12 in. x 4 in. Pro Finishing Trowel

An essential tool for finishing a concrete slab properly. It helped this novice concrete mason get a great result on my rustic porch project. The trowel appears to have a very slight radius on the base and was very easy to use on fresh wet concrete without dragging too much. It is comfortable to handle and easy to clean. I had never worked with concrete aside of the odd patch here and there and this finishing trowel helped get a really smooth finish which meant my first major concrete project turned out much better than I expected. We’re building a rustic porch with real tree logs for the columns and the footings measure 2’ x 2’ x 18” deep. The outside columns required us to build footing boxes to hold the poured concrete and this finishing trowel was perfect for getting a nice smooth finish on the column footings. The footings took about 8 bags of cement to fill and once we had the cement parallel with the tops of the existing slab and form boxes, we leveled the wet concrete with a screed level before switching over to a float to bury the aggregate and draw the mud to the surface of the slab. Since we were setting columns made of cedar tree logs into the footings, I had to maneuver the trowel around 8-10” diameter logs and still ended up with a good result. The trowel fit easily in the designed 1” gap between the bottom of the log and the surface of the concrete. It took me a little practice to perfect the use of the trowel and I managed to dig the corner into the wet cement in a couple of places, but by the 3rd or 4th footing, I was really getting the hang of it. I found that if I left the concrete a little too long to cure (we were working in 90 degree+ temps) I could just spritz the surface with water and the finishing trowel would continue to work the mud to smooth it out. After use, the steel blade and soft grip handle were easy to clean however despite cleaning and drying off the blade, it was starting to develop some rust spots on the handle side of the blade by the second day. It also comes with a no-hassle lifetime warranty which is great value considering the price.

Being a flooring installer I needed this tool. I do a lot of self leveling and this will be a breeze moving the cement around. This thing is huge, looks a really good quality product and will definitely cut my floor prep working time. I have not used it yet but i have used similar and they work great. I did a cement slab not to long ago and this would have been great just to get the trowel marks out. I used my faithful flooring trowel. It worked but took forever. You can also use this for plastering and drywall. One last thing is Big is better sometimes.