Friday, November 21, 2008

Man up, Yo.

After reading about it on my favorite bike-blog, Bike Snob NYC, I decided to test the manliness of my blog with Genderanalyzer .

According to the smart computers over at Genderanalyzer, there is a 89% chance that all this is being written by a man.

My other blog, which I share with my wife gets a "likely female" but produces a 50% score. This thing seems pretty accurate...

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Dewalt Impact wrench

This thing rocks. On Saturday I installed snow tires on Kathy's car, rotated the tires on my 3/4 truck and swapped wheels on the M3 so I can sell the LTWs. That's 72 lug nuts including 32 that were torqued to 125 Ft/lbs last fall.

The Dewalt just ate it up and asked for more. It can easily remove lugs bolts when the wheels are off the ground. It's got plenty of power and makes quick work of everything I've thrown at it. When reinstalling wheels, the "rocker" trigger is nicely variable so it's easy to snug-up bolts without over torqing them.

That said I also got to use the 18v Snap-on and talk at length with a guy who owns one. As nice as the Dewalt is, the Snap-on is the best tools available. It produces well over 600 ft/lbs when removing fasteners. In fact the Snap-on is the only wrence designed specifically to remove fasteners. The Dewalt and the Milwaukee are both designed to drive-in fastners with the same power that they are removed. The Snap-on produces twice the torque when removing fasteners than when installing which is perfect for automotive applications.

So If you can part with 5-large for a cordless impact wrench, then grab the Snap-on. If your're thinking more like $300, then the Dewalt is a good choice.