Oldfeller--FSO
Serious Thumper ModSquad
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Hobby is now "concentrated neuropany"
Posts: 12673
Fayetteville, NC
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Well, I did it. Cleaned out the tool box that is.
Stripped all the stuff out of the drawers and pulled the drawers and sprayed all the sawdust out of all the the little cracks and crevices with the garden hose.
..... my tool box sits next to the miter saw, so there is a lot of sawdust .....
All the tools are wiped down and ready to go back in and I have had a thought, a brand new thought.
(for me, anyway)
I have not owned an American based car at any time in the last 25 years. I buy Nissans and Acuras .....
Why am I cluttering up my main tool box with inch based sockets and wrenches?
I took them out and put them in a separate basket. My metric stuff fits a lot better now and I can actually can pick up and carry all the tools I will actually really ever use again.
Next, I started another storage basket for the "speciality tools". This includes all the modified one off things you did over the years that ruined that particular set of pliers (except for popping off radiator wire curl clamps, which it does very well indeed except they don't use the things any more).
These two changes have cut the carry weight of my tool box in half, easily.
Weight loss is good, being able to find stuff easily is good. I really didn't toss anything, but am I really going to need all those diamond grit ignition point files ever again?
Specialty tool basket, along with the rest of the obsolete car technology stuff.
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Change is something I notice, me, I like watching the stuff roll on along. Cleaning my tool box was fun because I was able to see the generational effect in a short condensed fashion.
I was raised in post WWII America, and we had the best stuff of anybody. It was 100% inch based.
We put Japan back together after the war and sent them our best instructors, like Deming to teach them the theoretical best way to do things. We couldn't be bothered using SPC ourselves, but the Japanese didn't know any better so they used SPC and continuous improvement and all the other American invented stuff that Americans were too durn lazy to use. The Japanese started building really good cars, in metric.
America didn't go metric intentionally, we just quit making competitive stuff here in America so we had to buy it from Japan and Mexico and Taiwan and now China (in metric).
I was there, working as a Supplier Quality Engineer when we had to teach the Taiwanese how to build a quality power tool. At that point in time the Chinese were hopeless, not even Hong Kong attempted to export Chinese power tools to anywhere as the quality was "hammer and file" crude.
Then we NAFTA'd everything America based down to Mexico but we sent the tooling and some of the people with it and it ran as good as it ever did in the USA. But Mexico then passed a law that all parts had to be metric and all parts had to be produced on tooling that was no older than 5 years old .....
(get the stupid Gringos to pay for modernizing their manufacturing infastructure is what they were doing)
oopsie .... time to move to Taiwan/India/China.
Inch still exists in furniture and in a very few items intentionally built expressly to the inch standard. My Harbor Freight bike trailer is a good example of a Chinese good that was built completely to the inch standard. Every fastener is inch as well. This has to do with the old DOT requlations on trailer bolt sizes which don't mention any metric anything. Trailers are heavily regulated, BTW --- try to get a home built trailer jobbie licensed in North Carolina sometimes.
I thought on this a bit as I scrambled to locate my inch sockets and wrenches to fit the bolts the kit is put together with -- the tools hadn't been used in over 20 years.
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