What's the tale of ceramic brakes?

What is your evidence for this?

You may want to consider the Swanstrom pliers then. They make them with several different handle lengths, and there is an extra-long one that is curved outward for people with large hands. They are standard in the electronics industry. Erem also makes some similar electronics pliers.

--scott

Go to Ace or Lowes and look at the current production Craftsman tools. They are all cheap crap, no relation at all to what Craftsman was selling a few decades ago.

Try the current Craftsman 3/8" ratchets. They look good enough but they will tear into your hands as badly as the Kobalt ones after a few hours on the job.

I have better things to do with my life than fight with bad tools.

--scott

Which are the ratchets that look like lathe projects? Just WRONG!

You know what's sad? We have all the tools anybody would ever need (including crowfoot wrenches and some Whitworth stuff) and we just don't ever want to use them again. Enough is enough. That's why I bought a Corolla.

Our friend is in a worse position -- his dad was a mechanic for those large earthmoving machines and he has all his giant tools. My son will get our tools (he knows how to use them) but the friend's kids aren't at all interested.

Maybe a decade ago I needed to buy a 10mm socket. (Yes, it's true -- no matter how many you have, eventually they will all disappear.) Sears is close. I could peel off the chrome with my thumbnail. Not worth returning for what is essentially cosmetic failure, but I'd never buy another Craftsman product.

I also broke a Harbor Freight open-end on the 1988 Caddy oil pan drain plug. They took the set back, of course, and I bought a better one (still unused), but the one that broke was really PRETTY (sort of a gunmetal grey, nice design). I still don't understand how anybody could make such shoddy stuff.

Craftsman tools were never of the tier of the Snap-On, MAC, Maatco ... variety. Then again, they weren't as bad, and fall apart, as Harbor Freight junk either. Very few to none of my shop's expensive, well remunerated diesel mechanics (each of whom having many ten's of thousands of dollars invested in just hand tools alone) ever relied on Craftsman tools, although they were and likely continue to be (to my now dated knowledge) acceptable for shade tree, Firestone shoppish, and other wrench turners that don't make such a handsome living solely as mechanics.

I use only Craftsman, and now, Pittsburgh (yes, I know, HF stuff). o All my tools which are decades old are Craftsman though.

For the record on the warranty, this is a photo of the Craftsman six-inch

Interestingly, I prefer the "round" bar handles to the rectangular ones:

But I prefer the "tab" mechanism as opposed to spokes, as shown here:

Where, unfortunately, the -V-43785 is the rectangular bar type. o If I can get them to mail me a repair kit, that would work out well.

Yes. For many years, Craftsman tools were the cheap-but-entirely-acceptable tools that were perfectly fine for occasional use. They weren't professional, but they weren't crap either, and Craftsman really did honor the warranty.

There were a few exceptions: for a while Craftsman rebadged a Wiha jeweler's screwdriver set that was excellent, but at the same time they also had a nutdriver set that was poorly hardened and worse than useless.

These days the stuff that is being sold under the Craftsman name is several steps below what it used to be.

--scott

Exactly. You can flip it with one hand. One FINGER of the hand that's holding the wrench deep in the innards. I'm trying to remember why you might want to do that besides forgetting to flip it the right way beforehand.

We bought most of our tools at yard sales decades ago when everything was cheap and good.

HF makes some shoddy tools, I agree.

For example, I use their tire mounting tools at home all the time: o Bead breaker (roughly about $50) o Tire mounting & dismounting tool (roughly about $50) o Static wheel balancer (roughly about $75)

All of which, IMHO, suck ... but ... they work. o I need one more tool, the "bazooka tire blaster" (roughly about $60)

But AFAIK, Harbor Freight doesn't sell the bead blaster (seating) tool!

The beauty of the HF tools isn't the quality, but that you can get the job done, where, without any tools, you can't mount & balance tires at home.

Nor repair them properly (from the inside) with a patch & plug.

Total cost (so far) was roughly about $200 or, at $20 per tire, about ten tires, which I surpassed _long_ ago (dynamic balance test is always free, while dynamic balancing, if needed, is about $5 per tire at Costco - but it's almost never needed in my experience testing on the highway).

In the past, oh, I don't know, five or so years, I must have replaced something like 40 tires (at least), so the tools are free at this point.

I even have some of these P215/65R15 light truck tires in my home office at this very moment, waiting for the fourth tire to arrive so I can put them on a neighbor's truck (since our mountain eats tires like you can't believe). o

I really need though, to buy that bazooka blaster shot of air!