Roy Berendsohn

The lubricant you purchase for home and shop maintenance is some of the most expensive oil you can buy. In terms of chemical products, it’s among the most expensive materials that you regularly purchase, on a per-weight basis. Eight dollars will buy you a quart of motor oil, but will get you only about 8 oz. of spray lubricant used for home and shop maintenance. Essentially all of the motor oil will be put to use lubricating the engine of your car. It’s anybody’s guess how much of that spray lu…

Not all yards are the same, and not all mowers are either. Find what’s best for you!

A fire extinguisher is more than a tool that puts out a fire. It can be the arbiter between life or death. Putting out a fire early can mean the difference between a small, smoky mess and widespread wreckage. Consider this: Fire with access to air and fuel, will double in size every 30 seconds. In three minutes, a fire that starts out the size of one 5-gallon bucket becomes the size of 64 burning buckets. Just 180 seconds after it begins, a fire can be transformed from a nuisance to a room-size…

Spring. There’s excitement in the air. The snow is gone and the grass goes from mottled to gloriously green. At Popular Mechanics, this is the season we test the latest products for our annual Yard Garden Awards. We roll up our sleeves (well, assuming it’s warm enough to roll them up) and have at the newest batch of chainsaws, mowers, string trimmers, a variety of brush-busting tools, hand tools, wet-dry vacuums, grills, pressure washers, and watering tools. We tackle everything a landscape can…

These cordless cutters are powerful, convenient, clean, and quiet.

Whether you call this a cedar sleeve or a planter is up to you (maybe it’s a planter sleeve) Its purpose is to disguise weather-beaten flower pots. I call it a sleeve because, unlike a planter, it holds no soil. I can swap flower pots in and out of it easily to suit the season or for maintaining the plant. All it takes is adding some form of a bottom to make it a planter.Also, unlike a planter, this project is quite small and simple. Wood is expensive. A full-on cedar planter can easily set you…

These achieve the rare feat of making lawn mowing fun.

Portable table saws take the precision cutting function of this full-size wood shop workhorse and make it mobile, so you can take it to the worksite or your backyard. Unlike the stationary table saws contractors use, these relatively lightweight options rest on top of a workbench or come equipped with a folding metal frame with wheels for easy transport.The vast majority of portable table saws are equipped with a 10-inch blade that provides more than enough height above the table to cut thick lu…

Sometimes it’s faster, easier, and a lot neater to shoot a nail rather than hammer it.

Whether you’re cutting plywood sheets, dimensional lumber, or breaking down hardwood pieces to feed through a table saw, a circular saw is an invaluable tool to have on hand. These handheld cutters feature large circular blades and powerful motors that slice through wood, so they’re more efficient and versatile than manual hand saws and smaller jigsaws. Circular saws are also relatively compact, lightweight, and easy to transport—especially compared to bulkier table saws—and are available in bot…

It’s a workshop axiom: If you can’t hold the workpiece securely, you can’t work on it well. Sure, there are lots of times when you can hold something with one hand and cut or drill it with the other. But there are other times that the workpiece has to be firmly clamped because you need two hands to operate the power tool or hand tool.A firm hold on the workpiece is no problem in most cases when you’re working in a fully-equipped shop with a workbench. But it can be maddeningly difficult to keep…

You can capture table saw dust with a lawn mower's grass bag. Really.

Everybody loves neatly trimmed shrubbery. But the job of trimming? Not so much. To get those bushes from shaggy to sheared as quickly and as easily as possible, you need a tool uniquely designed for speed, mobility, and power. There’s only one that fits the bill: the battery-powered hedge trimmer. A cordless hedge trimmer is relatively lightweight and arguably easier to use than one with a roaring gas engine, hot muffler and cord that can get tangled. It’s powered by small-but-mighty electric mo…

Two pieces of 2 x 12 and some screws are all you need.

These cordless electric saws are light, quiet, fast, and ideal for pruning and other yard jobs.

These new and improved brushes can revolutionize how you paint.

These tools let you quickly strip weathered exterior paint, remove a finish, smooth a tabletop, and do basic metal prep.

A simple tool packed to the gills with versatility.

It's a surprisingly versatile tool in the shop or even at the job site.

Following an illustrious 35-year career with Popular Mechanics, he imparts his wisdom on life and all things DIY.