A power tool is a tool that is actuated by an additional power source and mechanism other than the solely manual labour used with hand tools. The most common types of power tools use electric motors. Internal combustion engines and compressed air are also commonly used. Other power sources include steam engines, direct burning of fuels and propellants, or even natural power sources like wind or moving water. Tools directly driven by animal power are not generally considered power tools.
Power tools are used in industry, in construction, and around the house for purposes of driving (fasteners), drilling, cutting, shaping, sanding, grinding, routing, polishing, painting, heating and more.
Power tools are classified as either stationary or portable, where portable means hand-held. Portable power tools have obvious advantages in mobility. Stationary power tools however often have advantages in speed and accuracy, and some stationary power tools can produce objects that cannot be made in any other way. Stationary power tools for metalworking are usually called machine tools. The term machine tool is not usually applied to stationary power tools for woodworking, although such usage is occasionally heard, and in some cases, such as drill presses and bench grinders, exactly the same tool is used for both woodworking and metalworking.
The term power tool is also sometimes used as a buzzword, meaning a technique for greatly simplifying a complex or difficult task.
Read more about Power Tool: History, Energy Sources, Safety, List of Power Tools
Famous quotes containing the words power and/or tool:
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius.... They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)