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Quadsaw drill attachment cuts perfect square holes in walls

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Quadsaw: attaches to the end of a drill to create perfectly square or rectangular holes in plaster walls
Quadsaw
Michael Sebhatu, creator of the Quadsaw, looking happy
Quadsaw
Michael Sebhatu, creator of the Quadsaw, looking intense
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: side view
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: front view
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: built in spirit level
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: attaches directly to a drill
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: cuts square holes in walls
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: also cuts rectangular holes in plaster walls
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: a single-purpose tool that could save a lot of time
Quadsaw
Quadsaw: attaches to the end of a drill to create perfectly square or rectangular holes in plaster walls
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: in rectangle form with a pilot drill
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: rectangle form with no pilot drill
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: square form with pilot drill
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: square form with no pilot drill
Quadsaw
The Quadsaw: that's about all it does
Quadsaw
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One clever tool can turn a fiddly, annoying job into a breeze – and the Quadsaw is such a solution for cutting square or rectangular holes in plaster walls.

I have a special section in my shed for tools that are designed to do one annoying and fiddly job really well. There's the fork seal driver, which is exceptionally useful for gently bashing rubber seals into fork boots, and utterly useless for anything else. There's the chain tool, which presses motorcycle chain plates together and peens over the rivets on them, and I'm knackered if I can find anything else it's good for. There's the two-foot torque wrench, which is used exclusively to bludgeon stuck front sprocket bolts and otherwise entirely ornamental.

So here's another single-use tool – one that will be extremely handy for a very small subset of people, but will likely not rise above the threshold of "heh, look at that" for the average home handyman.

The Quadsaw: that's about all it does
Quadsaw

Quadsaw cuts square holes in plaster walls. That makes it very handy for installing power points, light switches and other electrical bits and pieces, and … not much chop for anything else.

It smashes that job, though. Connecting to the end of a drill, Quadsaw can be set to drill squares or rectangles with its four straight cutting blades. It's got a height gauge (a stick you can elongate to make sure all your switches are at the perfect height) and a built-in spirit level to keep things straight.

The Quadsaw: in rectangle form with a pilot drill
Quadsaw

It makes one annoying and fiddly job much quicker, cleaner and easier. According to the Quadsaw people, electricians cut 200 million square holes in walls a year, in the United Kingdom alone. Moving to Quadsaw makes these things so much faster that at an average worker pay of UK£20 per hour, this thing could save the British building industry a whopping UK£320 million per year.

When you look at it that way, UK£199 for one of these things looks like a total bargain. But gee you'd wanna be cutting a lot of square holes. Check out the video:

Source: Quadsaw

View gallery - 15 images
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11 comments
nar53
Clever little Gizmo but as you say, limited market.
Danbranch
Great for electricians, certainly a time saver as shown in the video.
McDesign
As someone who has carefully made actual hundreds of rectangular holes for J-boxes in our old plaster-and-lathe house, I wonder how long the blades last on real, old plaster.
Tom Swift
roto-tools already do this. Plus this only makes one size/shape hole. what about a round hole?
oldguy
Really cool. Could save the building industry Now lets make a version for the American building industry shall we?
Grunchy
The way I did it is I mounted the electrical boxes on to the bare studs. They were exactly where they needed to go. Then when I installed the drywall board over top, I put it into place and then sort of punched it where the boxes were, so they would dent the back of the board. Then I put the board down & cut out the openings with a razor knife. Then I put the board back in place, trimmed whatever needed, and then screwed it on. Seriously - it's not a difficult job.
toolman65
This tool assumes that all boxes are consistant in size.
Anyway
Why would i pay for a tool i already have? A Fein multimaster will cut any size and shape box . And changing a blade after hitting a nail is easy
The target audience , electricians in new construction, only install the boxes. It is the drywallers who do the cut outs. They already have a cutout tool.
May be useful to trades doing install of low voltage boxes after the drywall is hung, but only on a large project
ljaques
In the US, the electricians do the rough install and the drywallers install over the installed and code-inspected wiring. I've watched laborer drywallers cut in the outlets by holding the sheet up against the wall and tapping the two or three places outlets and switches go with a flat palm. Then they pull it away and jam a drywall saw into it at the 4 times at each of 3 places and are done installing that 4x8 or 4x10 sheet in under 5 minutes total. Each cut takes maybe five seconds. I think this tool might slow that process down for them, but might be handy for the DIY market with deep, deep pockets. The price, of course, is absolutely ridiculous. I truly don't see a market for it, at least over here. In the UK, how do the electricians run new wiring if the drywall or plaster is already up? That would be truly time consuming.
ErstO
As someone who employees electricians to cut rectangular holes for j-Boxes, I don't care how long the blades last, I am sure replacement blades cost less then the labor cost it eliminates. I’ll have to order a couple and see how they hold up.
Madlyb
This is nice for old work, but new work requires alignment to boxes that already mounted for rough-in inspection, so this may actually be harder that using a rotozip and a box locator.