5 RYOBI Products So Strange, We Can't Help But Want Them

One of the most strangely interesting things you can do with your day is take a casual stroll through a hardware store. Even if you're not the slightest bit handy, there's something oddly compelling about seeing rows upon rows of power tools and heavy-duty equipment. It's almost like walking through an armory, except instead of being tools of war, it's just... tools. Still, the power is intoxicating, so much so that, even if you have no idea what a particular tool is for, you just want to hold it in your hands.

RYOBI is one of the world's most well-established power tool brands, having gotten its start in Japan's Hiroshima prefecture all the way back in 1943. With so many decades of experience in construction and adjacent industries, you can bet that RYOBI has a tool for just about every occasion, even the extremely specific ones you wouldn't have thought of until you saw a tool for it.

Depending on your line of work, you may not think of a stapler as something that falls under the category of "power tools." Indeed, if you're just stapling small packets of paper, an ordinary office stapler would suffice. But what if you needed to staple something heavy to something thick, like wallpaper to a solid wood wall? What if you need to drive some nails in, but don't have a nail gun handy? That's where RYOBI's Heavy Duty 4-in-1 Stapler comes in.

This industrial-grade trigger-style stapler can utilize four different kinds of fasteners, including regular light-duty staples, heavy-duty staples, round crown staples, and even 18GA brad nails. Whatever you want to use, just feed them into the convenient bottom-load magazine and set the rotary power dial for high or low strength. The built-in staple meter shows how many staples you've got left in the magazine, and when work's done, you can engage the handle lock for safe storage.

When you own your own garden or flower bed, it's not as simple as just sticking some seeds in the dirt and waiting a while. You need to properly till and adjust the soil so the seeds are buried deep enough to get nutrients, but not so deep they can't sprout. Normally, you could do this with a trowel and some elbow grease, but that's both inefficient and boring. Why do with your normal arms what you can do with high-rotation power tools?

RYOBI's Compact Cultivator will till the absolute heck out of your flower bed's soil thanks to its tough metal tines. Using the power dial, you can spin the tines at 176 RPM, 204 RPM, or 233 RPM for your ideal gardening preferences. Don't worry about debris flying up and hitting you in the face, as the Cultivator has a built-in guard screen to block any errant pebbles.

You may not think about it much because it's technically outside and you're probably wearing shoes, but your patio can get really dirty, especially after a big storm. If you leave all that dirt alone, it can start to affect your patio's color, not to mention make guests reluctant to walk around barefoot. To prevent that from happening, you need to clean your patio once in a while, and the best way to do it is with a specialized tool.

The RYOBI Outdoor Patio Cleaner can be used to clean any kind of flat patio, be it laid stonework or wooden boarding, either with water or loaded cleaning solutions. The telescoping head and two-handle design allow you to easily run the Cleaner along the ground, scrubbing surfaces with its thick, rotating brush. Plus, thanks to the Cleaner's built-in brush guard, you don't have to worry too much about kicking up suds and debris.

As part of the usual garden-owning order of operations, you'll likely have to spend some time on a regular basis spraying stuff on your garden, whether it's just water to feed your hungry plants or protective chemicals like insecticides and weed killer. Using a one-handed spray bottle is rather inefficient, though, not to mention rough on your fingers. Don't just squirt your garden with piddling nonsense, give it a proper blasting!

RYOBI's Backpack Blower and Sprayer allows you to load up with up to 3 gallons of solution in the back-mounted tank and blast it all out up to 15 feet away. Utilizing the various included nozzles, you can focus your spray on specific targets, as well as reach tricky nooks and crannies. You can spray up to 28 gallons of solution while the integrated fan is off, or up to 5 gallons with the added power of a ONE+ battery-powered fan.

If you're living in the kind of situation that necessitates regular log-splitting, you probably just do it yourself with an ax. Splitting logs with an ax is very physically intensive, not to mention potentially dangerous. For a safer process, not to mention an exponentially cooler one, you should use something a little more modern. Split those logs with the power of science!

RYOBI's Kinetic Log Splitter is the very first of its kind, a log-splitting device that requires no gas or cords, and not much manual labor beyond loading logs. In fact, it's so unique that it's not available as of the time of this writing, labeled only as "Coming Soon". Still, we love the idea.

Just load a log up to 20 inches in length, hold the safety, and pull the crank. The powerful kinetic motor forcefully shoves the log into the stainless steel frame with 12 tons of force, splitting it right down the middle. With a sprightly 2-second cycle time and 150 splits on a full charge, you can take apart a whole branch in a fraction of the time it'd take you to do with a gas-powered splitter or an ax.