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Last Updated: , Created: Friday, January 11th, 2002

Discovering a power chisel

Some tools go un-noticed on the hardware store shelves, like the rotary hammer chisels. At first glance this appears simply to be a heavy duty hammer drill. It has a special quick change chuck called an SDS system and will only work with drills and other accessories with the special SDS shanks.

It will drill like an ordinary drill. You can put it to hammer and it will hammer as it rotates making a solid masonry drill. But it has one more unappreciated function, you can hammer without rotating. With a spike bit, that makes it into a small jack hammer for breaking up concrete. Put in various sized cold chisels and it becomes a versatile jack hammer that can split bricks, clean mortar off of used bricks or lift tough tiles off the floor. Because of all of the masonry oriented functions, this tool is primarially known to people who specialize in masonry work.

The one function that I stumbled into by accident and it has really impressed me ever since is that you can buy wood chisels with the SDS shank (from Bosh). This turns this tool into a power wood chisel. It is amazing how efficient this machine is at chiselling wood. Any time that you might have to take a chisel and hammer to hand, this will sculpture out whatever you need in seconds with no effort. Whether you need a long deep gouge in a beam, or you need to widen a passageway where the recip saw can't quite do the job, or you just need to notch a stud to fit in an electrical box, this power chisel will do the job.

This is a professional tool and it is not cheap. I have tried both Porter Cable and Bosh and they work well, but you will probably have to special order the wood chisels. Nobody knows they are there, so the stores don't generally stock them.


Keywords: Rental, Hardware, Floors, Accessories, Tiles, Drills, Chisels, Hammers, Mortar, Renovation, Masonry, Power Tools, Concrete, Innovations, Alternative, Tools, Wood

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