Marking products often get overlooked as tools in your toolbox. As a carpenter & joiner, without a pencil I would be as useful as a pencil without any lead. Therefore, I was looking forward to getting my hands on some Tracer Professional Marking Products to see if they would get a tick or a cross.
Tracer’s Deep Hole Construction Pencil is simple yet effective, making life on site much easier and more efficient. I am sure at some point we have all been in a situation where we have needed to create a mark through some deep material. To get myself out of this hole I have usually spent some time carving my pencil into a spear to get into that hard to reach place. The lead has then often broken, deeming my crafting skills pointless. This is where the Tracer comes into its own as it’s specially designed to mark 100mm depth in a 3mm hole, and up to 145mm depth in a 6mm hole.
The 3mm hole is due to the thickness of the long retractable lead, and the increase to a 6mm hole as you go deeper is thanks to the sturdy metal shaft. The lead itself is snap resistant, which is great for when marking on rough surfaces where it might otherwise break or get blunt quickly. There’s also a neat site holster with in-built sharpener to protect it, and this can be attached to your trousers or tool belt.
The 120mm pencil leads are replaceable and can be stored safety in a Tracer holster. In this holster there are four 2B graphite leads for marking clear dark lines, and two yellow wax leads for when marking darker surfaces. This is a bright idea and I personally found it very handy when I was recently cutting and installing black fascia boards.
Partnering up with the pencil, is the company’s Deep Hole Marker, allowing you to mark to a 50mm depth in a 5mm hole. This is no ordinary marker but a two in one. The tip is reversed by removing the shaft, spinning it around and reinserting it, to give you the option to mark both thick and thin lines. This intelligent design allows you to use it for different applications. For example, you could be writing on drawings with the thin tip and then quickly change it over to the thick tip to mark on a surface.
I always like to keep a rough marker pen on hand for when I need to mark or write on various surfaces. My experience with many markers is that they either dry up or clog up very quickly. Tracer’s clog free marker pens overcome this problem, whilst allowing you to mark on almost any surface, from tiles, wood, glass, and bricks. Again, they come in a site holster and are available in black, blue and red. I particularly like the fact that they’re colour coded at the top of the markers, so you can easily identify which one is what colour as soon as you look down to grab the one you require.
For further information on the Tracer range of marking products visit tracer-tools.com/
Tibby Singh – TibbySingh.com
