CH Hanson sells two low-cost accessories to protect and enhance your marking tools: Pencil Armor and Crayon Armor. Although I find it hard to justify spending a few bucks to protect a ten-cent pencil, I’ve held the pencil armor and it does look pretty cool. Armor for crayons, on the other hand, might make more sense since they’re a bit more expensive and fragile.

CH Hanson designed the aluminum Pencil Armor to work with rectangular carpenter’s pencils. The armor only exposes as much of the pencil as you need. You advance the pencil by sticking your thumb into the slot and pressing forward. The Armor also has a clip so you can keep the pencil in you shirt pocket.

The plastic Crayon Armor securely holds one of CH Hanson’s crayons and protects it from breaking since it only exposes enough crayon for marking. There’s a thumb slot for exposing more crayon and a lanyard strap.

The Crayon Armor will cost you about $4 and the Pencil Armor will run you $2 before shipping. Before paying double the product’s worth in shipping charges, check out your local Home Depot; mine carries the Pencil Armor, so maybe yours does too.

C.H. Hanson [Corporate Site]
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Crayon Armor Via Amazon [What’s This?]
Pencil Armor Via Amazon [What’s This?]

How exactly are you supposed to improve graph paper? A grid of lines on a sheet of pressed cellulose. It doesn’t get much simpler, but Whitelines has come up with a very clever twist. Instead of printing heavy blue or grey lines on a white sheet, they print a grid of very faint darker squares on the usual white background. The result is white grid lines. Graph paper’s great stuff, but your own lines can get lost among the factory competition, a problem Whitelines solves. For extra cool factor, the paper looks totally white when scanned.

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The specialty pens folks would like you to use in the shop get pretty amusing — take the Inka pen for instance. For $13 you can get the Inka Pen made from 304 stainless steel and carbon fiber with a pressurized ink cartridge (like those in the Fisher Space Pen), allowing the pen to write wet or dry at any angle or on rough wood. The integrated PDA stylus is just the equivalent of a laser. Are they serious? You could buy an entire box of square shop pencils for that.

A Viton o-ring seals up the closed pen (3.15″ long and 0.375″ diameter). If you’re in a hurry, you can just pull it apart and you have a stubby pen. When it’s fully assembled, it’s 5″ long. It fits the hand well, and the stainless gives it a nice heft.

For a crack-smoking $40, you can pick up the Inka Special Titanium version that weighs in at only 0.45 oz. Or again get a shop pencil that they often give out free at the local home center with the purchase of 50 cents or more.

Inka [Manufacturer's Site]
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Via Amazon [What’s This?]

Readers will no doubt be disappointed that this post isn’t a racy commentary on Sophie Marceau or some such foreign lovely. But, there’s humor to be had. These drawing aids come from (no kidding) Dick Blick art materials. Ever heard a name like that outside of the kind of film you don’t want your kids finding?

Silly retailer aside, these can turn back-of-the-napkin sketches into much more polished pieces. Engineers and designers who don’t get along with drawing (pretty common thanks to commonplace CAD systems) will appreciate the smooth, easy arcs a French curve can produce, and they can be a real time-saver. Additionally, they’re cheap. Dick Blick sells a set of three made by Alvin for $7.10, but your local Staples may be a better bet.

French curves [Dick Blick Art Materials]

Speaking of mechanical pencils, the Uni Kuru Toga has a nifty little clutch mechanism that rotates the lead a small amount each time it touches the writing surface. This rotation promotes uniform wearing of the pencil lead, and prevents getting the dreaded slanted lead surface, or chisel point, that can either break or give you increasingly wide lines. The rotating pencil lead maintains a sharper point with correspondingly narrower line widths. If you’re scribing a line against a straight or curved edge, you’re not likely to be lifting the pencil and retouching the surface, so the rotation advantages won’t apply in this case (unless, of course, you make a dashed line). In typical writing applications, however, it works very well, and it’s neat to watch the rotation mechanism in action when you touch the paper.

The Uni Kuru Toga is available for $7 (both 0.3mm and 0.5mm).

Street Pricing [Google Products]

You carry a pen around religiously, but wouldn’t it be nice to have calipers always handy? If you owned a Messograf caliper pen from Cleo Skribent, you’d always have calipers.

Built into the retractable ballpoint pen is a 4″ Vernier caliper that measures in increments of both 0.1mm and 1/16″. The pen also functions as a metric screw thread scale and a tire tread depth scale.

Made in Germany from chrome-plated brass, the Messograf caliper pen retails for about $27 or so depending on the exchange rate, but you can find it as low as $20 before shipping.

Messograf [Cleo Skribent]
Messograf [Garrett Wade]
Messograf [Passion4Pens]

How many times have you cursed at a wooden pencil slipping endlessly through your greasy-handed grip? Not many? Well, listen up anyway. The Draftmatic is a pencil designed for artists (yes, I know. Bear with me), available with 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9mm lead sizes. Since it’s mechanical, you won’t lose any time sharpening it, but the tiny little eraser probably won’t last very long in rough environments. The pencil itself, made by a very good name from strong plastics and fine steel, probably will.

But why bother mentioning it? Well, the answer is that bit of machined steel at the pencil’s business end — a chromed, knurled-steel grip. Oily hands? Pfft. Your fingers are going nowhere. The quality materials won’t collect gunk, either, and even if they do, a shot of brake cleaner would restore the pencils to brand-new status. Woodworkers will appreciate the 0.9mm version, with lead thick enough to stand those little bumps and knots, as well as any annoying notches in your ruler. Art and online stores have Draftmatics for around $9.

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

A framing square just isn’t designed to work with sheets of plywood. Especially when making cabinets, most pieces you need to lay out exceed the length of a standard sized framing square. That’s why Woodpeckers designed their 36″x24″ giant square.

Woodpeckers’ CNC machines the square in the USA from 1/4″ phenolic and guarantees the giant square won’t deviate more that ±.005″ from 90° across its entire length. They make the 36″ long leg 3″ wide and the 24″ leg 4″ wide, and machine three handle slots into the square to make it easy to hold and store. Finally, they laser engrave markings in 1/8″ increments along both sides of the square.

Woodpeckers will begin shipping their giant square the 27th of July (2009) and it will cost about $80 shipped.

Giant Framing Square [Woodpeckers]

Carabiners make everything better, right?  That seems to be the mantra of SnapGate, a company who builds a carabiner into products like tape measures, flashlights, and pens. They sell both plastic promotional products and a few real tools.

One of the real tools is an 6″ aluminum flashlight they claim to be waterproof (non-submersible) and shatterproof. Two AA batteries power the flashlight’s krypton bulb. The other real tools are the tape measures which they manufacture in 16′ and 25′ lengths. Both tapes feature a rubberized coating over an ABS plastic case.

If you’re into snapping things onto your belt loops, the tape measures will cost you either $7 or $9 shipped while the flashlight will set you back $6 plus shipping. Check out SnapGate’s contact information on their website if you’re interested in their promotional products.

SnapGate [Corporate Site]
Flashlight [Campmor]
Tape Measure [Harbor Freight]

Yeah, we’ve posted a lot of FastCap products week and we’re still not done. This is because FastCap is actually cranking out a ton of unique tools right now. Whether these tools stand the test of time or are relegated to the back shelf remains to be seen, but you have to hand it to them for having the nerve to put out new specialty products in this economy.

Another one of these new products is their pattern marker — so called because it’s primarily used for tracing patterns. The long nosed marker also lets you trace around other objects without resorting to tilting the pen at a funny angle. Another use would be transferring the locations of small holes where everything but a scratch awl would be too thick.

The long nosed pattern marker actually is two permanent, waterproof markers in one. One end has a  1-1/8″ narrow extension tip for getting into tight spots, and the other has a wide chisel tip for normal marking uses.

FastCap’s long nosed marker will run you $5 when it becomes available.

Long Nosed Marker [FastCap]

You’re not going to build a house with the Measure ‘N Mark tape measure and ballpoint pen combo from General Tools, but that’s not the point of the tool.  You’d carry one for the same reason you carry a Leatherman — so you have something available when you need it, even if it isn’t the best tool for the job.

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We’ve covered magnetic stud finders before, but rather than just indicate where a nail or screw is located, the Magic Stud Finder Plus leaves a little target stuck to the fastener — no marking up the wall required.

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Lasers just keep getting cheaper — Rockler cut the price of the Infiniter RS-1 Laser Cutting Guide in half.  That’s right, it’s on sale for just $13, cheaper than the Harbor Freight version is currently listed!

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A few months ago we covered Striker’s drywall tool, but we overlooked their new carbide utility score. The two tools are very similar in design except that instead of a blade, Striker gives the utility score a carbide tip for scoring materials like fiber cement siding, concrete backer board, laminates, and glass.

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Some people like to mark their layout lines with a pencil, and others like to use a marking knife — if you’re following the Japanese tradition of woodworking, you might prefer an ink brush like this one from the Japan Woodworker.  With an ink brush you can draw finer lines than with a pencil, and the lines are more visible than those cut with a marking knife.

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Would you rather be sharpening your tools or using them?  Gladstone bets you’d prefer using their marking knife rather than sharpening it, so they gave it a ceramic blade that never needs to be sharpened.

Gladstone makes their marking knives in the USA using a material called Ceremax 80 — a material they claim is second only to diamond in hardness — for the blades.  Then they double-bevel the blade for either right- or left-handed use and cut two flat sections in the handle to keep the knife from rolling when you set it down.

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A new spin on the traditional carpenters pencil, the Swanson AlwaysSharp contains eight replacement tips in the body, so you can ditch the sharpener.  When a lead wears out, just pull out a replacement and swap it with the old one.  The tips last longer, too, since they’re not ground up in the sharpener, and a plastic cap protects the tip when you’re not using it.

The AlwaysSharp costs a bit more than traditional pencils:  about $2 for two.

AlwaysSharp [Swanson]
Street Pricing [Google]