Crafters know that some materials just weren’t meant to be cut with scissors. Make more than a few cuts through cardboard, and your hands will ache; use the wrong shears on fabric, and you’ll ruin both the material and the cutter. A useful new tool from Skil handles those materials and many more. The $50 Power Cutter is advertised for use on most things under 1/4-inch thick (carpet, leather, vinyl flooring, and more), making it more like a delicate-use circular saw than a pair of scissors. It’s easier to steer along curved paths than a utility knife, and in my testing it made clean, splinter-free cuts on some things €” like a scratched compact disc €” that are notoriously difficult to cut. Hard as it is to believe, there seems to be room at the workbench for a whole new variety of power tool. Happily, the Power Cutter won’t be a power-strip hog: Like the palm-sized iXO2-powered screwdriver ($40), it’s part of a line of Skil products using next-generation lithium ion batteries, which can hold a charge much longer (up to six times as long, Skil says) than the NiCd and NiMH batteries found in most cordless tools, and they can sit for 18 months without losing juice €” meaning you’re less likely to be in the middle of a home repair when you discover the tool you need won’t be ready until it has had a few hours to recharge.