I was thinking particularly of those 40 pc socket sets in metal cases
^ The "40-piece" sets came a bit later. MOST of those were either from mainland China (PRC) or Taiwan.
We bought them from Wilmar, Medallion, and "Buffalo" (which can still be found in the second hand market.)
I just shipped one to another member - brand new unused set - for his kids.
Buffalo 40-pc SAE & Metric socket set (ebay)
^ This is the one we sold the most of. Made in Taiwan. Sales rep was Cal Steiner. We finagled a deal with him on these and got them down to about $1.63 each (freight prepaid out of Los Angeles). Retailed them for $8.88 all day long. Ran them on sale for $4.99 a set.
While these were arguably the worst of the dregs at the very bottom of the barrel, let me share with you:
Early one day long ago, a young man walked into our Tillicum store on the first of the month with a pocket full of cash.
He bought an HS7733PT-2 Fel Pro head gasket set, a 40-piece Buffalo socket set, a set of 16 HL1817 Wolverine lifters, and a $29.95 reground "rump rump" camshaft.
Because these young men were not allowed to work on their vehicles on base, we allowed them to work on their cars in our parking lot. We had lots of room. (Only issues we had were the girls that would come out on payday and work Union Avenue - we'd have to go out and run them out of the parking lot every hour or so.*)
He went out the front door, lifted the hood on his little Camaro, and went at it. Every 20 or 30 minutes he'd come back in and buy another tool - pliers or a wrench or something, then go back out and tear into that engine.
By lunchtime, he had the cylinder heads off.
A couple hours later, he came in and bought a Wilmar 150-pound beam-type torque wrench to torque down the cylinder heads.
He drove off before dusk.
So, while admittedly these things were pure ****, I watched a guy with my own eyes R&R a set of heads on a small-block Chev engine using one of these, and the cheapest other **** tools we had for sale that day. (We had a whole wall of Indestro behind the counter, but he was just a low-level Private who was on a budget.)
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
(* Uncle Harold solved the issue with the girls. He went out and approached them, and told them they were free to use our parking lot to solicit, and he'd even let them use the sofa we had in the back in the "break room", but the deal was they had to do Uncle Mickey. One of them came in the front door, asked "Who's Mickey?" and when Mick looked up and grinned, she went right back out the door and they found another parking lot - probably down at Gertie's Grill.)
