Laser Tools Opinions

Swap to Lidl. In general their tools are more than adequate for DIY - and decent value too.

Easiest got hold of decent stuff is Halfords pro range.

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+1 for the Halfords Pro. Perhaps your nearest and dearest would consider Halfords vouchers?

Chris

+2 for the Halfords Professional (or "Advanced" though they may have dropped that name now, but not the ordinary stuff) - excellent kit. Got a 10 year old 1/4" & 3/8" set and the only thing to show any wear is the living hinge on the blow moulded case. Bought various other bits piecemeal over the years, all very good. I can heartily recommend the flex-head ratchet spanners for places a fixed spanner won't get into.

And another +1 here.

Laser is on a par with Silverline, ime - and if you buy something off eBay/Amazon on price, without knowing brand, odds are it'll be one of the two.

It's not absolute shit, but it's not too many levels above.

snip:

As others have said below, Halfords Pro. Can't really fault them at all. Wait for the regular offers and you will get some *real* bargains.

JB

Quite. As I said for cheap tools Lidl takes some beating. Problem being of course you have to keep a lookout for when they come up. I'd put them well ahead of Laser, etc.

Funnily enough, I wondered into Aldi this morning and they had a many many piece socket set for £30-odd quid.

And, FWIW, I'd rate Laser as higher up the tree than Silverline. If nothing else they do seem to specialise in the obscure/specialist tools from what I've seen (eg the five sided allen bits for some French stuff.)

I'm not in the market for one so didn't look at it. I do have a pretty comprehensive tool kit they did some years ago which lives in the old car. Just in case. And it got some quite heavy use at a classic car meet one day fixing another car. And stood up well - especially at the price. Of course it would be pointless them selling rubbish with their unconditional

3 year warranty.

I've got one or two Silverline bits that are fine. I suppose it is rather pot luck. One such is a threaded rivet gun I've been using today. Does the job ok at a fraction of the price of some of them I've seen.

While I was there, there was a punter waiting on an employee to open up a box of battery drills (£20) and congratulating him on the quality of previously bought stuff. Said employee confided that "they're made by Black and Decker and rebadged for Aldi."

For the life of me I can't decide if that's true or not (having sworn off ever buying B&D again after my one purchase of a circular saw with a non standard blade size.)

The cheap end of their stuff always looks a bit ropey but then so does Draper's, Halford's, etc. A friend has a 24mm Silverline combination spanner that was dug out when doing something suspensiony on his E39 (track rod ends IIRC) and it seemed well made and certainly up to the job. It then survived rattling around in the back of my car (by mistake, honest!) in my spanner bag for a few months without any chrome coming off. As you say, pot luck, although perhaps just indicative of the usual fight between Quality Control and pricing strategy.

You're also stuck with the fairly restricted range they're likely to do - great if all you're after is a bog-standard sacrificial toolkit to keep in a corner of the boot, less useful if you actually want something specific (let alone timely).

Is that a recommendation or a warning...?

They're bound to be built-to-order, but B&D? I know the semi- regular aldidlpikeymarket compressor is also sold as a Wolf Apache (and also rebadged by HobbyCraft and others, if a quick google's to be believed). Whether they actually built it is anybody's guess...

I dunno if all their power tools come from the same source - but if they do, I'd say there's more of an affinity with Bosch, given the consumables. Blades, staples, etc. Although that might be more German.

I've got several of their power tools and am very pleased with them. I'm sure they're not as good as Makita - but for DIY it can be a choice of Lidl or nothing at Makita prices. If it is something which gets heavy use I do trade up in the future. They're certainly streets ahead of similar priced offerings from B&Q etc, IMHO.

They don't do a "range". Just deals. Once it's gone you have to wait

6/12 months for it come back if it ever does.

95 piece 6.3/12.5mm drive (sic) is £39.99 on "hurry while stocks last" and may have sold out in some stores.

Aldi and Lidi seem quite random in stocking stuff. Lidi have ONE pallet of mince pies with a big sign, "Hurry, when they are gone they are gone". They had some about 3 weeks ago, ran out 2 weeks ago and have had a 2nd batch, dunno if there will be a 3rd. It makes doing a regular shop impossible as things that you try and like can't be found ever again. In the summer they had a 3 pack of Solero lookalikes. Next week none to be found and it never repeated.

I've bought some great tools from Lidl- a very good hex/torx bit set with a small ratchet and some fairly good screwdrivers.

Their gherkins are quite good too, compared to the s**te at Asda.

Potentially Kress, who made quite a few of the better Wickes power tools= .

Some of the expensive Laser stuff is brilliant, most of it sort of match= es =

clarke/sealey/silverine.

You can probably get all of that in Britool

or even closer