Waxtik. Following the discussions on carnauba and budget woodturning wax, I found this professional blended wax stick that includes carnauba, beeswax, microcrystalline wax, and others. With light pressure the wax stick produces a “lustrous sheen,” and with heavier pressure it gives a “satin finish.”

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