Cheap Ass Tools

Disclaimer: this blog was written for the weekend hobbyist guys.  You professional mechanics that buy the good shit from the start can have a laugh at this one (and at us). 

 

When the day comes that you decide to be a hot-rodding, greasy fuck and turn wrenches, you’re gonna need some tools.  Whether you are a teenager, young adult or middle-aged, you’ll go through the ritual that is picking your first tool set and toolbox.  It’s overwhelming, but we all went through it.  We all also go through the sticker shock of new tool prices. 

 

…And here we go with the temptation of buying cheap ass tools.  It is with this sticker shock is where the temptation comes from.  Don’t feel bad, we’ve all succumbed to the siren-like song of places such as Harbor Freight, with its slogan, “Quality Tools at Ridiculous Prices!”  Sure, the tools look shiny and offer a lifetime warranty, but damn if they work correctly.  Swap meets and flea markets also offer no-name brand tools fresh off the boat from China or Taiwan.  I have a cheap tool set in my daily driver truck toolbox that consists of a bastardized set of Harbor Freight and swap-meet tools.  The wrenches fit sloppily on fasteners and the ratchets skip teeth, but they’ll do in a roadside emergency.  If my toolbox gets broken into or if I lose a tool on the side of the road, I won’t lose sleep over it.  

 

I’ve been lucky with a few cheap tools in my main toolbox at home, where I keep my good shit.  My best cheap ones are Popular Mechanics brand offset box wrenches.  They’ve held up to some pretty good torque, I must say.  Other times, I’ve had numerous tools fail on me.  The most recent event was a cheap ass three-jaw puller from Harbor Freight.  I was trying to remove the crank pulley/balancer from my daily driver, and the thing literally snapped apart and also bent the bolts that came with it.  Pathetic.

 

If you are starting out and ready to stock your new, shiny toolbox, you will fall for the cheap tools.  The experienced will tell you to wait and invest in the good stuff, but you will eat the apple.  I’ve gone through my cheap tool phase, but mind you, I’ve been buying tools since I was 16.  How they hell am I going to afford good tools as a teen?  I made do with swap meet and Harbor Freight shit to work on my first car in high school, but more often than not I mostly used my dad’s tools.  I still feel bad to this day when I used one of my dad’s Mac open end wrench to remove the battery terminals from my car.  Stupid me, removes the + lead first and I arc his wrench.  Sorry dad!

 

Eventually, after your cheap wrench slips off a bolt or your ratchet jumps a tooth and you skin the ever loving shit out of your knuckles, you’ll buck down and start investing in quality tools.  Get a credit card, because you’re gonna need it!  See, this is why young car guys are always broke.  Between buying parts for your project car and buying good tools, you’ll only be able to afford ramen. 

 

There’ll come a point in time when you’ll be ready to start buying shop equipment and metal fab tools, such as a sander, drill press, band saw, sheet metal brake etc.  Again, here’s where the allure to places like Harbor Freight come in.   Why spend thousands for a piece of equipment when Harbor Freight has it for a quarter of the price?  You’ll rethink your decision real fast when the motor fries or the tool just doesn’t live up to your expectations.  Yes, I’m guilty of buying Harbor Freight shop tools, but I spent a lot of time “fixing” them to get them to work decently. 

 

If you wrench for a living, then high-quality tools are a must.  My dad is a mechanic and as such he has all Snap-On, Matco and Mac tools to make a living with.  But for the hobbyist like me, we’ll just have to slum it with the mid-grade stuff, with a few Chinese tools thrown in.  My last biggest disappointment was my Husky air compressor.  Six months old and the motor took a shit.  Luckily it was still under warranty, but I had to drop my compressor off at a repair facility for a month.  Let me tell you, a shop without a compressor is like losing your right arm and leg.  Sure enough, it gets fixed with another motor like the one that failed.  If it shits again I’ll just buy a new US-made motor. 

 

Summing it up, damn near every beginner gearhead goes through the ritual of buying cheap tools, getting frustrated with them and then buying the good stuff a bit at a time.  It happens.  Till next time, try not a skin a knuckle on your shitty Harbor Freight ratchet!

Why Must I Be A Teenager With A V8?

My first car was a 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.  I got it in May of 1999.  It has a V8.  It was old and needed lots of work.  I was still in high school.

 

When I first brought my car home, I gave it a good wash.  Once insured, I took it to school the following Monday morning.  It got me to school okay for the first few times.  But, old cars will give you shit as they are wont to do.

 

Ah yes, the joys of putting it in neutral and feathering the gas to keep it from stalling at every red light.  And yes, stalling out in front of the school, in front of a group of cuties.  But fuck it; I had the 3^rd oldest car at school, and an American one to boot.  You can keep your plastic import POS.  Also, I had no working stereo, so I borrowed my dad’s portable stereo to play music while it sat in the passenger’s seat (all the while consuming D cells by the package).  Lastly, I kept a full 5-gallon gas can in the trunk because the gas gauge didn’t work worth a damn.  Just keep this gas can in mind as you read this.

 

            Let me tell you, driving a V8-powered machine will show its ugly side when you go to the gas pump.  At the time I was making money doing auto repair side jobs.  I can remember that gas at that time cost around $1.75 a gallon.  Filling up my 17-gallon tank cost $25 – 30.  My car could get around 12 MPG.  Guess where all my money went?  In that fucking gas tank.  It was so bad that I made the girlfriend I had at the time pay her way for movies, food, etc.  Hey, I’m old school like that, where I believe that a man should pay for everything.  Luckily she was cool with it, since she knew my gas tank sucked my wallet dry.  It got to the point where I was scrounging couch change to put gas in my tank.  This is what taught me budgeting, the Greasy Hot-Rodder way.

 

            Now for the gas tank…One day after driving around with my girlfriend at the time, my friend and his girlfriend, I took a hard right turn and skidded around a corner, just for the hell of it.  A few minutes later, the whole car started smelling like gas.  Turns out, the hard turn I took toppled the gas can  in the trunk over and for some reason, the cap came off (thanks Dad for giving me a gas can with a fucked up cap).  Luckily I realized it and pulled over quickly, so only about a gallon spilled out into the trunk.  It wasn’t fun trying to mop up spilled gasoline in a trunk.  For the rest of that night, my car smelled like gasoline to the point where it got you high.  I saw my imbecile friend about to light a cigarette in my rear view mirror and I yelled at him “NO!”  Damn to think he could have killed us all.  Never again did I carry a gas can in my trunk.  This would come back to bite me in the ass later. 

 

            The following summer, I got my first steady job at Home Depot as a cart boy.  I was then in college at the time.  Having already built and dropped in a 350 smallblock, I was tweaking that thing all the time.  And, my gas gauge still wasn’t working.  The result of my gas gauge not working caused me to get stranded with an empty tank many times.  Also, the fussy 350 left me on the side of the road quite a few times as well.  My parents booted me off of their AAA membership and made me get my own since I used up all three tows in a month.  I remember one time while waiting to get towed home (after my MSD 6A ignition box took a shit), some guy with a flatbed truck stopped across the freeway and asked me if I wanted a tow.  I asked him how much and he says $80.  I told him all I have is $20.  Then he took off.  Asshole.  Nice to see you help out a young kid broken down on the side of the freeway. 

 

            My first year of college saw me again spending lots of dough on gas.  I was commuting 20 miles one way to school.  I filled my tank twice a week.  On top of that, I spent a lot of money on parts for the engine.  Thank god my parents helped me out with some of my school expenses.  Also, I was in for a rude awakening when I found out that no modern girls get turned on by a guy re-jetting his carburetor in the college parking lot.  Talking to girls about camshaft profiles, porting heads, rear-end gear ratios and how much I hate import cars got me no play.  This wasn’t like back in the day where the car guys had the cute girls.  Even worse was when I changed my major to the sausage-fest known as Mechanical Engineering.  Eventually, one girl did come around and didn’t mind when I got gas on one of our first dates and I left her in the car for about ten minutes while I popped the hood and talked to some random guy who asked about my engine.  She was around for a few years until she turned psycho.

 

            I drove my Cutlass until my final two years of college, where I bought a new truck with an inline-5 cylinder engine that gets 20 MPG.  What a difference!  I still drove my Cutlass on weekends and I was now able to modify it and take my time, as anyone with a project car as a daily driver can attest, you have to get your car running as soon as possible or else you ain’t got no wheels.

 

            Now, at 33 years old, I look back at all of my experiences being a “car guy”.  Once you’re out of college and living the adult life, shit changes and now women love a guy who’s handy.  My oh my, how the tables have turned.  I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve seen guys with a flat tire on the side of the road waiting for AAA to come rescue them.  Might as well leave your manhood on the side of the road, too.

 

            My wife loves the fact that I keep the cars running and loves to ride in my ’61 GMC hot rod.  She loves the whole Greaser/Hot Rod culture, and comes to hang out in my shop while I’m wrenching to keep me company.  I wouldn’t go back to change anything about my college years.  I had my car and tools to keep me busy.  Besides, a girlfriend with no interest in cars would’ve led to some awkward silent moments and a diversion of money for car parts to shoes or some shit. 

 

Time to take the wife tool shopping (after she buys shoes, of course)!

 

Shop Zen

A Greasy Hot Rodder’s natural habitat is a garage/shop.  Those of us fortunate enough to own a house and have our own shop will tell you: We spend most of our time there.  If we have an understanding girlfriend or wife, they know where we are and what we’re doing.  We’re not out gallivanting at some bar or blowing our paychecks at some titty bar.  They put up with it because their cars are always running and shit around the house gets fixed!

 

As I’ve described in my previous blogs, I turned my two-car garage at my house into a service/repair/fab shop.  Besides wrenching on my ’61 GMC hot rod, I take on side jobs and perform repairs on our daily drivers and families and friend’s cars.  As I write this blog, I have my mother-in-law’s Rav4 on jack stands in my shop.  Her car needs the steering rack removed and resealed.  As much as I loathe modern import cars, I have to say I admire Japanese design with their packaging.  The lack of room to work, not so much.  Nevertheless, I kind of do enjoy working on them (shhhhh don’t tell no one!)

 

Us gearheads can tell you, there is a Zen associated with a shop.  Every other Friday night that’s not a date night with the wife, I come home after work, pour some whiskey and just go to my shop to drink and have some alone time.  Even I just put on some tunes (Rockabilly of course!) and sit at my workbench just to stare at my shop, it calms me down.  All of the stress from dealing with the dickheads and morons at work just seems to float away.   Even thinking of the smell of my shop is enough to get me through a shitty week at work when I’m stuck at my desk cranking out a report for some asshole customer with no sense of realistic scheduling. 

 

As much as we cuss and throw tools when shit gets rough, we really do enjoy what we do.  There’s no better feeling than firing up the car you’ve been working on and taking it for a successful test drive.  This is when it’s time to break out the extra-special dark beer or whiskey and to clean and put away your tools, while letting the endorphins flood your brain.  The feeling of the “First Ride” on a project car is just like sex with a new woman: Excitement and Nervousness rolled into one, followed by triumph.  Eventually, your wrenching skills reach a point where routine preventative maintenance and simple R&R jobs can be done blindfolded.  This is when you crank the tunes, crack an ice cold beer and get to wrenching.  To a non-car person, us Gearheads doing our thing is mystifying; their broken-down car is in good hands and will run again soon.  Chicks dig that shit.  It’s also very satisfying taking any non-car appliance or object and fixing it in your shop.  Again, the endorphins mixed with beer in your bloodstream makes you feel good when it’s fixed.

 

A few weeks ago I had a three-day weekend for Memorial Day.  I hadn’t started on my Mother-In-Law’s Rav4 yet.  Saturday and Sunday were spent running errands and spending time with my parents and wife.  On Monday during the day, I started on her car.  After opening an ice-cold Pabst and putting on some Kim Lenz and cranking the volume, I put her car on jackstands and started to remove the steering rack.  Even though I had power steering fluid running down my arms and dripping onto my face, I still felt the Zen of working with my hands and using my tools.  I got to use my brand new IR impact gun my wife got me for my birthday and my new crow’s feet wrenches she got me for Xmas.  Using new tools always feels good.  I had to stop since my parents came over for BBQ.  I seriously didn’t want to stop.  I could’ve easily wrenched into the night.  It’s okay, beer and steak was just as good as well as smoking cigars and drinking black & tans with Dad.  Point being, I waited until Monday to work on it, while getting errands done the previous two days.  Two days away from work dropped my stress level, and the Monday spent wrenching was the icing on the cake.  I was ready to return to work Tuesday, fully recharged. 

 

The only thing that can break the Zen of a shop is worrying about where you’re going to place new tools and equipment or when a tool breaks or goes missing.  Re-organizing and cleaning a shop brings the Zen back, knowing that you’ll have a fresh start when the next job starts. 

 

On a last note, my wife is expecting our son this August.  The cycle will begin anew where I will let my son help me in the shop, he fucks around and I send him in the house crying, just like my Dad did with me.  Needless to say, the Zen will be unbalanced for a while.  Once my son is old enough, it’ll be “Son, go grab us both a beer!”  The Zen shall then be restored.

 

So, there you have it.  Now you know why Greasers like to hang out at shops.  There’s ALWAYS beer, good tunes, hot rods and metal fab equipment, sitting there looking badass.  So, let’s blast the Rockabilly, drink some fucking beers and turn some fucking wrenches!  Cheers!