Poor quality tools suck......

I like a bargain as much as the next person.  Combine that with my love of tools and that means there are some items of dubious quality still lurking in my tool boxes.  I should know better by now that some products are cheap because they are manufactured to be .... but it can sometimes be difficult to tell.

The rubbish has been filtered out of my core tools, the stuff I use regularly, but I still find it difficult to justify the higher prices for specific tools that I use infrequently.  That’s a long term mistake, as I was reminded of again last night.

Torx screws are not something I have to deal with often.  To date I’ve only had to deal with them on fairly lightweight jobs where the Torx bits I’ve got as part of cheap socket sets have done the job fine.  I’m currently helping out a friend by changing the front wings on his old Audi A4.  The top of the wings are secured with four T30 Torx screws ... which it seems were done up in the factory by a robot with a torque driver set to 11.  I guess the advantage of Torx heads showed itself, as I didn’t strip the head, but I did manage to destroy three Torx bits before giving up.  Two of them actually twisted – one of them just snapped off.

What should have been a straight forward job stopped because of poor quality tools.  Lesson learnt – again. 

Now I’m on the hunt for some quality Torx bits for the website.