If You Can See Your Floor, You’re Okay

Looks like today will be a day of waiting and preparation. Waiting for my burglar alarm company to show up and give me 4G. Waiting for the wife to call after some errands. I was also supposed to be waiting for Elon Musk to show up with a package from Starlink, his rural Internet company, but it looks like he will be dropping by tomorrow. I assume he drives the trucks personally.

Non-Tesla gasoline- and diesel-powered trucks, but let’s not go there.

While I’m sitting here, I’m admiring my new Doyle precision pliers and thinking about admitting I’m a tool collector.

I have a drawer full of pliers and other hinged tools. Side cutters. Scissors. A tool for making fishing leaders with heavy mono and cable. Stuff like that.

I have two shops. Obviously, there is the big one in the detached building. I also put a bench, a table, shelves, and a fair assortment of tools in my former dining room. Who wants to walk to the big shop every time something needs fixing?

I am forcing myself to confront the fact that the dining room needs to be reclaimed. As great as it is to have a dining room full of tools, I am duplicating things more than I should, and I have difficulty deciding which tool goes in which shop. I guess I should also mention the fact that my wife will probably want a dining room.

Should I put the second-tier stuff indoors, or should I put the good stuff there because it will never rust? Should I put all the electronics stuff indoors because doing electronics indoors just feels right, or should I put it in the big shop because sometimes electronics work involves tools I don’t want to put in the house?

I have to figure out what to do with my small pliers.

Around 28 years ago, I started buying a few tools, and I assumed Craftsman and Stanley had to be wonderful because I had heard the names so often. I got myself two pairs of Stanley needle nose pliers. I got a small pair and a tiny pair.

Tool people like me are always looking for the best manufacturers. It’s hard to resist becoming a snob. I now know that Stanley wasn’t always making great tools back when I got my pliers. I have looked for better ones. But the tiny Stanleys are wonderful. The jaws meet up correctly, I have never managed to damage them, they cut whatever I want to cut, and because the jaws are very long and skinny, they will do stuff a lot of pliers won’t do.

I wanted a similar pair so I could have the same great experience in both shops. I couldn’t get old Stanleys, and I don’t trust the new ones.

I found out it’s not simple buying needle nose precision pliers. A lot of them come without cutters or jaw serrations. Smooth jaws are supposed to avoid marring work. Needle nose pliers without cutters seem inadequate to me, but once I learned they existed, I figured they had to exist for a reason, therefore I needed them.

What did I end up buying? One pair of Pro American pliers. Three pairs of Harbor Freight Doyle pliers. Two pairs of Engineer pliers from Japan. So I have 6 new pairs of small pliers now. This does not include my larger Channellock, DeWalt, Icon, and Stanley long nose pliers. It doesn’t include my water pump pliers, my Knipex adjustable pliers, my Engineer and DeWalt dikes, my non-marring Japanese pliers…

Engineer makes Vampliers which are sold in America at inflated prices. The Japanese versions are exactly the same except for labeling and colors, and they cost a lot less.

Vampliers are made to pull and turn fasteners that are hard to grip. They have weird jaws full of edges and points, and they will grab nearly anything. You may have seen them in TV commercials. They really work, but there is no point in paying the American price.

I bought Engineer needle nose plies with smooth jaws as well as long nose pliers with cutters and serrations. The long nose pliers aren’t as needly.

I decided to try the Doyle pliers because Harbor Freight now makes some really excellent tools, and many are pretty cheap. I wanted to see if Doyle products were any good.

It’s not accurate to say Harbor Freight makes them. I don’t think they make anything. At least in some cases, when you buy Harbor Freight pliers with different names on them, you’re buying things made by different companies. In a way, then, Doyle may be a completely legitimate brand, as is Quinn, their next step down.

Harbor Freight sells Icon now, and Icon is supposed to be their answer to Snap-On. I decided to buy myself two big pairs of extended pliers to see what they were like. I’m not all that impressed. They seem sturdier than Chinese pliers from Home Depot, but the metal finishing is somewhat clumsy. Snap-On gets a lot of mileage out of the appearance of its tools, so to compete with Snap-On, you should make tools with nice finishes.

The Doyle pliers are a nice surprise. The fit and finish are very nice. They seem reasonably hard. The steel doesn’t scratch easily. They work smoothly. They have springs. The cutters close correctly.

One pair has one jaw that seems a little larger than the other, as though a grinding procedure wasn’t completed as well as it could have been, but it doesn’t affect the way the pliers work.

For 12 bucks or whatever, the set seems like a real bargain. One pair of Engineer pliers runs around 17 dollars. Engineer pliers are meticulously finished, but I don’t think they will work better.

I ordered an old pair of 5″ Pro-America pliers from Ebay just to see what they were like. Pro-America is supposedly a company that has done most of its business with the government, so most people don’t see their tools often. It’s also called Kal Tool. People say their tools are very nice. I thought a tool from a company like that would be an interesting curiosity.

I have quit trying to justify my pliers and other hand tool buys. The truth is, I just like having them. People collect a lot of stupid things, so why not collect tools, which are useful? I plan to keep buying whatever seems interesting, whether I really need it or not.

I can’t figure out what to do with my electronics stuff. If I move it to the workshop, I will have to find a way to store it. I have a power source, a powered breadboard, a couple of meters, two soldering irons, a bunch of leads, a ton of components, surgical clamps, two oscilloscopes, and probably other things I can’t think of right now.

This leads to an inevitable question: do I buy a SEVENTH rolling tool chest?

I’ve been watching shop organization videos, and I learned something interesting: storing things on walls or in the open is stupid.

This is heresy in tool circles. People love putting up pegboard and hanging their tools on it. They like drawing little tool outlines to show them where to put things. They like French cleats. I don’t care. It’s stupid.

If you hang things on your wall, you end up with several problems.

1. You take up many times as much space as you would if you used boxes.
2. You kill your wall space, so kiss shelves goodbye.
3. Your stuff gets dirty and rusty because it has no protection.
4. You have to do a lot of walking to get to things.
5. You can forget about moving your tools when you want to. You can’t roll a wall around.

My shop has two great big walls and 4 smaller ones. The doors eliminate a lot of wall space. If I were to take the stuff from one box and try to put it on the walls, I would lose an entire large wall. That’s dumb. Walls are the best places for shelves.

If I used the wall, A lot of my tools would be 20 feet or more away from my main bench. That makes no sense.

It’s also dumb to put things right where you can grab them, uncovered, unless you really need to. Dust and crud will fall on them. They may get damaged when things fly around the shop. They make the shop look disorderly. If you have 10 tools you use over and over, having them out all the time is great, but the rest should be in boxes.

Boxes and shelves are the skyscrapers of workshops. They multiply what you can do with limited square footage.

Right now, I have two boxes full of my most useful tools within 5 feet of my bench. If I need a tool, I turn around, open a drawer, and take it out. No walking. No getting on a stool to reach something 8 feet up on the wall. No reaching around the chests or freestanding tools to get at things behind them.

Resist the urge to cover your walls with tools. If you own more than 20 pounds of hand tools, you will regret putting them on the wall.

I have some things on my walls, and I have some other things hanging on the fronts of shelves, but I am determined to minimize that stuff.

Here’s another helpful suggestion: use drawer organizers, but don’t buy the ones they sell in stores. They cost a lot, they take up a lot of room, they weigh a lot, and they force you to do things their way.

I found a great video about organizing wrenches. Many wrenches come with special plastic trays that have little arms that hang onto them. The trays put the wrenches an inch or so apart, and you can’t put additional spots in the trays. Bad. The video showed how you can buy solid wire and turn it into wrench organizers that will take any configuration you like. I’ll post it.

I put 17 wrenches in a wire loop organizer I made, and suddenly, a drawer that had been full of wrenches was more like 1/3 full. The wrenches were arranged by size, making them easy to find, and unlike plastic organizers, the loops didn’t force me to yank wrenches loose. They come right out.

Wire is not cheap right now, but it’s not prohibitively expensive, either, and you can save money by buying romex, stripping it, and using the individual wires. I’ve spent $30, and I don’t think I’ll need to spend more soon.

Ever wondered why tool chest drawers can hold 100 pounds each? Now you know. If you organize, you can get a lot of mass into a drawer.

Now, what about tool chest drawer liners?

This is a sore spot with me.

Tool chests have to have liners. Period. Tools slide around on metal, and they remove the paint and cause rust. Then you have dirty rusty tools in your hands all day. You need liner material that provides cushioning, wears well, doesn’t accumulate debris, and won’t eat plastic.

Yes, some tool drawer liners eat plastic. One of the most popular liner materials is a foam product that looks sort of like a mat woven from 3/16″ black rubber cords. Like many rubbery products, it’s made with one or more solvent. When you put certain types of plastic on it, the solvent or solvents dissolves the surface of the plastic and leave a picture of the pattern of the liner material.

You should be able to line a typical 26″-wide chest for a few dollars, but companies that sell liner material jack the price up. They will take a material which is sold cheaply for other purposes and multiply the price by three or 4.

I found some solutions. Some people buy cheap yoga mats and cut them up. They’re actually better than many liners. One guy uses astro turf, which works very well. Treadmill and exercise mats work.

I turned a Harbor Freight chest into a welding cart a year or two back, and then I left a drawer open, not knowing how mice think. They moved in and starting eating drawer liners. Not knowing they were in there, I closed the drawer one day, causing them to die of thirst, rot, and stink up the chest and my tools. They also used the chest as a toilet, to a copious degree.

I bought myself a new roll of Harbor Freight liner, thinking that and some serious cleaning would fix the problem. Well, it didn’t. The drawers are about 20″ deep, and Harbor Freight’s rolls of liner are 16″ wide. I was not happy to find that out.

Here’s what I learned later: Lowe’s sells Kobalt liner rolls something like 20″ wide. Perfect. And they impregnate it with Zerust, a chemical which will discourage rust for a few years. The price isn’t bad, either. I got a big roll that solved my problem for $20. Actually, I bought two rolls, thinking they weren’t as big as they were.

You could also paint the inside of your drawers with truck bed coating.

To get back to electronics, I have to come up with the answer. I can’t just dump all my things on shelves and hope for the best. Maybe one more US General chest is needed.

Speaking of shelves, I am still contemplating welding some up. I was discouraged when I found out what 1″ steel tubing costs now, but it’s not like spending $500 on a permanent major shop improvement is extravagant. A couple of days ago I blew $600 on a washing machine for a tenant, and I thought nothing of it. Why feel bad about spending on my home?

I think shelves would open up more space, making me feel more comfortable with buying another chest.

When the physical improvements are done, I may make some improvements involving data. I may make an inventory so I’ll know what I have. It sounds awful, but I could do it in two days. I have all sorts of screws and washers. I never know what’s here. Sometimes I buy things and then find out I already have them. Also, I need an inventory for insurance.

If I could go to my computer and look things up instead of walking around confused, it would be tremendous.

I’m also using a Brother label maker now. I hope to be able to stop opening and closing things so much. Just scan the labels and reach.

Today I watched an Adam Savage video about shop organization. I think his ideas are bad, because his shop is a rat’s nest. Tons of things are out in the open. He has a whole wall of movie memorabilia in illuminated IKEA cases. Why would you fill your shop with space-killing things that have little or nothing to do with tools? He has at least one rack of nerdy costumes he has made for himself. He goes to nerd conventions dressed as comic and movie characters. Costumes are not tools.

His problem is that he’s like me. He’s not really building a shop. He’s building a neat place to hang out. And he loves the tools and the shop more than he loves getting things done.

Anyway, he said something he thought was brilliant. He said that when you choose a location for something, you should pick the place you thought it was in the first place. If you want your PVC cutter, and the first place you look is the third shelf to the left of your drill press, when you finally find the PVC cutter, you should put it on that shelf. You will instinctively look for it there.

This is good advice, but it’s not that original. I’ve been doing this for years. Not that it has helped much, what with all the counterproductive things I’ve also been doing. Anyway, I’ll toss it out there as a good tip.

These are my thoughts on shop organization at the moment. I hope they age well.

And another pair of Engineer pliers is arriving Saturday.