The other week I was asked to review a new gadget which has just been launched. I read the press release, watched the video and knew instantly that if it did what it said it did, I was going to love it!
But first a bit of background. As you can imagine as a military family we spend more time than most hanging pictures and we do it in a variety of surfaces. Everything from the impenetrable concrete walls of the houses in Cyprus to modern stud walls in Scotland. It is always a stupidly stressful exercise and it always results in messy holes which we have to cover up when we leave.
Even now we are in our own home, the hole creating hasn't stopped and the walls of our house are peppered with messy scars in the crumbly plaster.
The gadget I was offered to review is called a Hardwall Takker and is in very basic terms a hand-powered drill. At its base it has a drill bit and there's a wind up mechanism at the side which you turn to push the drill bit into the wall. It doesn't sound like it should work, but it does on every surface we have used it on and it makes a really neat perfectly formed hole which you can then slot one of the provided "takks" in to. The result will hang up to 12kg in weight.
Since we received it we've used it on the solid walls inside the house (we fortunately have a couple of walls we are removing in the spring, so lots of room to practice!) and on the external wall of the house. I have used it to hang the Christmas cards display and Jim has used it (in preference to the drill) to hang our Christmas wreath on our outside wall.
It's incredibly easy to use and so much quicker than charging up the drill and getting the extension cord out. In fact there is only one very small way I can fault it, which is that because the drill bit is in the centre of the base, if you want to make a hole in the corner of a wall close to the ceiling, you physically cannot place the Takker in the space, but honestly, I can live with that.
It may not be the most technologically sophisticated piece of kit, but its simplicity has completely won us over and we think it's going to be a big hit, particularly with military families!
If you want to find out more about the Hardwall Takker their website is here.
In principle this looks a great gadget and one I badly need. I have a variety of wall surfaces and some are impossible to put picture hooks into unless you go down the drill, rawl plug and screw result. As a result I have a total of four pictures up in the whole house since it was renovated!
ReplyDeleteSo cool. I love hanging things but hate the process of finding the bits and pieces. What really intrigued me was that it was made on a 3D printer. (Yes I watched the advert - I am a bit of a nerd - or as I like to say - an engineer's daughter). I grew up with Meccano bits all over the house - including a large crane in the living room and my dad built a sailboat in the basement.
ReplyDeleteMy husband just saw this over my shoulder and said "quick, get me one!" - our walls are so crumbly and utterly rubbish that everything falls out of them if you even look at it - must add to wish list now!
ReplyDelete