To make sand castles that are worthy of prize money takes custom tools. For a look inside a pro's toolkit, Popular Mechanics talked to the world's top builders. Here are their secrets.

We've all been there before. With a couple of brightly colored buckets and plastic shovels, down on our hands and knees in the gritty wet sand, trying to build a sandcastle before the tide comes ...

Wet your sponge in water, then wring it out thoroughly. You want “damp,” not soaked. Sand your wall using the rough side of the sponge, starting with the high bumps and roughest areas.

The Wet Wedge is an absolute necessity if you're in the auto body collision or restoration business, and a great item for DIY-ers' tool sets. Get It: Mac Tools800/622-8665mactools.com ...

Diablo Tools ("Diablo"), which offers a solution-oriented range of best-in-the-world and best-for-our-world products for professional users, is raising the bar for the sanding industry yet again ...

2. Kiddosland Dino Play Sand Kit. Move over, Jurassic Park, there’s a new dino land to explore. This kinetic sand tools kit from Kiddosland was made for little ones in awe of all things mesozoic.

They discovered that wet sand sticks together for exactly the same reason water beads up on wax paper: a phenomenon called surface tension. Surface Tension.

As I walked on the glistening ribbon of wet sand at the water’s edge, each step produced a patch of dry sand that expanded outward from my foot for a few inches, and then disappeared as I moved ...