Holstery PinPal

From the workbench

We Invented the World's First Gravity-Locking Drill Holster to Prevent Your Drill From Falling

Twenty-two years on job sites taught me that dropping a drill is one of the most common accidents in construction — and the factory hook is the reason why.

By Ryan Smith — carpenter, 22 years on the tools. Now builds gear at Holstery.

Disclosure: this is a Holstery page and the PinPal is a Holstery product.

Anybody who has spent time on a job site with an impact driver in his hand knows how easily one comes off a belt.

NIOSH puts a construction worker's odds of a struck-by injury at twice those of anybody working in any other industry.

In 2020, struck-by incidents caused 14,000 nonfatal injuries in construction. The last time anyone broke those down by cause, falling objects and equipment were 29 percent of them.

And that's only counting the ones that hit somebody. Nobody counts the ones that just hit the floor.

Injury count: NIOSH, Struck-By Injuries in the Construction Sector, April 2023, citing CPWR Data Bulletin, March 2023 (2020 data). Cause breakdown: NIOSH, Preventing Struck-by Injuries in Construction, October 2020, citing CPWR Quarterly Data Report Q2 2017 (2015 data). Comparative risk: NIOSH, 2020.

It doesn't happen to the careless ones either. It happens to good hands, on ordinary days, doing ordinary work.

Every commercial site I've been on in the last ten years has a dropped-object policy.

Nobody writes a policy for something that isn't happening.

It's secure—right up until the moment it isn't.

The one that cost me something

I'd dropped my drill plenty of times without consequence. Then, during a two-storey re-roof, it slipped from my hip while I was working near the edge.

It hit the gutter, then crashed onto my car's windshield below. The drill survived the fall. But my windshield didn't.

I've seen plenty of tools fall since—usually because someone was reaching, twisting or moving too quickly.

One mistake and a steep price to pay.

The factory hook was never meant to hold your impact driver

A factory belt hook doesn't hold your drill. It hangs it. There's a lip of stamped steel, and gravity does the rest of the work.

Standing on a slab, that's plenty. But on a ladder you lean. On a lift you turn at the waist. In an attic you're on your side between joists.

The hook doesn't know which way you're facing. It just lets go.

So it wasn't that you got careless. It's that the hook was only ever designed for the one position nobody actually works in, standing straight up.

Left: the stock hook, and the lip the whole tool hangs on. Right: that same lip doing the job.

What an unsecured drill costs

I've kept a rough tally over the years, mostly because nobody else bothers. It runs in this order, cheapest last.

Peace of mind

Working off the ground with a drill on a hook, you spend part of every shift minding it. Is it seated. Did it move on that turn. Don't lean left.

That's attention going into the tool instead of into the work. Every hour, every day, for as long as you do this.

Control

A hook decides where your drill sits — you don't. It swings when you turn, rides up when you kneel, and lets go when the angle says so.

Your tool should come off when you want it off. On a hook it comes off when the geometry decides, and that's a different thing entirely.

The tool

A 20V XR impact is north of two hundred dollars. From twenty feet onto a slab it's finished — housing split, battery gone one way, bit the other.

And you're the one replacing it. Nobody has ever been handed a new impact for dropping the old one.

What it lands on

This is where it gets expensive. A finished floor. A glazing unit. A stone top that took two men to carry in. Somebody's windshield.

And if there's somebody working underneath you, it stops being about money at all.

“I work up high on lifts, scaffolding and ladders. These are a game changer to keep my impact right where I want it, until I want it.”

— Verified PinPal customer

What most of us tried first

Lanyards work. I'll say that plainly, because they do.

They also wrap round a wrist at the wrong moment and hang up on rails, which is why half the men I've worked with quietly stop clipping them on by Wednesday.

Past that the list gets short. Pockets, until you kneel. Setting it on the plank beside you, and everybody knows how that one ends.

Then the aftermarket holsters, most of which are a deeper cup around the same idea. Better odds. Same principle.

So we quit trying to build a better hook

A hook holds a tool with gravity. That's the whole problem. Gravity gets a vote.

We built something that holds it against gravity instead, and takes the vote away.

The holster and the pin. That is the entire mechanism.

A steel pin goes on the drill where the factory clip came off. Seat the tool in the holster and the pin locks in.

No strap. No latch. Nothing to remember at the top of a ladder, which matters, because that's exactly where you stop remembering things.

The only motion that releases it is a twist and a lift.

Leaning doesn't. Climbing doesn't. Turning hard doesn't.

Three different men, three different days. Walking, turning, reaching over. The drill stays on the hip.

They move. It stays put.

The part that takes the weight is metal. The bracket your pin locks into is riveted through at four points, the pin is solid, and so is the plate it mounts on. The body those parts sit in is polymer.

That's worth being straight about, because a black body is the first thing anybody looks at sideways. The load path is metal. The housing isn't, and doesn't need to be.

The clip takes a belt up to an inch and three quarters, which covers every work belt worth owning. It'll also go on a vest, a pocket, or the side of a bag.

Thirty-five dollars of aluminum may be all it takes to keep a two-hundred-dollar impact off the slab.

“Being in construction and fabrication for 30 years, I have tried just about every kind of drill holster out there. The quality is well above expectations.”

— Verified PinPal customer, 30 years in construction & fabrication

Get the PinPal

Setting one up

Once, with a screwdriver, and then it's done being a thing you think about.

Real time, one take, no cuts. Factory hook off, pin on, holster out of the pack — sixteen seconds.

Step 1

Take the factory belt hook off your drill.

Step 2

Mount the pin in its place, same spot on the tool.

The pin going on where the factory hook came off.

The pin plate is splined so it cannot work itself loose, and the screw arrives with thread lock already on it.

Step 3

Clip the holster on your belt, where you actually reach for it.

On a work belt, alongside everything else already on it.

That's the setup. Everything after it is just using the thing. Drop the tool in and it locks. Twist and lift to draw.

Draw and re-seat. One hand, no fumbling.

One pin per tool, one holster per hip. Most guys pin the impact first and work the rest out later.

How you'll know it worked

It's the first time you lean out over a rail, or turn hard on a ladder, and the drill doesn't cross your mind at all.

What it runs

Price

$35, one brand-specific pin included

Fits

DeWalt · Milwaukee M18 & M12 · Makita

Build

Metal bracket, riveted · metal pin · polymer body

Clip

Fits belts up to 1.75 in

Guarantee

Lifetime — if it breaks, we repair or replace it

Returns

45 days to send it back if it isn't right

Made

Assembled in the USA

What comes in the pack, and what every part of it is.

If I had one piece of advice, it's buy two. Put the second on whoever's newest on your crew, before he learns this the way the rest of us did.

Get the PinPal

References

  1. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Struck-By Injuries in the Construction Sector, NIOSH Science Blog / Construction Stand-Down bulletin, 4 April 2023 — citing CPWR Data Bulletin, March 2023 (2020 data). Source of the 14,000 nonfatal struck-by injury figure. cdc.gov/niosh/bulletin/2023/struck-by-stand-down.html
  2. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Preventing Struck-by Injuries in Construction, October 2020 — citing CPWR Quarterly Data Report Q2 2017 (2015 data). Source of the 29% falling-objects share of nonfatal struck-by injuries, and of the comparative risk figure for construction workers. cdc.gov/niosh/construction
  3. Product specification, pricing, fitment, warranty and returns terms: Holstery PinPal product page. holstery.com

Injury figures count injuries to people, not dropped tools, and the two NIOSH figures are drawn from different reporting years — they are quoted separately and never combined. PinPal is a tool-retention product. It is not fall-protection equipment and is not a tool tether. Where a site requires tethering, tether.