Showerthought: why do so many guys still undercut door jambs with a pull saw when an oscillating tool does it in 30 seconds
I was trimming out a kitchen in Fort Worth last month and watched the guy helping me cut every jamb by hand with a pull saw, took him almost an hour on 6 doors. I grabbed my cordless oscillating tool, set a scrap of flooring as my depth gauge, and had the rest done in maybe 20 minutes without chipping a single casing. He said his old boss told him power tools mess up jambs, but I think he just never tried it with a fine tooth blade and a light touch. The trick is letting the blade do the work instead of forcing it, and taping the casing right at the cut line if you're worried about scuffs. Anybody else switch over, or am I missing a reason to still do it by hand?
Man that story hits home. I had the same fight with an older guy on a flip in Garland last year, dude spent like 45 minutes on three jambs with a pull saw while I stood there holding my oscillating tool feeling like an idiot. He kept saying the same thing about power tools wrecking the casing, but once I showed him a scrap piece of LVP as a depth stop he kinda went quiet. That trick with the scrap as a gauge is the whole game, keeps you from digging into the subfloor or blowing past the jamb. The old boss line gets passed around job sites like gospel and nobody ever questions it.