dwasifar

Give that sorry-looking old soldier a coat of paint.

I would spend money on used hand tools and used corded power tools, but I don't think I'd buy used battery-operated tools. Batteries are always the weak point and you don't know how good they are or how well they've been treated; and of course the manufacturers price the replacement batteries with an eye towards making you consider a new tool.

We are in agreement.

Well, looks like I was wrong about that. Stanley Black & Decker bought the Craftsman brand from Sears today for $900m. No word yet on what that does to existing warranties.

Albert, I generally agree with you, but I have to differ about the origin of the foot measurement. Almost nobody's foot is actually a foot long unless they play in the NBA. I wear a size 12 shoe, and my SHOES are a foot long, which is handy for pacing off rough distances, but my feet are obviously not as long as my shoes. Neither system is more accurate. Any quantity can be expressed with any desired degree of precision in either system. The debate is really about which is easier and more convenient, and each has its benefits and drawbacks in that regard. I think the human measurement argument weighs strongly in favor of the Imperial system, while the math argument leans in favor of metric. So I'm tired of hearing from metric advocates about how stupid and inefficient Imperial measurements are, but I acknowledge it would also be wrong to take the opposite position.

Surprisingly good. The tape itself has more of a matte nylon finish than the Stanleys do, and the housing is comfortable to hold. The thumb button is well-placed, not too stiff, not too loose, and when you pull the tape out you don't feel as much resistance as some other auto-lockers I've tried. Of course, for 83 cents each, anything above "shitty" would still be worth the money. I don't know that I'd pay Uline six bucks apiece for them, but they're much better than typical no-name bargain-bucket tapes.

Well, I am officially set for new tape measures now: As you can see, I like auto-locking tapes. The 16' and 12' LeverLock were on sale for $4.99 for the pair at Menards. The yellow 25' LeverLock was a warranty replacement from Stanley and the red was an impulse purchase from Amazon for $6.92. The red 25' is a fractional scale and magnetic; the yellow is a center-read scale and not magnetic: I figure I only need one magnetic tape. I got them in different colors to easily tell the difference. While I was puttering around Amazon looking at tapes, I saw these 12' Uline ones for a bargain price and had to snap them up: They appear to be private-branded Komelon Speed Lock tapes, with fractional scale: I paid $5 for those. Not $5 per tape; $5 for the whole box, shipped free as a Prime add-on item. And they're pretty nice tapes. My wife works at Lowe's and carries a tape with her all the time, but the store doesn't give them good ones. I'm going to let her give a few of these out to her work friends. She'll be the popular girl that day.

That picture makes better sense when you read the instructions and realize that what appears to be a skinny black rod sticking out of the side is actually intended to be a line drawn on the workpiece by the tool. Yeah, I don't think I'd use this. If I'm marking something, I'm usually making more than one mark; drawing the tape out and make all the marks in one pass. This would make you adjust the tape for each mark, and you'd have to line up your sight exactly with the line on the tape and lock it without shifting the tape. I agree with albert; gimmick.

FOURTH year? How did he get that far?

In practice the material measurement debate is pretty much moot; you use the system that's dominant in your region, because those are the dimensions your materials come in. We tend to prefer the system we're comfortable with, which makes it hard to be objective. I don't think either system is inherently more precise. You can measure anything with either scale, it's just a matter of how small an increment you have to choose to match the length you want. 1/32" is 794µm (microns to us, micrometres to the rest of the world), or about 0.8mm, which seems like an inherently imprecise conversion, but it looks as messy the other way; 1mm is about 5/128". I'll make an exception to that statement for temperature, though, just because outside of science it's rare to see temperature expressed in fractional degrees. Common use (weather reports, thermostats, etc.) is to express temperature in one-degree increments, which makes Fahrenheit's smaller degrees superior to Celsius. Dividing the temperature difference between the boiling and freezing points of water into 100 increments seems kind of arbitrary; they'd have been better off choosing some other benchmarks, or dividing it into 200 increments instead for smaller, more precise degrees. Once I got in a debate about this with a Russian woman, a co-worker. I explained my point of view about human-scale increments and divisibility, and she pooh-poohed my arguments (as metric advocates tend to do). "You just say that because you don't know the metric system." I told her I know the metric system just fine. "Oh really? Then how tall am I, in metric measurements?" She stood there looking smug; I looked her up and down and said, "About 170cm." Her face fell. I said, "I'm right, aren't I?" "Well, we wouldn't say it that way, but yes. Why do men win all the arguments?" I said, "Is that the way it is where you come from?"

Yes. I got mine around 1997, if memory serves. And none of that stuff is older than me.

Nice score. I have that same router table and it's been pretty good, once you go through the fiddly steps of getting the router attached. I might have some extra router mounting pieces for that table that I don't use. If you need anything like that hit me up in a PM and I'll see if I can dig it up.

What's different about them that makes them perform better? I have some older Craftsman adjustables that are reasonably good in that regard, but it never hurts to try something better.

Actually I have both of those too, and while I don't use the Clench Wrench very much, I like and use the Robogrip. Maybe not as much as you've used yours, though, judging by the amount of wear. What turned your Clench green?

As part of my upcoming project to convert my third garage bay into a proper workshop, I'm retiring my space-hogging wooden sawhorses and replacing them with folding ones. I wind up never using the wooden ones because they're tucked into a corner with a bunch of other bulky stuff and it's too much trouble to haul them out. I figure I can hang the folding ones on the wall instead. I'm starting modestly with them, with a pair of USA-made "Blue Hawk" from Lowe's: Cheap and light, I'll see if they're any good. But they already came in handy on the way home from the store:

I was too late! Nice set of tools tho. I have USA Craftsman hand tools from lo these many moons ago, and they've always treated me well. That's why I'm so sensitive to the Sears warranty issue. But I hope they do well for you.

You'd score major points if you said, "Honey, let's use my gift card on baby clothes." Just sayin'. And congrats, man.

Buy clothes and shoes for your wife, and take her clothing and shoes budget to the tool department at Lowe's, Home Depot, or some other such place that's likely to be in business a year from now to honor their warranty.

Why? It hasn't broken. I just don't use it much. Don't usually need it.

Oh, how could I forget the Pack Horse. Folding saw horse made of resin with a recessed handle. This is someone else's pic: I impulse-bought this thinking it was a Stanley product because of the color. Didn't try to use it for over a year, and when I finally took it out to put it into service it broke immediately: Obviously at that point it was too late to return it. It's been sitting in the basement since then, and I just put it in the trash today as part of a basement cleanup. A complete waste of money.

If you wear that face mask to the bank, you won't have to worry about what batteries cost any more.

This one was called an O-Ratchet, from a company in Denton, TX. You can kind of see how that worked. It's a hex drive instead of a square drive. The smaller sockets would snap inside the ratchet's drive hex, and the larger ones snapped onto the outside. There's a sticker inside the case touting a lifetime warranty, but from what I've been able to glean on the internet, the company went out of business in 1992. The other thing was called a Watt-a-Driver, and it was a straight-up interchangeable screwdriver, not a ratcheting one as I thought I remembered: Those batteries are long dead, of course, but at least they didn't leak, and when I put new batteries in it I discovered it works just fine after all this time: Although I don't really know why it wouldn't, I guess, or why I should care. The thing's been sitting collecting dust for at least twenty years, and you can see it's still unused inside the case.

Do these count as tools? Once again I was sucked into buying more than I need right now because of the price per unit savings of a bigger package. I only intended to buy four or five loose pencils at 25 cents each, but this box of 20 was $3.48 less my 10% discount, so a little under 16 cents per pencil. I probably won't need to buy any more pencils for the rest of my life.

For this particular video, maybe the key is in the title: "How to read an American tape measure." Perhaps the people who need all this help were raised on the metric system and aren't used to thinking of measurements in terms of repeated halving. What's half of half a centimeter? 2.5mm, but there's no mark on a metric tape for that, and they wouldn't think in those terms. I'm comfortable with either system. I appreciate the metric system for its easy calculations and conversions, but I think the American system is more lined up with human scale measurements and the calculations that are native to the way our brains work. You don't say to someone, "Hey, gimme 5/10 of your candy bar." I don't have a problem measuring, say, length in metric measurements, but since nobody uses decimeters, the increments in common use are centimeters and meters, which is like giving the size of a room or the height of a person in half-inches or in yards with nothing between. A foot is hard to divide by 5, but divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, or 6, whereas any metric increment really only divides evenly by 2 or 5. So I think the American system has the advantage in divisibility at least.

I can't believe this really needs so much explaining: Who doesn't know how to use a ruler? But the comments are filled with "Oh thank you, this was so confusing before," and there are oodles of such videos. I was at least expecting him to explain why the hook is loosely attached and why the multiples of 16 are in red. Those are pretty basic things too, but no, he spends the whole video, almost 9 minutes, just on explaining the 1/16" markings.