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On another topic of interest to me, I've started buying new tools. For awhile now I've been primarily using a mixture of tools I bought at Harbor Freight, Northern Tool, and from Amazon. The Tekton stuff I have is generally really well made and works great, but I'm not that fond of their ratchets. My favorite ratchet right now is a Gearwrench, but it's kind of meh too.
I've been spending the last 4 months doing research on hand tools... a lot of hours, probably several hundred at this point. With that I have bought a mixture of tools from various Japanese and German tool brands, such as pliers from Knipex, ratchets from Stahlwille and Nepros, wrenches from Asahi, sockets and ratchets from Wera, screwdrivers from Wiha and PB Swiss, and some measurement tools from Mitutoyo.
The first of the bunch arrived today, a skeletonized offset metric open-ended wrench set from Asahi. I'm super stoked by the quality and I can't wait for the rest of the stuff to arrive. Not really specific to the build thread, but it'll be really interesting to use Japanese tools on my Japanese car.
Soon, I'm going to figure out storage, it's looking like the Germans may have me covered there too as the Festool/Tanos Systainer system looks really epic. Next up, I want to buy new cordless power tools so I can centralize on a single brand. I'm trying to decide between Milwaukee and Ryobi right now.
Just a sort of tangentially related topic, since I do all of the work on my car myself and I've also been volunteering to help out others in the local FT86 community (helped a guy do a clutch and TOB on Monday for instance). Now that I'm really heavily using them, the deficiencies of lesser tools are becoming apparent.
Not sure if there's a good place other than the GarageJournal forums to talk about tools, but if folks are wondering what I use to work on things, this is as good a place as any to put things. If you're just starting out, I can't recommend Tekton hand tools enough, but I think there's definitely a place for finer things too.
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