Tools: Get The Best, Even Used

Having posted with pride about our new honest-to-hillbilly deck, I thought this might be a good time to talk a bit more about the many tools a homesteader needs in order to keep the place in order, do the gardening and landscaping, renovate and repair home and outbuildings. I can do this because during the deck project we had a total of 4 hammers on hand, and two of them ended up without handles before we were done. Frustrating.

The very best thing you can do, of course, is to purchase the absolute, best quality, longest-lasting tools - any tool - you can possibly afford. Yet in today’s economy, getting the best quality tools is often beyond the means of those of us trying hard just to make things work. Here at my homestead we’ve got a shed chock full of old chain saws, string trimmers, handle-less shovels, pitchforks, axes, mauls, sledgehammers, pruners, etc., not to mention a whole collection of broken hammers, screwdrivers, various saws and power tools bought cheap over the years and which didn’t last long enough to get to the second job.

Worse, I’ve an energetic daughter and some grandchildren who work hard on occasion, but can’t ever manage to put the tools back where they belong. Which means I find rusted things all over the place, often with wooden handles that long since rotted into compost. It’s extremely frustrating, and having to replace the tools every time you start a project is a regular pain in the ass. Not to mention expensive.

My friend and local homesteading hero told us many years ago to “Buy The Best” because that way you don’t have to keep on buying over and over again. Great advice, but not very practical if you’ve got to have an axe (the last one has only half a handle) and you’ve got just $20 to spend right now. And my hugest complaint about ALL homestead tools with handles - when the heck do the handles get to the modern composite resin/graphite world, just like golf clubs?

Luckily for all us non-wealthy homesteaders, There Is A Way. Why, we can purchase ‘best’ quality tools secondhand! There are a number of ways to do this, and you won’t be sorry. Often you can acquire the super guaranteed-for-life item at or below on-sale cheap stuff at Walmart if you just spend some time looking around. There are estate and farm auctions, there are whole secondhand warehouses, and there are a good many sites on the internet where even with shipping costs the ‘best’ tool comes in cheaper than the Walmart Special.

You could go local to the auctions and auction houses that will let you inspect the items and brands pre-auction, you could go to Craig’s List or Freecyclers and hope for the best, or you could check out some of the links below and surf some of their cross-links too. The ‘best’ of our tools is a Craftsman tiller my father-in-law bought for me when we first moved here. It’s still in the shop right now for its 5-year tune-up, but that thing’s a true workhorse that may never really die. We went ahead and put out the bucks for a Stihl chain saw about 7 years ago, and it’s still going strong on its 4th chain. Which is better than the several cheap ones under the shed that didn’t last 2 seasons.

What’s your most elderly tool, and are you glad you bought the ‘best’?

Links:

Used Tools
How to Buy Good Used Garden Tools
Used Snap-On Tools

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Filed under Building, Future Planning, Home-Products, Homestead, Maintenance, Renovating, Repair, Tools |