If you’re a professional home improvement contractor or do DIY on the weekends, an oscillating tool is so versatile and does so many things so well it might be hard NOT to use it.
We’d know. We compressed what feels like a year of home improvement into three months building out nine bakeries for Food Network’s Save My Bakery. We used our oscillator every episode—and for a different purpose each time.
The tool we used, DeWalt’s DWE315K, worked like gangbusters. We plunged through sheet flooring and wood for demo and undoing the horrible work we always encountered. We cut vinyl and engineered flooring, vinyl tiles and more. It got major use removing shoe molding, fixing mistakes in trim and it got hours and hours of sanding, scuffing and scraping to prep stuff for paint. We raised door jambs for new floors and cut spray foam insulation for, no joke, ‘donuts’.
The blade swaps out well. The release mechanism on the tool we had was kind of stiff, but so what. I like the large trigger, which enabled me to activate the tool with both hands. I suppose that a cordless version may have saved time at some point, but we really didn’t miss it. The cord on the DWE315K is long and that’s good. The blade box and blade/sanding assortment that came with the tool DeWalt sent us was great.
If you’ve got lots of home improvement work in store for your oscillating tool, it pays to keep a small inventory of replacement blades and sanding stuff. And while using it, well, for anything it can do, let the tool do the work. Forcing these high-speed steel blades through the cut does nothing but chew up teeth and slow the tool down. Their trick is speed not power. So until the blades these tools use are carbide, slow is fast.
Like a 48-hour makeover. Who wants donuts? They’re rated for exterior use.
