I love older USA-made tools. I buy them when I can find bargain prices, because I like hunting for "
hidden treasures", and because I worship the incredible quality. And, I am in no big hurry to fill in the various sets, because I already have
SOME BRAND of tool to be used for most jobs, if needed. I hope one day to build a really cool assortment of tools, all premium USA-made quality.
But I have bought many HF tools over the years too. Frankly, since I stopped wrenching for a living while still a young man in the 1970's, it has been unrealistic for me to buy
super tools off of the trucks for many years.
Can you imagine paying $200 for a set of sockets that you may not use for a year at a time? How about $50 for a ratchet, even though you might not use it more than once or twice a year?
There are many tools I would never have owned at all, if not available from HF, simply because I could not afford them, or could not justify them.
Then for a while I was pursuing my collector car hobby by visiting bone yards in the area, and scrounging parts. I had a traveling tool box made from a hiker-style back pack, jammed with tools which I might need. But I quickly found out that I lost a lot more tools than I ever broke. So I started filling it with HF tools. Lost pieces were no longer a crisis for me. Then my sons got old enough to start borrowing my tools for bike repairs, etc, and they were constantly losing tools. Rather than ban them from all my tools, I made separate drawers with tools which they were welcome to use
(even though I still chewed them out if they left tools lying on the driveway, etc).
But I have also bought quite a few worthless tools at HF, and one of my biggest complaints is that you have only 30 days to return them. So if you buy a tool and then set it on a shelf for a while before you open it
(and then later discover it is junk), then it may be already too late to return it.
Certain tools simply MUST be made of really great quality, in my opinion;
IE: certain pullers will bend under pressure and pop right off into your face, unless they are
really well made. Premium quality ratchets really do a better job too, in many cases.
Today I putter around with my collector cars, my old farm tractor, lawn mowers, etc. I am slowly switching over the tools in my boxes to older, top quality USA-made tools. But if I were a young technician with a good job who was making a good living repairing vehicles every day, I could not afford to wait around to hopefully find a bargain someday on good tools, nor could I leave a "hole" in my sets of tools, waiting till I found just the right part. I would simply order new tools off of the trucks, and pay for them on time...like all the other techs.
I use Garage Journal to share my tool questions, ideas, suggestions, and "found-treasure" stories with other people who think like me. If I am not interested in a certain thread, I don't read it.
What a concept.
I wish I had seen this locked thread before it was gone.
Precisely Mr. HS. Ran into a kid at a local trade school that had a display at the Detroit Autorama. He was leaning up against his new Macsimizer chest. When I asked how much it was, he admitted to being into the MAC dealer for $70,000! Here's a kid, fresh out of school, hasn't got a job or earned a dime yet and he owes the tool truck 70 large. Like someone said in another thread, the customer doesn't care about your tools. He wants his vehicle fixed correctly and in a timely manner.