I was reading an old trade magazine and saw a stat about how much more we cut by hand

I was cleaning out my garage last week and found a stack of 'Floor Covering Installer' magazines from the late 90s. I was flipping through one and saw an ad for a basic manual tile cutter. The ad said something like 'Save 80% of your cutting time compared to a snap cutter.' It just hit me how much HAS changed. Back when I started, we did almost every straight cut on tile with a manual snap cutter or a wet saw for the tricky ones. Now, with a good electric cutter, you can zip through a whole bathroom floor in an hour. I remember a big kitchen job in 2003 where I must have made two hundred cuts on a snap cutter, my hands were sore for days. That old magazine page really made me think about the small tools that changed our daily work the most. What's the one tool from the last 20 years that you think saved you the most actual time on a normal job?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_thomas20d ago

What about cordless angle grinders? They turned a messy, cord-tangling job into a quick two-minute cut. That's a real time saver for me.

perry.phoenix20d ago

The laser level changed everything for layout work.

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adam_thompson5320d ago

My old boss used to spend an hour with a chalk line on big floor tile jobs. Now we pop that laser down and have the whole grid in five minutes. It feels like cheating.