Super Light 15 Foot Fiberglass Fish Tape. Goes STRAIGHT up or down a wall!
The 12" diameter PVC case is both light (under 1 lb) and easy to carry. Small enough to carry in your luggage for out-of-town jobs!
The SECRET is that it's made exactly like a 1/4" Steel Fish Tape... 1/4" Wide and 1/8" Thick!
Feed the flat 1/4" section up or down the wall (facing you) until you hit the header or floor, then fish the included 8" chain (with a ring to tie the cable onto) out of the hole.
The 1/4" Fiberglass Fish goes straight up or down - it doesn't go off to the side or get lost in the wall!
This tool makes fishing walls a quick and easy one-man job.
8" Ball Chain with a cable ring on one end and a bullet nose with a hole on the other end.
Although phone men have been trying to fish both insulated and un-insulated walls with 1/8" fish tapes for years, they quickly found that the fish would simply coil up inside the wall, and pretty much never come out. That's because the 1/8" fish retains it's coiled memory, so it coils up inside the wall just like it did when it was stored.
In the early 1980's Harris Seltzer, a phone man I worked with at General Dynamics, showed me the magic of the 1/4"" fish. It's twice as wide as the regular 1/8" fish (the 1/8" fish was made for fishing pipes, not fishing walls). The extra width and weight of the 1/4" fish helps it to stay flat after it's uncoiled (unlike the 1/8" fish). The extra width means you can feed the fish out along on a suspended ceiling and it will go straight... and you can fish either up or down a wall - and the fish goes straight up or down.
The problem with the 1/4" steel fish was that it was difficult to uncoil and the coil back up, and it's heavy. A new technology has allowed a 1/4" Fiberglass Fish to be made with all of the benefits of a steel fish - and none of the drawbacks!
It's light, easy to carry, easy to coil and uncoil from its PVC case, and there's no oil or rust to come off on your hands.