What socket set would you buy?

[Ozark Lee]

This turned out to be a heck of a lot tougher than I thought it would be but in the end (today being my birthday it was my birthday present) I wound up with a 200 piece set of Kobalt sockets and wrenches. They aren't the perfect setup but they are pretty close and the tool quality seems to be excellent. They are chrome vanadium steel and made in Taiwan with 72 tooth ratchets that feel very good, on par with the Pittsburgh Pro ratchets. They were on a Father's Day special for $99.00 which was a real plus. The wrenches don't have the larger sizes and quit at 16 mm and the 1/2 drive sockets start at 14 mm which I wish they started at 10 mm or 12 mm but I usually carry around a pipe with me for extra leverage that I can use with a 3/8" drive. I have a set of the long handle Pittsburgh wrenches that go to somewhere around 26 mm and I am used to needing to thrown them in another tool bag along with wobble extensions and the Pittsburgh Pro ratcheting combination set that fortunately didn't get swiped with the rest of the tools.

I really went back and forth and it is really tough to buy tools when you can't touch them and the way I use tools is, I guess, somewhat unusual. I have to have a set that is portable, that goes with me to the job, or the car, or the boats rather than the project coming to the tools. I do have a fairly large Craftsman tool cabinet in the garage at my house but I don't think I have been able to wedge a car into that garage since the first week I bought this house 30 some-odd years ago and had to put my 142 into the garage since to keep from getting ticketed since it wasn't properly registered. The home garage is more like a storage locker. Last year I took possession of another larger garage at my mother's apartment building but somehow in that deal I also took over helping her maintain the property so that garage is largely plumbing, electrical, HVAC, and woodworking tools. I do have room to work on a car in it though if I move whatever the current apartment project is around. I also have a cabin at The Lake of the Ozarks complete with my own boat dock and its requisite fleet of watercraft so the tools need to go there as well. The apartment garage is about 20 miles from home and the lake is about 150 miles from home so you pretty much have to have what you need on hand.

The other thing I need is a case where each tool has an assigned slot. When I get going I can have tools strung from one end of the driveway to the other and once the task at hand is completed I need to know that I have picked up all of the tools. I will always need residual stuff that isn't in the kit but the main kit needs to have the bulk of what I need in the case.

What amazed me is that many of the sets from real brand names were obviously put together by someone who doesn't use tools. Bostitch (Stanley) had a real nice set that had the 1/4", 3/8", and 1/2 drive sockets along with both SAE and Metric combination wrenches. For all of that they had no 12 mm combination wrench. A 12 mm wrench is about the second or third most important tool in any kit, at least for working on a Volvo.

As a last stop I went to Sears and they had a fairly large 263 piece set that pretty much had everything I was looking for but the Craftsman ratchets are about the worst on the market these days. The set was on sale for $179.00 which was on the upper end of my scale and I pretty decided to go that way and then just buy Pittsburgh Pro ratchets to fill the ratchet slots. I started to read the fine print though and, whereas Craftsman had always been advertised as chrome vanadium in the past they were now just listed as being made from "alloyed steel". The rear bumper mounts on an 850 are an alloy steel too so that doesn't really tell me much. While the Craftsman lifetime warranty has always been "As solid as Sears", Sears isn't quite so solid anymore. I'm a bit beyond the 25-54 demographic and I smoke a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. That stipulated, I think I have a pretty decent chance of outliving Sears.

If I was like most people and used tools in one place (the work comes to the tools rather than the tools going to the work) the Pittsburgh Pro would have been a terrific choice but the only decent set that Harbor Freight has with a case is the 300 piece set that weighs about 50 lbs and I'm not sure that the kit had the Pro line tools in it. The cases were sealed so I couldn't look, touch, and feel without buying them first. That scenario played out just about everywhere but one of the associates at Lowes was decent enough to open a case that had been returned and let me touch the tools.

Time will tell, the last month has been brutal without tools but now I can proceed on getting the '94 back in shape.

...Lee

[precopster]

I have a small Kobalt tool set. It's a shallow headed 3/8 drive socket set from 9mm to 17mm which has combination metric and SAE sockets in that newer non slip socket profile that seems to be gaining popularity these days. I pretty much only purchased it for removing control arm bolts on P2s. I like the case and the finish of the sockets and wrench.

I really wish it was a dedicated metric set as on the 16 or 17mm control arm bolts they have slipped a couple of times causing some bolt damage however the sockets have remained perfect and the wrench looks good after being used with a pipe extension.

I have another novel shallow headed solution not made by Kobalt with dedicated metric slip rings which act as sockets but the design is poor and the six sided rings drop out during use.

The Kobalt range is handled exclusively by Masters here as well as Gear Wrench. Masters use great suppliers as they have a name to build in this market so they don't use any second rate suppliers.

Good luck with the new set Ozark.

[dosbricks]

Nice find Lee, and you timed it very well to get a sale. I have a set of Kobalt flare nut wrenches and they are stoutly built and the chrome finish is very good. This is an item I declined to get at HF. The purchaser reviews mostly said the HF ones broke. Always good to read reviews.

Many of my 20-30 y.o. Craftsman wrenches are excellent, but a close look at their tools in the store suggests they're not what they used to be.

The small size and light embossing on my older sockets bugs me now that newer ones have large high visibility size markings. How easily we get spoiled.

[polskamafia mjl]

I'm late to the party but I've been a big fan of harbor freight tools. I know everyone accuses them of having low quality stuff but half my tools are from harbor freight and have held up just fine.

[Ozark Lee]

I'm late to the party but I've been a big fan of harbor freight tools. I know everyone accuses them of having low quality stuff but half my tools are from harbor freight and have held up just fine.

I agree and I would add that the Harbor Freight Pittsburgh Pro line was as good as any tool I looked at. I would have bought them in a heartbeat if they had the single case kit with the pro line tools in it. What I found was individual ratchets and sockets that only had a holder that came with each set of sockets - standard depth, deep, SAE, and Metric all came in their own set with their own holder and the holder didn't look terribly durable.

...Lee