Tried a $12 pull bar on a glue-down job and it beat my $80 roller hands down

I was working on a school gym floor in Tacoma last month, 2,000 square feet of LVP glue-down. Usually I use my heavy roller for everything, but the edge of the room had this tight corner near the bleachers where the roller just wouldnt fit. So I grabbed a cheap pull bar from the truck, one of those rubber handled ones I got for like 12 bucks at a supply shop. Figured it'd be a pain but it worked way better than I thought. It got into that gap perfectly and actually seated the planks tighter than the roller did in spots. Now I'm wondering if I should use the pull bar more often for whole rooms or if that was just a fluke. Has anyone else compared rollers and pull bars on glue-down and found one way better?

3 comments

3 Comments

cooper.phoenix21d ago

Your expensive roller's about to get fired" - that line got me good, haha. I had the same rude awakening when my cheap pull bar outperformed my fancy roller on a tricky LVP job in a laundry room. Now I'm side-eyeing my roller every time I grab that twelve dollar bar, feels like I got played by the tool industry or something.

casey_harris1mo ago

So you're telling me I spent $300 on a roller that's about to get replaced by a $12 stick with a rubber tip? That's classic, man. I've had the same thing happen with a cheap pull bar on a tricky bathroom floor where I couldn't get the roller near the toilet flange. It seated those planks so tight I had to check if I was using the same glue. Now I keep that $12 bar in my main bag instead of buried in the truck. Might have to run a test on a full room, just to see if my expensive roller gets fired.

caleb2621mo ago

@casey_harris I had a $400 roller sitting in my trailer after a cheap hand roller did the same thing.