Sheltering at home today inspired me to do some tidying in my perennially messy garage. While doing so, I recalled that DougD had posted a great family history of his tools a couple of years ago. One thing led to another, and I decided to take a few pictures of some of my favorite tools, and ask, what’s interesting, unusual, or just a favorite in your toolbox? When I purchased this roll-around box in the late seventies (and brought it home in the back of my Ford Fiesta), it was probably the most expensive non-internal-combustion-powered item I’d ever bought. My friends made fun of the “Stack-On” brand, but it was probably an order of magnitude cheaper than a real Snap-on toolchest, and I still use it every day. I just checked, and in fact Stack-On is still in business and sells toolboxes and gun cabinets at big box stores nationally.
The oldest tool that I own and use regularly is one of my few, perhaps only, Snap-on tools. I found this set of pliers about ten years ago going through my Mom’s toolshed after she passed away. I’m sure she picked them up at a garage sale or thrift shop for pennies. I did a little research and these may date back to the 1930’s. The Credo screwdriver in the background is part of an inexpensive set I got about 20 years ago at Ace Hardware. Still made in USA and quite good quality.
But the tool that I’ve had the longest was made in 1972 – by me, in high school machine shop. The head was turned on a lathe and the flats were machined down on a shaper, not a milling machine. The original handle lasted until just a few years ago, but split unexpectedly and it now has a replacement American hickory handle from the local hardware store. This hammer has seen a lot of use, though I had to get my biggest sledge to knock the rotors off our New Beetle when I replaced them about ten years ago.
A year or two newer is my first set of metric wrenches, Powr-Kraft from Montgomery Ward. As I recall, the MonkeyWard tools were cheaper than Sears Craftsman, and I bought a few more tools there before I moved up to Craftsman. Here’s another Powr-Kraft tool, a 3/8 flex handle which has also seen a lot of use and held up well for almost half a century.
I’m pretty sure I also have a Powr-Kraft ratchet but it may be in the toolbag that lives in my truck, along with a set of Made in Taiwan 3/8″ drive sockets, from 6 – 19mm in a metal box, which I bought for 99 cents at Sears, around the time I got the flex handle and ratchet. Sometimes Sears had bargains.
My first mechanical experience was working on my parents’ Volvo 122S. No Internet or YouTube then, of course, but ads in Road & Track and repair manuals from the public library made it clear I needed a Uni-Syn to synch the SU carbs. Notice how these brand names … Stack-On, Powr-Kraft, Uni-Syn, and Snap-on … all used hyphens? I don’t think that’s so common now; today it would be StackOn or UniSyn.
Pretty soon I moved on the motorcycles, and within a year I had my first Japanese bike, a Honda. A lot is written about the high quality of 1970’s Honda’s, but the Phillips head (or strictly speaking, JIS) screws that held a lot of the bikes together were made of very soft steel. Essential for their removal was an impact driver, to jar the screw loose without damaging the head. Of course, cordless tools were decades away, and air tools and a compressor were out of financial reach for most of us, so a Japanese Vessel brand impact driver was a necessary acquisition. Note that the box says Impact-Driver (there’s that hyphen again) but they were also known as Attack Drivers, and are still available today. And if you can’t figure out how they work, well, I’ll just say that it involved the use of the hammer I showed above.
Pretty soon Japanese bikes, as well as the VW Scirocco I bought in 1980, adopted internal hex head (aka Allen) screws and it was time to add a set of drivers to my toolbox. Still Made in Japan; no Chinese tools yet. The best tools, at least anecdotally, were American (Snap-on, Craftsman, S&K etc) or perhaps unobtanium German; then Taiwanese or Korean. Like my Stack-On toolbox, I bought this 3/8 drive socket set at a local chain called Post Tool, which was sort of the Harbor Freight of its day. While basic tools like wrenches, ratchets and standard-sized sockets were quite affordable from the American brands, something like this hex socket set, or a long extension, or large metric sockets (larger than 19mm) got pretty expensive, and these Japanese options, often available in sets, were a good value.
But before my fleet had transitioned to higher quality hex head screws, I still had a few disasters involving corroded steel and aluminum threaded interfaces. I needed a tap and die set, so off to Sears I went. I’ve added a few individual SAE taps since then, but this Craftsman metric set still gets regular use.
I’ll wrap up with my newest tool, juxtaposed with something I’ll probably never use again but can’t quite throw away. In the foreground is the socket needed to remove the cap on my V6 Tacoma’s cartridge oil filter. Our Golf, which also uses a cartridge filter, just requires a 22mm (?) socket but Toyota in their wisdom designed something special. And yes, that’s a drain plug crush washer stuck inside it, but don’t worry, I put a new one on before replacing the drain plug at my last oil change a month ago. And the yellow thing behind it? Well, for the younger folks here, I’ll just say that motor oil used to come in cans. With flat tops and no spout, so the spout came out of your toolbox, combined with an opener. The original multi-tool.
So those are some tools from my collection. What are your favorites, classics, or maybe a tool so unusual you’ll stump some of us here at CC? No, that’s impossible; there’s always a CC’er with the answer to any question, no matter how obscure.
I do have some special tools I’ve acquired since of course, but the best Christmas present my dear departed Father gave me 40 1/2 years ago was a metric Craftsman toolkit with metal tool box. Even then wasn’t sure if SAE would have been more useful choice, but since I’ve owned nothing but foreign cars since, it proved to be a good one.
I’ve since supplemented it with some SAE to take care of my household chores.
The Craftsman tookit also had an ignition service kit with feeler gauges, points file, distributor wrench, of course at the time my car still had a carburator and points. It even had a hacksaw with a bunch of blades….there were a lot of them originally, but I’ve used most of them throughout the years (thankfully mostly on non-car projects).
Though I don’t use all the tools consistently, the kit has allowed me to work on things I’d never have thought to try previously.
My Dad really wasn’t a car guy, but he was technical (a chemist by training) and maybe more useful was the bits of information I picked up hanging around him and other people. Sometimes he couldn’t do a job himself and hired it out to be done, for instance when he had a set of fold-down stairs to the attic put in….and I was to be his assistant while the work was being done, so I learned something about framing an opening which of course was useful later on (even when I was putting in doors in a house for Habitat for Humanity or replacing a leaky back door to his home). Mostly an interest in how things are done, even if they aren’t quite in your normal field of practice, can lead you to ideas later on that you might not otherwise have thought of. One of my ex-co-workers impressed me greatly with his resourcefulness…his refrigerator had a bad starter and he couldn’t get parts until the next day…he characterized the operation of the starter and figured an incandescent bulb would approximate it, and clipped in a bulb so his refrigerator would work until he could get the replacement part (maybe if he was single, his refrigerator would continue to operate with the bulb in place without having to buy the starter, to this day?). The great part of the toolkit was his mind….he wasn’t normally a refrigerator repair person for his day job.
When I got a ’63 Beetle as my first car, realized the tools in Dad’s shed (standard) didn’t fit my VW (metric). Wow, the fun of owning a car!!
Dad drove me to Sears and for $50, you has a choice of a tool box full of standard or metric sockets and wrenches, plus some screw drivers and pliers. With the metric set plus other items like brake repair tools, kept the ’63 & ’69 Beetles and ’75 Toyota Corolla rolling thru high school and college. I still have the original metric set (minus a socket or two). The best source of the old US made Craftsman tools are garage sales and flea markets.
One thing I learned from this is go ahead and pay the $10 or $15 for the proper tool for the appropriate job. I learned this the hard way when an improvised tool slipped and left a gash on the back of my hand. School of hard knocks!!
Here is the pride of my toolbox. When I say I need my Crescent wrench, I really mean it!
I have my Dads, I have no idea how old it is, I have known it as long as I’ve been alive.
On the other side side it says CeeTeeCo.
I’l call it the Granddaddy of my toolbox,
I had the exact same impact drive and the carb sync tool. All purchased for a 3 cyl Kawasaki 500. The impact driver got a lot of use and at some point it disappeared. The carb sync tool was a waste of money for me. It flutter so bad on the Kawasaki I couldn’t tell anything. I just used my fingers to set the carbs and cancelled cylinders to check load balance. Also used it on my Moto Guzzi, similar results. The Guzzi techs scared me with talk about the Del Orto carbs being notoriously difficult to get tuned properly. After my bike sat there two weeks waiting for them to go thru the carbs I went back and got the bike and went thru them myself. Moral of the story, most techs assume you are an idiot.
I’m sure I have numerous interesting tools (many of which aren’t with me where I am now), but my old toolbox itself probably has a more interesting story than anything that was in it. It was at the house where I grew up as long as I can remember, usually on the basement floor along with other clutter. Most of the tools in it were well-worn Craftsman screwdrivers, wrenches, and pliers, but also some old-timey wood screwdrivers, wrenches, and hammers, some of which looked to date from before the 20th century. Only occasionally did my dad trot out the toolbox to a work area elsewhere in the house or driveway, and when he did occasionally he’d mention his grandfather (a plumber and woodworker) made it himself. A few years ago I gave that some thought – it was made by my great grandfather, and my nephew and nieces’ great great grandfather, making it by far my oldest family heirloom.
The significance of that didn’t hit me until I thought back to another family-heirloom story an old girlfriend once related, and which stuck with me. Her mother (or maybe her grandmother, don’t remember) had an old set of fine china, apparently rare and expensive when new, that had been in her family and handed down for several generations. By the time her mom got it, it was considered too valuable to risk breaking stuff by actually serving dinner on it, so the collection mostly sat in the dining room cabinets, behind doors in protective covers. When her mom got old and tried to pass on the fancy dinnerware to her daughter, she declined it. Her mom was horrified. These were treasured family heirlooms that belonged to her grandmother! But my gf had no use and no space for another set of dishes that were too old-fashioned looking for her tastes and couldn’t be used in the microwave. It’s not like she had any treasured memories of her family and friends eating from this dinnerware on fancy occasions or holidays. And that’s why I came to love the old handmade toolbox: my dad never treated it like a valuable, treasured family heirloom. No, it was just an old but functional toolbox, and when he was done using a screwdriver he’d just chuck it in there from waist height without a thought, thus explaining its current
dilapidated conditionpatina. I learned from the juxtaposition of these two stories that sometimes, counterintuitively, the best way to get your kids to appreciate something is not to treat it as anything holy or special that must be preserved, but rather just let them take in the seeming mundanity of it being part of your life.I have a similar toolbox that belonged to my grandfather. His doesn’t have the nice curvature on the handle that yours has. It’s wonderful what they used to make out of wood once. Nowadays it’d be moulded plastic.
I saved the first, small toolbox I got as a gift from my folks when I was 16, for many years, using it for odd sized drill bits and sockets, or bent saw blades I might use on a demo job with lots of nails. When it was still quite new I used at a rainy SCCA race in Portland in 1978, where it filled with water and starting growing that PNW patina. I passed it on to my daughter a few years ago (in Portland, fittingly) and I actually used it a few months ago to do a small repair at her house on our last visit. The 40 year old stickers are holding up well and the patina is just on the surface.
I’ve owned a wrinkle band ring compressor for over 40 years and it by far beats the standard type ring compressor. I’ve used it on at least 50 engines. It is superior in that it can’t slip into the cylinder, adjust it for the first piston and it is set for the remainder, and you can see where the rings are in relation to the block. (Stock photo) I read some current reviews on Amazon and the current Chinese made one may not be as robust as mine, but it still received a 71/15/6/3/5% (5 to 1 star rating).