After the June/July issue of TechShop came out, I heard from an industry friend about my “Common Sense Tool Advice” column, which featured “fatherly advice” from my coworker Andrew Markel’s dad.
Denny Mandeville, the owner and lead technician of Canyon Automotive in Sedona, AZ, and I have kept in touch over the years after meeting at one of my first aftermarket industry events, back around 1999, after he was named the NAPA/ASE Automotive Technician of the Year.
I’m sure many of you feel the same way about tools as he does, so I thought I’d share his comments.
Jennifer,
I am a tool person — I love the feel of tools in my hand. Once upon a time, my wife accused me of stroking a tool while in a store, contemplating its purchase. Jenny and I were both previously married, so early on she had a new appreciation for my “fixation.” She made the comment that my tools fit in my hands — they become an extension of me.
In her family, and first marriage, tools were awkward and clumsy in the hands of her dad, husband and brother. That said, as a Baby Boomer, I have accumulated enough tools over the years to open my own hardware store. I have often said if I still had the money I have spent on tools, my wife would have a really nice house in an exclusive neighborhood.
My fetish not only includes automotive tools, but woodworking and yard tools as well. My neighbors sometimes look at me as the local United Rentals yard.
To get to the point, the advice my dad gave me many, many years ago still holds true:
First: Don’t buy cheap tools. They will let you down and not accomplish what you need to do. Buy the best you quality tools can afford and you’ll only have to buy them once.
Second: Learn the proper way to use your tools and use them the way they were designed to be used.
Third: Take care of your tools and don’t abuse them.
The first tool set I owned was a graduation gift from high school (1965), and I still have 90% of them. The missing 10% is thanks to my son, but I look at that as payback for my dad. I also have tools from my grandfather and great-grandfather.
That missing 10% of my tools is payback for my dad because of his lost tools from my adolescence. What goes around comes around. One of my sayings has been “my dad survived me, as his dad survived him and I will survive my children.” The best part about being older is watching your grandchildren do to their parents as they did to me (and their mom).
My son, while working for me, is not a mechanical type of guy. His tool purchases are more whatever the tool truck vendor convinces him he needs rather than the practical. He doesn’t want to listen to the old guy manage his life. His toolbox is full of tools that have never been out of the packaging — and probably never will be. The only tools I own that have never/seldom been used are the tools bought for cars/repairs that never became the problem envisioned. By the way, want to set the valves on your Pinto (this particular wrench found a new lease on life when I found it would reach injector nuts on a GM 6.2), adjust the clutch on your Vega, change starter drives on Ford starters, need to remove the clutch head screws in your GM? Come see me, I can set you up. Need a “spark catcher” for use with a scope, file your points or rethread the Quadrajet fuel inlet? I’m your man.
The right tool for the job, used in the right way, will get the job done in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of blood spilt. I don’t buy tools “just because,” I purchase tools as I need them, or find out a certain tool will do the job better — but, oh how I love tools.
— Denny
