There’s a Gadget for That on the ‘Specialized Tools’ Subreddit

In honor of Analog Week here at Lifehacker, let’s explore a subreddit that features devices that do very specific things: r/SpecializedTools. The tools featured therein will make you want to take up a hobby or a whole career just so you have an excuse to buy them, like driving a semi truck so you can clean snow off the top, or making huge stacks of toast with this efficient butter spreader. And some of them, like this semi-automatic hammer and this motorcycle cover, are actually useful for everyday tasks. You’ll need those to save some time, after you waste a whole day looking at all the GIFs and videos of these monotaskers. Here are our favorites.

Tools for home

• Use the pickle strainer to pull pickles out of the jar without a fork or wet fingers.
• The manual coin sorter shakes each denomination of coin down to a different level.
• The magnetic window washer wipes down both sides of a window at once.
• The wind-up tube squeezer gets all the goo out of a paint tube.
• An adult can help a little kid cut paper with double-handled training scissors.
• We’re not supposed to like kitchen monotaskers at Lifehacker, but the mini rice ball maker looks fun.

Tools for professionals

• The automatic honey dispenser is like steampunk for wood. Woodpunk.
• If you watched Salt Fat Acid Heat, you might recognize this olive harvester that wraps around an olive tree and shakes it down.
• These calipers and wedges level out floor tiles.
• The bowling alley lane polisher is like an efficient Roomba.
• This moving dolly helps you carry boxes up stairs, and this handle grip helps you carry big planks of wood or other flat objects.
• Some tools use surprisingly basic technology to accomplish a task. This analog tachometer measures the RPM of a motor using its vibrations.
• The artificial animal womb looks freaky; it’s a fluid-filled incubator for premature lambs.

Silly tools

• The automatic paper plane gun folds and launches its own paper planes. Someone needs to install ten of these onto a golf cart converted into an aircraft carrier.
• The spaghetti straightener seems designed for Marcel Duchamp.
• The homemade nail puller is the most work anyone has ever put into building the back end of a hammer.

Homemade tools

• The ping-pong ball collector cleans up a messy game room. It’s a small trash can screwed to a broomstick, with the bottom cut out and a few elastic bands snapped across the hole.
• This four-person tree log bender was clearly built in the workshop. It looks so dangerous!
• The homemade humane mouse trap drops mice into a bucket.
• One redditor posted their grandfather’s homemade avocado picker, and it turns out lots of grandpas built similar tree pickers—basically a hook and a bucket on a pole.
• It’s a bridge…for live salmon.

If you like that subreddit, try r/redneckengineering, r/mechanical_gifs, and r/EngineeringPorn.

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