Well, 40 year professional harley mechanic here. Always indy shops, no dealer stuff. I like others have a mix of a lot of stuff in my boxes. There are 2 stories that became lessons I learned 30 years ago regarding tool trucks.
Story 1. 30 years ago in the mid 90's A friend of mine had an auto repair shop. At the time I was in between shops and I working out of my garage since I had a ton of side work. He ended up with medical problems and asked if there was any way I could work out of his middle bay since it had no lift and nobody used it. He wanted me to watch over the place. He sweetened the deal by gifting me a really nice set of MAC boxes, top, middle, bottom, and 2 side boxes. He had just bought a mammoth snap-on box, so the MAC boxes were sitting unused. At that point all I had to do was move the harley tools, the bike lift, and split up my hand tools. Well that wasn't happening, so I bought one of those billion piece craftsman tool sets, mainly for the sockets, and I got myself a bunch of snap-on ratchets when the tool truck came in since I was ready to upgrade anyway, and at the time there wasn't much out there that felt as nice. Soooo...one day I had a handlebar job, and on the 1982-1994 handlebar switch housings there are these small ******* Phillips screws that hold the switches in the housings. I went through every ******** screw driver I had. New MAC, New SK, craftsman, and others, and NONE of them would budge the screws. They were rounding out the heads and wouldn't break them loose. The one really good auto mechanic hears me cursing, and comes walking over with a smirk on his face and hands me a snap-on screw driver. I said ok snap-on man with your fancy screw driver, give me the damn thing. I stuck it in the screw, gave it a twist and *POP*, the screw breaks loose instantly. I do the other 3 screws with the same result. 2 weeks later I have another handlebar job, and the same thing all over again. None of my screw drivers would break them loose. I call the mechanic over and ask if I can borrow the magic screw driver. I put it in the screw and *pop*, it instantly breaks loose. I said ok, I'm done with this ****, the next time that dude rolls the truck in I'm getting some snap-on screw drivers. To this day i never had a problem with those screws. Final score- Snap-on 1, everything else zip, zero, nada.
Story 2. During this time I was also looking at snap-on wrenches, again at that time nothing felt as nice. The other mechanic, who used to work at a K-mart auto center started preaching about this benchtop brand of tools they had at the time. Talking about sockets his exact words were " i hit them with torches, beat them with hammers, and they don't break. I didn;t care about sockets, but he said they had a set of wrenches that looked like older snap-on before they made them longer, and its $20 for the set. After 2 weeks of this preaching I said ok, lets go to K-mart, I'll buy $50 worth of tools and I'll show you that I'll turn them to dust in a week. I got the wrenches, a string of 3/8 sockets, a 3 piece wobble extension set, and a string of torque sockets for $50. Even though the wrenches looked pretty damn good the next day or so i grabbed the snap-on wrenches off the truck. Well, joke was on me. A week later the wrenches were fine, 1 year later the wrenches were still perfect, and now 30 years later those bench top wrenches are still going fine, and every bike I worked on in the last 30 years was with those wrenches and they are still like the day I got them. The 2 lessons I learned in those few weeks was yeah, sometimes the tool truck is your savior, and never poo poo a set of tools because they're cheap, because there might be some serious gems. There is a balance in there somewhere.
