You're either gonna wrench or you're not! Oil changing ain't wrenchin. I believe if you drive you should be capable of oil changing and on a car tire changing. If you're gonna wrench you gotta have the tools.Buy a set, you won't regret! I buy cratsmans,their not the best but close enough, and if it breaks you get a new one. I'll bet I have 20 different socket sets thrown together and have used nearly every one. Even if I have 20 3/8ths drive 1/2" 12 point sockets.

 

All Torx bolts an most all HD allen head bolts have been replaced with SS allen head bolts.. I hate Torx!

 

So, rather than buying good quality tools, you buy cheap tools, and have an arc welder available to fabricate a removal tool?

Yup, that makes sense! NOT!!

 

Love my Chapman ratchets! We use lots of them at work. They're nice little tools to have. I've always bought the stuff al a carte, but the set is cool. I may have to add to my collection!


Tools...can't never have too many. I have a two car garage that only fits one car. The rest is full of tool chests.

 

Thanks! What do you do for work?

The majority of customers have the same mindset as you, that's why our Master set is our best seller; it's the biggest set!

I don't know if we have a garage full of tools at the shop, but we do have quite a few. I love it when I come across some oddball homemade looking wrench that's bent at a strange angle and ground down, and then months/years later we're very frustrated trying to reach a bolt on a machine the lightbulb goes on. Now we have draws full of tools with tags like "for impossible to reach 5/16 nut on left underside of xxx..."

 

These are the most common I've used. I would also recommend multiples of each, torx bits suck and I've rounded off a few bits. The loctite that HD uses is good stuff and the bolts usually require quite a bit of effort to get out

 

Buy the full set, and an T-27, spend the $ and buy quality. The beauty of Torx is that they can get you out of a pinch if you need to remove a stripped out hex head.

 

Among other things, we build high thermal capacity (50-500kW) touch cooling systems for power conversion electronics, CPUs, laser diodes, etc. Most of them are tightly packaged in racks or rack-mount modules. There are lots of difficult to reach fasteners.

 

Tight spots and hard to reach fasteners are our niche! Are there any tools/bits that you need that we don't currently offer? I'm not an expert on touch cooling systems, do you work with ESD sensitive products?

It's funny, when I ask people how they use our tools professionally, whether their answer is "Steinway pianos" or "NASA test equipment" it always ends with "hard to reach fasteners!"

 

We do have some electronics that we need to take ESD precautions with but they generally get installed fairly early in the process (on ESD mats) and are generally easy to reach at that point.

The only thing I can think of that plagues us is universal joint adapters that bind up and make keeping the socket on the fastener head difficult. Would be nice to have something better to replace variable angle adapters. Something that swivels smoothly and can handle moderate torque. Say 15-20 lb-ft on 1/4 drive. Maybe double jointed or cv jointed? Traditional u-joints get hinky after they exceed maybe 40-ish degrees off axis. We haven't had good luck with the "wound wire" extensions under torque. They just twist up.

We have had some prototype units that we used two u-joints and three extensions so we can get two directions of offset. That's always a problem when applying torque.