Jeremy Kassel
Owner, Kassel Construction
Albany, N.Y.
We’ve been using fastenmaster products since 2012, and there are two in particular I recommend to anyone in earshot.
FastenMaster’s LOK line of structural wood screws eliminates the need for pre-drilling. Picture any applications where you’d have a traditional piece of hardware—let’s say a ledger board for fastening a deck onto a house. You’d have to pre-drill your ledger board and hand-drive lag bolts into place. But with LOKs, you can drive them with an impact driver, and they have the capability and specs to replace those traditional lag bolts.
HeadLOKs, TrussLOKs, and LedgerLOKs come in handy on almost all of our jobs, but one of my favorites in that product line is the TimberLOK, which replaces 3/8-inch lag screws and comes in lengths from 21/2 to 10 inches. We recently built an outdoor pavilion at a client’s home by butting 6x6 timbers to one another and fastening them with TimberLOKs. It gave the pavilion that timber frame look without requiring all the timber frame joinery.
FastenMaster’s Cortex Hidden Fastening System is another favorite. It has a driver bit with automatic depth adjustment and a mechanism that prevents overdriving of the fastener and ensures a uniform depth for each fastener. The genius is there’s a color-matched plug that perfectly fits the recessed hole made by the driver tip. You can get almost any color of Trex, TimberTech, PVC—if there’s a non-wood product you want to conceal a fastener in, they have a plug to match.