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My house came with a big air compressor in the garage that the previous owner installed. He copper plumbed air pipe around the perimeter of the garage (with several outlets) and up to the ceiling where there's a retracting hose reel. I attach extension hoses as-needed, and I can reach most of...

Zircon makes one with a passive magnet "transmitter" call the Exitpoint, and it comes in two models. Doesn't work for very thick walls, though. The Magnespot one supposedly works from as far as 4 feet away, so you could walk around up in the attic, waving the receiver around, to get a rough...

Wow, the Jonard Magnespot is exactly what I was looking for. I wonder what these tools are called, generally.... seems like "Reference point locator" is the term? There's also one with a passive magnet instead of an active transmitter.

There are times when I'm trying to drill a hole up through the basement ceiling through the first floor, and I have to go to great lengths measuring the locations of various pipes and things to figure out exactly where the hole will come out through the floor, like to align the hole with a wall...

Good thought, Ohio Andy! I'll be in Akron, OH visiting my parents in July. I live in Dover, NH. I will buy someone lunch who wants to show me their ratchet collection.

Well, I did put the initial Dual-80 to work, and found that it didn't work very well, which is what got me investigating this. I had a HEPA filter running across my shop as I was rebuilding a drum sander, and I wasn't getting feedback from the Dual-80 to let me know whether it was advancing the...

Snap-On sent me a replacement 3/8" multi-position ratchet. It is identical in performance to the first one. Quiet, sluggish, heavy back-drag, with oil oozing out of the head. If this is the finest ratchet on the planet, I feel like I'm missing something. But it seems like the first one was...

My blocks are aluminum, so magnets won't work. Those slotted shims are pretty much what I'm thinking of. I wonder if I can get some that actually fit my depth stop... Maybe I'll actually invent something someday. Hope springs eternal. It just gets harder and harder as time goes on, since so...

I use a kit of Setup Blocks all the time, for lots of things in the shop, specifically one of these kits: https://www.woodpeck.com/setup-blocks.html One of the things I use these for is for setting the depth on a drill press, to drill a hole to a specific depth in a piece of wood. But the...

Oh, you think I might have a defective Dual-80? I just grabbed it out of the basement, and with my bare fingers on the square drive, it's hard at first to tell which way to turn it... i.e., it's not instantly obvious which way is "free" to click. At first I think I might be trying to turn it...

Well, at least when the Snap-On is not broken in, my Husky 3/8" ratchet is way better than the Snap-On Dual-80 head. There's tons of back-drag on the Dual-80, and I ran into trouble with that when tightening some nuts on my drum sander yesterday. It's an old USA Performax machine that I just...

Just received a shipment from Snap-On: two of their Multi-position ratchets, the 3/8" drive F80MP with the Dual-80 head, and the 1/4" drive T27MP. They arrived in a flat corrugated mailer. They were dumped together in a greasy plastic bag inside the mailer. They were covered with oil, grime...

Curious.... does the non-recessed switch on the Snap-On version of this get in the way, and prevent it from being used as a speeder handle in combination with another ratchet? Looks like it might.

Whoa! Those are very cool. I also just learned that Ko-Ken's intermittent knurling is designed to prevent things from rolling away. Looking damn cool is just a nice side-effect. Here are those Wobble-fix extensions from Ko-Ken compared to the copycat Wobble-Plus extensions from Snap-On...

Also, what is this little guy, and does any other manufacture make these? Seems like.... if you were to put this on another ratchet, you'd kinda be making your own multi-position or indexing ratchet... but maybe without the ability to lock the position? Certainly seems like the "speeder...

Ah! The locking extensions on the Stahlwille are cool! 12pt, though... The 1/4" Ko-Ken set arrived today. Wow, just wow. Such attention to detail. I almost didn't want to touch the parts, so as not to smudge them. Felt like opening/handling a fine watch, more than a tool. That knurled...

Yessir! My father owned a printing company, and I worked there when I was growing up. It looked very similar to the second video, and nothing like the first video. I.e., no dirt floors, workers (including me) were wearing steel toed boots, no hand-dipping things in hexavalent chromium while...

Also, to bring the "where things are made" question closer to home, here are some fellows making square-drive L-handles in the third world: It's obviously a very complicated issue, with many facets, but... there's something about this video that makes me uncomfortable. And even if I didn't...

As a wannabe inventor, I'm so jealous! What a brilliant invention.

One thing that wasn't mentioned in this thread, that I can find, is a "multi-position" or "indexing" ratchet. I just learned about these... wow! So THIS is reason enough to give the Dual-80 mechanism a day in court. Ko-Ken doesn't make one of these, though you can piece one together from a...