Buying cheap tools

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I still have my father's Wolf electric drill, I think it was called a Sapphire? I am going to guess early 1970's.
No speed selection, no hammer function. Looking well used but still going strong.
Still got my first electric drill, a Bosch green, that I bought 43 years ago. It was only last year that I replaced the brushes in it. It now lives in a drill press in the shed and still gets used regularly.
And +1 for estwing hammers, i have at least three!
 
I used to love making go carts as a youngster with my younger brother , we had a decent hill where we lived and would spend hours and hours riding downhill and having to avoid the lorries going to and from the industrial estate at the top of the hill . So much more fun than the modern day kids that spend hours playing with Xbox and PlayStations and not being active. A good example of how these threads go off topic yet still remain within the woodworking theme 🤗🤗🤗

When my old man was a youngster, he and two of his four brothers spent a couple of hours making "the best go cart ever", and took it to a local hillside for the afternoon.
Unfortunately they'd decided to strip a brand new pram - bought for their newly-arrived brother number four - to make it, and ended up buckling the wheels and one of the axles in the process....
This was in the early 1930s, when admonishing a wayward child wasn't frowned upon, and their dad - my grandfather, of course - failed to see any funny side to their activities.
Apparently my father had trouble sitting down for a couple of days!
 
Hi Y'all

I've recently become involved in setting up a repair cafe in our city. The aim of this is to repair, as much as possible, all manner of things and reduce materials to landfill. We fix furniture, bikes, electrical items, clothing, and have a go at nearly anything. However, seeing some of the rubbish people bring in, I guess I take the perspective that we shouldn't be buying or even permitted to sell, stuff that can't be fixed, or at least recycled. The build quality of some of it is appalling. Obviously this applies more broadly than just tools. The cheap items that get bought in, in many cases, can't be taken apart and there are no available spares if you could get them apart, and they are so badly made in the first place that any fix is not going to be long-lived anyway. It is frustrating! You would hope that better quality would be the opposite, can be taken apart, motors rewound or replaced and some manufacturers hold spares for years. People bring in garden tools that have bent or broken on first use and have basically never been fit for purpose. They may have sat in the shed for a year and are out of warranty. Not sure if that adds another perspective to the conversation but I feel we cant just keep buying cheap stuff for single use then discarding it.

Cheers
Richard
 
The truck is determining what is decent and what is not fit for purpose, often it’s only when you have purchased said item that you discover it’s cxxp and then it’s usually too late as not all suppliers will take the item back if it’s not actually faulty . I found this out last year when I purchased a set of drain rods ( a one off job for my x . Didn’t like the way they connected but didn’t want to spend almost £50 on a decent set . So several rods connected to reach the blockage and surprise surprise they came apart , had enough rods to make up another set and off I went but the same happened again several rods now stuck in a manhole full of sxxte . Unable to return the rods ( obvious reason) ended up buying the quality set I should have got 1st . Sent a toxic review of the 1st set of rods and warned future customers not to buy as not fit for purpose. I did eventually got the stuck rods out of the sewer and successfully unblocked the drain but lesson learned.🫣🫣🫣
 
The truck is determining what is decent and what is not fit for purpose, often it’s only when you have purchased said item that you discover it’s cxxp and then it’s usually too late as not all suppliers will take the item back if it’s not actually faulty . I found this out last year when I purchased a set of drain rods ( a one off job for my x . Didn’t like the way they connected but didn’t want to spend almost £50 on a decent set . So several rods connected to reach the blockage and surprise surprise they came apart , had enough rods to make up another set and off I went but the same happened again several rods now stuck in a manhole full of sxxte . Unable to return the rods ( obvious reason) ended up buying the quality set I should have got 1st . Sent a toxic review of the 1st set of rods and warned future customers not to buy as not fit for purpose. I did eventually got the stuck rods out of the sewer and successfully unblocked the drain but lesson learned.🫣🫣🫣
Yes, that is true. But sending a google review seems a good way to draw attention to stuff that is not fit for purpose and helps others. I recently had a Nilfisk water blaster pack up. Nilfisk weren't any help at all even though it just required a small non-return valve and their advice was dump it and buy a new one. I wrote a grumpy reply in a review and finally found the bit for $5 in Australia - apparently the only place in the world you can get a Nilfisk non-return valve. Works fine again now. So even things that are apparently OK quality/recognised brand are only fixable if parts are available.
 
it all boils down to money grabbing accountants and the like.......
just look at car electronics.....!!!!!!!!!

So
you want to drill a hole in concrete......best tool for the job is a Hilti....
but I guess a Bosch, Hitachi, Makita being cheap will do....
it's all relative.....
cheap tools, 3 year warranty at Lidils does that count...I'm sure it helps a lot of DIY'ers.....Plus the sheves are almost always empty......

buying decent used stuff is the way to go....
I have a big Hilti, only used as a breaker now as I cant lift it anymore.......must be nearly as old as me.....
 
I recently had a Nilfisk water blaster pack up. Nilfisk weren't any help at all even though it just required a small non-return valve and their advice was dump it and buy a new one. I wrote a grumpy reply in a review and finally found the bit for $5 in Australia - apparently the only place in the world you can get a Nilfisk non-return valve. Works fine again now. So even things that are apparently OK quality/recognised brand are only fixable if parts are available.
My Nilfisk pressure washer packed up 10 days ago. It would not run - no response at all when switched on, as if there were a power cut. I stripped it down and found nothing I could identify as being wrong apart from the whole thing being covered in oil. Presumably a leak but I didn't find a leak. I cleaned it up, put it back together again and it ran! No idea why, but it seems as good as new again. It will be interesting to see how long that continues.

Sometimes you can bodge a repair by using alternate parts, but life is much simpler if the real parts are available. How that can be achieved economically is a difficult question. The supply chain required to make every minor part available world wide would not be trivial or cheap to set up. Designing that could be more difficult than designing the product.

My general approach when buying tools is that for things I will use a lot I buy quality items when I can afford it. I buy cheap stuff for occasional use. I have used my pressure washer more than I expected to when I bought it. When I eventually need to replace it I will buy a better quality item but to be fair I have had my money's worth out of the Nilfisk.
 
When you get into repairing stuff it's surprising how many shared components there are. In the last few weeks we've had a cooker and a tumble drier element go. The cooker element fits 5 different makes, and the drier element fits 12 different machines although some with a slightly different electrical connector
 
I used to love making go carts as a youngster with my younger brother , we had a decent hill where we lived and would spend hours and hours riding downhill and having to avoid the lorries going to and from the industrial estate at the top of the hill . So much more fun than the modern day kids that spend hours playing with Xbox and PlayStations and not being active. A good example of how these threads go off topic yet still remain within the woodworking theme 🤗🤗🤗
Sorry, this is a bit off topic but the subject of building trollies/go carts had a very happy conclusion for me a few years ago.
As a boy I was forever trying to build trollies but my efforts were invariably doomed to failure due to having mo money, no decent tools and no idea of what I was doing anyway.
All that changed a while back when I was with the ambulance service. Emergency services - ambulance, police, fire, coastguard, LandSAR and a couple of others would hold an annual trolley derby as a fundraiser and in which ambulance would usually come last. 'We need a better cart', I told my boss. This drew the inevitable response of 'well, go and build us one, then.'
As a man in his second childhood I can't begin to explain the joy of being given a chance to redeem my boyhood failures together with a not too shabby budget to achieve it. And as well, we had in the ambulance service an id10t who could not see any problem about hurtling down a hill in an untested cart at 74km/h (police hand held radar) with his backside only cm's above the bitumen. He's the guy on in the céntre in the pic. I designed the thing around his lean dimensions and we had to shoehorn him into it. We cleaned up in every race and went on to win nationally.
My most enjoyable design and build, ever.
Blue light trolley.JPG
 
When you get into repairing stuff it's surprising how many shared components there are.
That is certainly true. At the other extreme though it is also surprising how often companies opt for custom-made stuff when commercial, off-the-shelf items could be used. The trend (based purely on my own observations) seems to be to standardise on the hidden things and customise the visible. That is fine if something hidden fails because you can more easily find a replacement. There is also a silver lining when a custom part fails and you have to scrap something: you have a supply of parts to add to your salvaged parts bins, and let's be honest: we all have those.
 
Rather like the companies that use custom fasteners to stop people getting in to a product to fix it, that's why I have a selection of old screwdrivers that have been modified over the years. Haven't been beaten yet :cool:
 
I got hauled over the coals 20+ years ago for over spending, one of the items queried was a £10 set of security bits. I asked the boss if he'd rather pay £10 for the set or £25 every time he called a sparky out to do a repair we could often do if only we could get into something to fix it. Reluctantly he agreed to the £10 (in his eyes nothing I ever did or suggested was right :) ).
 
Memories, was it an aluminium cast thing with cast handle and a blade about 150mm diameter ?
I'm pretty sure I have an old B&D one I got from my dad still somewhere- the drill was dead, but so old they were a 'bronze gold' colour instead of the orange/black, so I have no idea of the age (he built his first house with them, and they were oldish then, and that was back in the early 60's...)
ETA I went looking for pics (as I have had some say before B&D were never anything but the black and orange colours before, and found this...
1692613762325.png

Even funnier, found this on Gumtree....
1692613802960.png

I'm pretty sure I still got the circular saw somewhere, either in the shed or the storage unit, and I remember him using the sander as a kid...
 
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My grandfather had one just the same as that and it had a hedge cutter attachment. The main thing I recall is the extension lead started out twice the length of the hedge and ended too short to reach 🤔
 
one of my ex girlfriend, dad was a white shirt at General Motors. And when they designed parts for cars , 98 % off all parts had to last 6 months past warranty. They were designed to wear out on the customers dime. They make nothing on a car, and all their money on parts.
 

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