From: FHB_WEB

Date: 9/22/08

Posted by: Justin Fink

I didn’t invent tool reviews, but I was put in charge of them here at Fine Homebuilding and I like to think they were originally intended to give readers what they couldn’t get elsewhere. Let me explain.

If we rewind 15 or 20 years to the time when your local lumberyard carried Makita circular saws and Hitachi nail guns, the only time you saw Milwaukee circular saws and Bostitch nail guns was when your buddy brought them to the job site from two towns over. That’s where we came in.

We would pull together 12 tool models, run the tools through their paces, tell you what you need to know, and show you photos of the interesting features. We would tell you where the tools shone and where they fell short, give you the street price and pertinent specs of each model, and tell you where to find the one you want to buy. In short, we did all the legwork for you.

But now it’s 2008, and whether we like it or not, things have changed.

Now you can go to The Home Depot or Lowe’s and play with 10 brands of power tools in the same aisle. You can see if the Milwaukee is heavier than the Porter-Cable, which grip is more comfortable, and which one comes with a case. You can log onto the Internet and do a Google search for “hammer” and get 108 million results in 0.14 seconds (I checked). You can bring up a manufacturer’s Web site, read the specs of a tool, rotate it 360°, zoom in and out, and probably watch a video of it in use.

What about independent opinions on the tools? No problem. You can read blogs, join discussions in free online forums, or see homemade videos on YouTube.com. (Editor's Note: You could even, gasp, visit FineHomebuilding.com's Tool Guide.)

You can browse Amazon.com and not only read user reviews, sort results by price, and look at 10 competitive brands, but you also can buy the tool you want and have it shipped to your doorstep in time for that cabinet job you have coming up tomorrow afternoon. Upset that your go-to tool maker replaced your favorite router model? No sweat. Just log onto eBay.com and buy the old version from somebody’s virtual garage sale.

So where do tool reviews fit in nowadays? It’s a good question, and one that I’ve been wrestling with for the last few months. Do readers still want a chart that lists the specs of each 18v screw gun, or does the ease of finding that information online make it a waste of space on our pages?

Do people want to read five pages of information on the six miter saws that we tested, or do they just want us to tell them which one we liked best so that they can move on to learning a trick for installing crown molding? If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? Is more generalized information on how to choose the right tools a better use of space? Should we focus on maintenance, cool aftermarket accessories, real-world safety, and proper methods of setting up and using the tools? Should we stop rounding up tools by category and instead expand the "Tools & Materials" department to include a wide variety of new releases?

I don’t think there is an easy or obvious answer to these questions. But I think it’s safe to say that the times are changing and tool reviews may need to change, too.

Please post a comment with your suggestions.



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