Everybody loves lasers, but sometimes they’re more of a gimmick than a useful guide. Miter saw laser guides help out a lot if the laser shows the edge of the blade — and they’re worse than nothing if the blade and laser aren’t aligned. If your miter saw isn’t fitted with a laser-site guide, chances are you can cheaply retrofit it with Harbor Freight’s laser arbor disc.

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If you charged your A/C system not too long ago and it’s still anemic, you might want to look at this UV leak detector.  In addition to the A/C it’ll find leaks in any of your car’s fluid systems, including hydraulics, and it can really save you some headaches.  If you’ve ever chased a leak you couldn’t find, you’ll immediately see the value.

Street pricing for the TP1121 universal kit starts at $50, a reasonable price considering the time you’ll save.

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

When you grasp rectangular objects with pliers you don’t alway get a good grip since the jaws aren’t parallel. Needle nose pliers compound the problem further with their narrow jaws. The parallel movement of Stanley’s MaxGrip 7″ needle nose pliers increases the otherwise wimpy holding force and the jaw capacity to boot.

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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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What can’t a reciprocating saw do? Designed to remove grout from tile with minimal dust, the Grout Grabber six-inch adapter fits most reciprocating saws.  The Grout Grabber’s two-inch curved-bottom carbide blade makes it easier to make the starting plunge cut into the grout.

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Porter-Cable’s PTX5 pneumatic reciprocating saw isn’t quite as powerful as its electric corded and cordless cousins, but what it lacks in power it makes up in agility.  Its lightweight aluminum body weighs only 2.7 lbs compared to 8 lbs for a corded saw.

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With Milwaukee’s 8″ Metal-Cutting Saw you can cut 10-gauge sheet and 1/4″ plate steel all day long, with the convenience of cold-cutting and metal-shaving collection. With proper cutting techniques, Milwaukee claims that the saw can cut 3/4″ steel plate.

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What’s in a name? I might never have noticed the Big Gulp dust hood if it didn’t have such a kick-ass name. If you need to collect dust from a miter saw, lathe, sander, or any other tool with no dust port or an inadequate one, the Big Gulp might be an inexpensive solution.

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A fender roller is your last, best hope for fitting over-sized wheels and tires. Why? It flattens out the bit of sheet metal sticking out horizontally from the wheel-well lip, giving you another few millimeters of space inside the fender.

Best of all, Eastwood is offering their quite sturdy and functional-looking model for $200 today. Sure, that’s not pocket change (for we poor bloggers at least), but it’s chump change compared to what the body shop’ll charge you to straighten and repaint your fender after you jack it up with a hammer.

PS: If you’re wondering how this thing works, there’s a video on the page linked below.

Fender Roller [Eastwood]

Safely cutting small pieces presents a challenge, especially when the workpiece is smaller than the minimum comfortable distance from the cutters. The Finger Saver sold by Price Cutter aims to give you the control to cut and shape these small pieces while keeping your hands a safe distance away from the cutter.

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Your drill is a Bosch, your reciprocating saw a Milkwaukee, your router a DeWalt, and that’s just your tools — the rest of your crew also owns a widely mixed set of cordless tools. You could, and routinely do, fill a bench with chargers. With the Crew Charge from 10C Technologies you can charge up to four different-style batteries at the same time.

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Maybe the designers at Wenger are fans of roll-on truck bed liners, because the newest knives in the Evolution (Evo) line look like they got the roll-on treatment. Wenger’s touting the EvoGrip as the next step in the progression of their Evolution platform.

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The ingenuity of the Yankee Screwdriver lies in its utility. This tool allows quick assembly and disassembly of anything you need to build or get into, without the cramps of a hand driver or the batteries and cords that come with a power tool. Easypower’s Push Pull driver — “Yankee Screwdriver” is a Stanley trademark — provides the functionality without the price, and it also uses standard 1/4″ hex bits so you won’t need an adapter.

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The tough plastic bags of salt, fertilizer, soil, or other products can also be tough to pick up and carry — you can transport these bags more easily by attaching Grabbit’s bag handle. Not only does their bag handle carry bags, you can also use it to keep bags closed, to hang bags off the floor for storage, and even to maneuver a heavy tarp full of leaves.

If you’re interested you can grab the Grabbit bag handle for $6 to $8.

Bag Handle [Grabbit Tool]
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Via Amazon(B000RJXUR4) [What’s This?]

The Depot is rolling into summer with a deal: for the next week or so they’re discounting “select” ceiling fans by 40 percent. You’ll have to go online for some of them, but most are discounted and in your local store now.  Though we’re a bit surprised to see a deal on fans at the outset of summer, it’s a welcome break.

We’re always leery when we see “select” in the fine print.  As we suspected, some of the fans on sale are models from years gone by that didn’t move or were too strange-looking to install in the living room. But the nice-looking Hampton Bay 52″ Leland is selling for $53 instead of $90 — it’s worth consideration.

40% Off Ceiling Fan Sale [Home Depot]

You’d like to illuminate that small outbuilding or garden shed in the back yard, but you don’t want the bother of running electric lines out to it. Instead you could install a solar-powered light like this one from SunForce.

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Broken bulbs happen, and I’ve even heard of bulbs falling out of the screw threads after a while. I like the EaseOut bulb extractor, but I figure most Toolmongers will just use a pair of pliers if they can reach the light socket. If the broken bulb is out of reach, though, you might want to pick up this long-reach broken-bulb extractor from Unger.

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