What Tool Is The Bane of your existence? I'll go 1st

[bonneyman]

Old school drop lights... god i hate them.

Well, at least they're aptly named. The inventor knew what happens to all bulb lights - he didn't want customers getting mad at him so he warned them.

I've modified my drop lights to make them more user friendly. I changed over to spiral flourescent bulbs which are a bit more resistant to breakage, and painted the inside half of the shield silver or white to reflect more light out the front. I was contemplating a form-fitting foam sleeve for the outside but then portable LED lights got popular.

 

[MichaelP]

Any tool made in India.

P.S. Must admit I've never seen or tried Kamasutra tools.

 

[neophyte]

Can't watch it now, but let me guess, it's something boiled?

It’s fairly simple, but elegantly prepared seafood fishes, from the first British chef to have a restaurant with three Michelin stars.
The video is from the BBC Meastro series, which is dome BBC version of The Great Courses, were you pay per video series, or pay a yearly fee for access to the lineup of courses.
Watching a few of the videos that are freely available on youtube has taught me what this type of high end dining entails, in both simple as well as complex dish production.
Marco Pierre White seems to be practical and knowledgeable enough to dimply recommend cooking certain side dishes like ratatouille a day or two before hand, because it saves complexity in meal production, and stews routinely taste better after sitting for a day or two.

 

[The Bean]

Ok listen up me hearties of the GJ.
Some of you will not agree with me and that is ok, but these are my opinions and mine alone.

Those brand-new no spill gas cans, oh sure someone a few years ago while smoking a dozen cigarettes, with a few Bic lighters blew themselves up, lost the garage, all the tools and they never found his body, his wife, the neighbors, the postman and crazy Karen down the street; so new laws took effect, well call me crazy but those dam things leak all over and kill me. Now I hunt for all those old gas cans, you can all call me crazy if you want.

I've got it listed on CL. Come and get it.

 

[rust in the eye]

Anything Swiss army tool / does a bunch of things poorly type tool. Vice grips are crappy clamps and terrible pliers.

+1, loathe these things. Vise grips have their place.

 

[308guru]

Engineers.

I'll play. My vote is for the idiots who think they know more than the engineers.

 

[alfadan]

Sawzalls. I hate them passionately.

 

[alfadan]

Old school drop lights... god i hate them.

Yep. They hang so the light goes horizontally away from anything you're actually working on!

 

[AEAdam]

It’s fairly simple, but elegantly prepared seafood fishes, from the first British chef to have a restaurant with three Michelin stars.
The video is from the BBC Meastro series, which is dome BBC version of The Great Courses, were you pay per video series, or pay a yearly fee for access to the lineup of courses.
Watching a few of the videos that are freely available on youtube has taught me what this type of high end dining entails, in both simple as well as complex dish production.
Marco Pierre White seems to be practical and knowledgeable enough to dimply recommend cooking certain side dishes like ratatouille a day or two before hand, because it saves complexity in meal production, and stews routinely taste better after sitting for a day or two.

Yeah I agree. Great video.

For anyone who didn’t watch it…First he gets the fish, then he puts it in “batter”. Then get this, he DEEP FRIES IT in really old oil, seasoned by potatoes. And the piece de la resistance VINEGAR!

ET VIOLA! That will be three stars please (and 14 quid!).

 

[YesIHaveAHammer]

What I mostly remember from older relatives years ago, are the poor quality tools they'd bought and hated. Often cheaply, but not always.

"The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten"

To be fair, there wasn't as much choice back then, and they didn't have the information and reviews we have today to make better decisions.

 

[Beerhippie]

Along about this time of year I start realizing I'm not over fond of lawn mowers and line trimmers....

 

[sansbury]

Having had the brilliant idea of setting cedar fence posts 42" deep in concrete it seems less brilliant 20 years later as they rot and break at ground level leaving a ~200# column of concrete to be dug from the earth. Still have more than twenty to go.

Can you rent a mini-ex for a day or two? I think I'd sooner sell the property than deal with that by hand. Nightmare fuel.

Gotta agree with @AEAdam, adjustable wrenches and their siblings, the pipe wrench. Good (expensive) ones are useful, but others (i.e., most of the others I have acquired) are difficult to adjust and won’t stay where set.

Slip joint pliers. Got a few blood blisters from them when I was young and I’ve always had an aversion to them since.

Knipex makes an adjustable wrench that ain't cheap but combines most of the best qualities of vise-grips, slip-joints, and adjustable wrenches with none of their flaws. There are also Chinese knockoffs (Klein sells one) that are about half the price.

Quality bits are the answer. I broke down and bought some Drill Hog bits a couple years ago.

Those look -fine- but the best way to buy drills and fasteners and about 10,000 other things is McMaster-Carr. They will happily sell you one $5 drill bit from a vetted high quality source (usually domestic) shipped to your doorstep within 24 hours for $10-15 S&H. Their website is a work of functional art.

In any case the quality of home center/hardware store drills is so wretched that even Harbor Freight's stuff is often markedly better.

I'll play. My vote is for the idiots who think they know more than the engineers.

There is plenty of ignorance to go around. Engineers will give you a 90-minute lecture on why achieving exactly the right amount of bolt elongation is crucial and then go "oh, huh, good point" when you explain that if they had moved the pump bracket half an inch to the right you wouldn't need to use a can opener on the body to get a wrench on the bolt in question.

 

[f121]

Anything in fractional sizes.

 

[neophyte]

Yeah I agree. Great video.

For anyone who didn’t watch it…First he gets the fish, then he puts it in “batter”. Then get this, he DEEP FRIES IT in really old oil, seasoned by potatoes. And the piece de la resistance VINEGAR!

ET VIOLA! That will be three stars please (and 14 quid!).

You sound sarcastic.
Marco basically makes elegantly looking dishes, in 5 minutes, mostly using basic techniques.
I think the only dish that had fairly expensive ingredients was the second to last dish using lobster and truffles.
I’ve probably paid close to the equivalent of £14 at Whole Foods in the past for hot bar food that was in some cases awful.
It’s sort of like the difference between someone who uses a sander for an hour sanding a wood surface, and someone who knows how to set up sharpen and maintain handplanes and a plane scraper, who can come out, and finish a board to a glass smooth finish were all the details of the grain are visible in 5 to 10 minutes.

 

[liliysdad]

Anything in fractional sizes.

I will counter…

Anything uses metric hardware, especially when that hardware is going to find its way onto something that’s originally fractional. I hate all metric…but I especially loathe mixed methods of measurement on one unit.

Example, a bracket or mount that’s going onto a mid 70s Jeep that has metric fasteners. Dumbassery.

 

[Beerhippie]

I will counter…

Anything uses metric hardware, especially when that hardware is going to find its way onto something that’s originally fractional. I hate all metric…but I especially loathe mixed methods of measurement on one unit.

Example, a bracket or mount that’s going onto a mid 70s Jeep that has metric fasteners. Dumbassery.

We have several machines around the brewery that are mixed. Hate it. If a single part of the machine is only available in Metric, make the whole damned thing Metric.

 

[Gozo]

Drill Doctor. Years ago I had a box full of dull drill bits. Drill Doctor sounded like the perfect solution. It just made them duller. Complained to the Drill Doctor company and they recommended the the face angle was off and had a doohickey that would hold it in the right position while sharpening. A+ for customer support, F for results. The doohickey brought the cutting edges up from really dull to just a bit duller than they were before piddling with them. The sharpening thing sits on a shelf. I do better with the bench grinder.

 

[Beerhippie]

Drill Doctor. Years ago I had a box full of dull drill bits. Drill Doctor sounded like the perfect solution. It just made them duller. Complained to the Drill Doctor company and they recommended the the face angle was off and had a doohickey that would hold it in the right position while sharpening. A+ for customer support, F for results. The doohickey brought the cutting edges up from really dull to just a bit duller than they were before piddling with them. The sharpening thing sits on a shelf. I do better with the bench grinder.

I'll make you a great deal on a lightly-used Drill Doctor!

 

[redwrench60]

I will counter…

Anything uses metric hardware, especially when that hardware is going to find its way onto something that’s originally fractional. I hate all metric…but I especially loathe mixed methods of measurement on one unit.

Example, a bracket or mount that’s going onto a mid 70s Jeep that has metric fasteners. Dumbassery.

Yup. I hate it too. In the industrial world I work in EVERYTHING is SAE. We are bathed in it. So when somebody slips us something metric it’s as welcomed as a pair of ****** underwear on an elevator floor.

Just to be contrary Americans, we convert everything to horsepower. Don’t care if it’s BTUs on a burner or kilowatts on a generator, it all gets documented in horsepower.

 

[rust in the eye]

Can you rent a mini-ex for a day or two? I think I'd sooner sell the property than deal with that by hand. Nightmare fuel.

Yes, I certainly could but little finesse with one of these (especially with ME at the controls) so the damage to the lawn would be catastrophic. I have devised a method that is almost tolerable to remove them but it remains VERY labor intensive. I do them as they fail which is happening with increasing regularity. Picked up two posts this afternoon. My back hurts thinking about it. I have great empathy for guys who earn a living with a shovel.

 

[hailwood1965]

This is a good thread. Three pages and no one has asked me to fill out my location.

 

[jabberwoki]

You mean the ones that are always pointed the wrong direction?

God how i hate those stinkin bastards
Blind me every time....

 

[Beerhippie]

God how i hate those stinkin bastards
Blind me every time....

Crawling in a hot as hell crawlspace or attic with a 60 Watt light bulb beside your head cooking your brains... light keeps rolling over so it illuminates only the side of your head... try to orient it to where it does some good... bump it an it dies... fumble for one of the spare bulbs in you bucket in the dark--hoping it isn't the busted one you replaced a minute ago--and change it by braille... untangle cord from around your legs, bumping it again... repeat....

 

[engineer2]

Those plastic caps they sell to seal tubes of caulk all ****. Either the caulk gets hard or the cap get stuck.
Best thing I've found it the hard plastic caps that come with Flo-Nase and similar products. Tried it on a whim and they work great. When the tube is done, the cap can be tossed.

 

[cherryred]

Drill bits ..... all of them...every last one ever made!
Spent an hour yesterday drilling 12 holes in a cabinet to put in RivNuts, I swear the drill bits were softening as soon as they touched paint on the sheet metal.

Cobalt drill bits make metal drilling tolerable.

 

[timsch]

I'll play. My vote is for the idiots who think they know more than the engineers.

But nobody thinks they know more than the typical engineer thinks they know.... Fresh from high school class, straight to college class and then they are "the Engineer". Diploma mill recipients the majority of them....

 

[liliysdad]

Cobalt drill bits make metal drilling tolerable.

Halfway decent HSS bits and knowing how to use them makes drilling way better than tolerable.

 

[TailGunner3000]

Caulking guns.

I swear every one of them ***** or every tube of caulk I've ever bought has been infected with syphilis.

 

[ecotec]

Crawling in a hot as hell crawlspace or attic with a 60 Watt light bulb beside your head cooking your brains... light keeps rolling over so it illuminates only the side of your head... try to orient it to where it does some good... bump it an it dies... fumble for one of the spare bulbs in you bucket in the dark--hoping it isn't the busted one you replaced a minute ago--and change it by braille... untangle cord from around your legs, bumping it again... repeat....

You need a headlight.

 

[ecotec]

Caulking guns.

I swear every one of them ***** or every tube of caulk I've ever bought has been infected with syphilis.

Tajima.

 

[jmdirk]

I'll play. My vote is for the idiots who think they know more than the engineers.

You mean the ones who implement stuff different from the design (cause the engineered way is too hard) and then blame the engineer when it doesn't work?

In all fairness, there is a staggering sense of superiority among many engineers. As I remember, it was instilled in them before they even graduated. I sincerely believe that every engineer, in virtually every discipline, would benefit from about 2 years of field work.

 

[Gmonkee]

Cheap, Ill fitted combo wrenches were the demons of my time playing mechanic.
Expensive ill fitting ones even worse.

I settled on Wurth and Truper wrenches later on to get the happy fits-all set.

The most precise fitting Wurth set could not be used on older junkers with gummed up bolts. The flex head offset line wrenches wouldn't ever strip a diesel line nor fit one an adjustable was on before it.
Beautiful, like new wrenches to this day for near no use.
No, not ever going to be sold.

 

[bigredcornhead]

Hole Saws especially those versions that had the different sizes like nesting dolls. I cut myself reassembling them and the holes are never great!

 

[liliysdad]

Hole Saws especially those versions that had the different sizes like nesting dolls. I cut myself reassembling them and the holes are never great!

Cheap hole saws are definitely on the list!

Good hole saws are a game changer, but even better are knockout punches if they will work for you and the particular use case.

 

[Steve W.]

You mean the ones who implement stuff different from the design (cause the engineered way is too hard) and then blame the engineer when it doesn't work?

In all fairness, there is a staggering sense of superiority among many engineers. As I remember, it was instilled in them before they even graduated. I sincerely believe that every engineer, in virtually every discipline, would benefit from about 2 years of field work.

Those of us who ARE "in the field" firmly believe that every engineer should be sentenced to working on his completed project for at least a year before he goes back to re-design it.

.

 

[timsch]

You mean the ones who implement stuff different from the design (cause the engineered way is too hard) and then blame the engineer when it doesn't work?

In all fairness, there is a staggering sense of superiority among many engineers. As I remember, it was instilled in them before they even graduated. I sincerely believe that every engineer, in virtually every discipline, would benefit from about 2 years of field work.

It's gone both ways before, no doubt. Call it general decline. I'd say engineering has been hollowed out. Around here, it's still not legal to even call yourself an Engineer without a PE license, although no one pays much mind to that. To get the license you had to have 4 years experience AND the recommendations of 3 other PE's, so paper on the wall just gets you in the door, then the work proving you're worthy begins. Now, kids can take the PE exam without the experience. Fools make those decisions. "Educated" idiots abound now, and of course they're the smartest ones in the room, not even knowing enough to know what they don't know.

signed,
pretty bitter man with a masters in mechanical engineering.

 

[Vinny]

Any tool made in India.

P.S. Must admit I've never seen or tried Kamasutra tools.

I say ANYTHING made in India. A lot of after market classic car parts seem to be from there and they don't fit at all.

Drill Doctor. Years ago I had a box full of dull drill bits. Drill Doctor sounded like the perfect solution. It just made them duller. Complained to the Drill Doctor company and they recommended the the face angle was off and had a doohickey that would hold it in the right position while sharpening. A+ for customer support, F for results. The doohickey brought the cutting edges up from really dull to just a bit duller than they were before piddling with them. The sharpening thing sits on a shelf. I do better with the bench grinder.

bought a Tormek with the drill bit jig recently, but until now I used a Drill Doctor 750 for years with great results. Check out youtube for how to see it up; it's how I figured out how to use it properly.

Those plastic caps they sell to seal tubes of caulk all ****. Either the caulk gets hard or the cap get stuck.
Best thing I've found it the hard plastic plastic caps that come with Flo-Nase and similar products. Tried it on a whim and they work great. When the tube is done, the cap is ready to be tossed tCaulkI

I use those wire nuts that you twist to bound wires together.

Caulking guns.

I swear every one of them ***** or every tube of caulk I've ever bought has been infected with syphilis.

I never thought I would, but I bought a battery powered caulking gun and man is it a game changer. Not worth it if you don't do much caulking.

 

[tool_scrounge]

Incorrectly marked measuring tools in the kitchen. I have one I have been using as all one for a while and just noticed there are 4 teaspoon in a tablespoon. It should be three. I checked it with other measurement tools and each tablespoon marking is 4 real teaspoons. Definitely not good for baking!

 

[Beerhippie]

Incorrectly marked measuring tools in the kitchen. I have one I have been using as all one for a while and just noticed there are 4 teaspoon in a tablespoon. It should be three. I checked it with other measurement tools and each tablespoon marking is 4 real teaspoons. Definitely not good for baking!

I've seen somewhere that the four teaspoons per tablespoon is a result of a fraction-metric-fraction conversion and rounding errors. Might be true.

But the proper measuring tool for baking is a scale, anyway.

 

[bonneyman]

Those plastic caps they sell to seal tubes of caulk all ****. Either the caulk gets hard or the cap get stuck.
Best thing I've found it the hard plastic plastic caps that come with Flo-Nase and similar products. Tried it on a whim and they work great. When the tube is done, the cap is ready to be tossed too.

Try these. They aren't foolproof, but are cheap and have made dried tips on caulk tubes manageable.

https://www.amazon.com/CAMGJORT-Caulk-Sealer-Saver-Tools/dp/B0CTQ1Y68K/?tag=atomicindus08-20