Today's Tool Thoughts

They've got sockets

If you're a car fan, you probably have some tools. Well, unless you are literally a car fan, in which case you are an inanimate object that lives under the hood of a car and spins like crazy to force or pull air into a radiator.......(awaiting groaning from our loyal blog reader).......I'm back now, and ready to share today's tool thoughts!

They've got the cheap basic set

With a glorious day off from work, I spent some time at the nearby Sears store, which believe it or not is still in business! It's fun to realize that the Sears and Roebuck company hit it big in their early days with home-shopper catalogs and mail order business. As the decades passed, Sears continued to be be a major retailer, and eventually added Land's End and Kmart to their company. Today however, the retail business isn't what it used to be, as today's version of mail-order, which means Internet sales, has taken much of the business away from Sears. What goes around comes around I guess.

They've got the torque wrenches

But enough about business, let's talk tools! At Sears, you can still find nearly any tool you might need, and specifically that means the Craftsman brand with their famous lifetime warranty. For the most part, if any Craftsman tool breaks, just take it to your nearest Sears store and they will give you a new one to replace it. Free. That's good old fashioned customer service in my book, and in my blog!

They've got the all-in-one garage jack stuff

So the Craftsman brand is not the most expensive brand in the world, and maybe not the top drawer super high quality used to build nuclear reactors, but for the every day guy like me, their tools are great. I've got a lot of wrenches and sockets of various sizes to use on the NMS fleet, mostly in the 3/8th and 1/2 inch sizes. One of my favorite wrench sets is a Craftsman ratcheting set of box wrenches that I found at a good discount at a Kmart store that was going out of business. If you haven't experienced this yet, I can tell you it's a blast to find a Kmart store going out of business, and then if they have any items you might want to buy, just stop by every week as they start lowering the prices. In the case of the wrenches I bought, the store started selling everything somewhere around 30% off, and slowly worked their way to the final day when everything was 95% off. I think I've stopped at four different Kmarts in the past few years, but only at the first one did I find the huge inventory of tools that led me to buying anything at a great price.

They've got the basic metric and inches sets

Oh, and when you've got to find a place to put all your tools, you need more storage boxes! And if you have empty spaces in your storage boxes, then naturally you need more tools to fill them up!

They've got the storage boxes