Tuesday, October 7, 2008

ToolTalk Tuesday: Caulk Gun



The person who coined the old adage about getting what you pay for must have had a caulk gun in mind. I’ve owned many of these over the years, but always a Dollar Store or the cheapest version available from of the hardware stores.

Never again.

I killed my last $1 caulk gun while working on the driveway. I was using the tube crack filler and it just fell apart. The disc part that pushes the tube bottom became inextricably jammed inside the filler itself and the stem fell right out in my hand. It went out with last week’s trash.

I remembered this while working on the shed, fortunately before my last trip to the hardware store. I ducked into the paint department at Home Depot where I was greeted with at least six different guns, ranging in price from around $2 to about $15. With my latest cheap caulk gun experience still fresh in my memory, and knowing that I’ll be wanting to use some Liquid Nails when we get around to working on the bedrooms, I looked right past that $2 model.

Instead, I chose the Workforce brand at $9.97. All I can say is Wow! I used two tubes of adhesive without issues on Sunday. No fighting the full can in or the empty one out of the gun. And no scrambling for a cutter to snip off the edge of the tube. This baby has a cutter built into its handle. Somebody was thinking ahead.

So, if you use your caulk gun regularly, and especially for more than caulk and you don’t have an air compressor version (which I hear are fabulous!) I highly recommend this one. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

5 comments:

Michael said...

Pardon my french, but that gun is bad-ass.

I too have endured the agony of dollar store guns... Perhaps one day I will also treat myself to a proper unit.

All the best.

NV said...

Michael -- It's worth EVERY cent!

NV said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
phunpho said...

am one of those people who are just plain bad at caulking, put on about half a tube, and then smear the excess on my pants leg. This product allows me to draw a perfect bead, thin or wide depending on who hard you squeeze the trigger. It's heavyer with the larger tubes but it works great for putting down construction adhesive to lay subflooring. If you have a compressor on the job you need this gun.

sukan said...

I did not use my 3 liter hopper can on my latest project. I ended up getting the pre-mixed mud jugs for one of my rooms that had to be finished at the time. It did not clog on me using their pre-mixed texture mud.