It’s been a morning.
Before I go further I need to explain some North Texas stuff.
Around here, if your house was built after 1960 or so, the driveways are in the rear of the house. You enter through an alley to get to your driveway. This is good and bad. Good, because you get a nice front yard, and your car out of the way in back. Bad part is, first, your back yard is cut in half or so. Usually they run a fence along the driveway on the side of the back yard, making your other side yard mostly useless. Also, Your average n’er do wells, patrol the alleys. Leave your garage open, your stuff gets stolen. At night they’ll come and wiggle your car door handle. If it’s open they’ll steal your stuff.
Unless you have a gate, like us. A big rolling gate that closes, leaving you with a compound. A compound that no one with a brain will enter when there are three big dogs guarding it. But they have problems. In our case, we built a shed in the back, so the grass behind it died, and now there’s mud, which cakes in the wheels and stops the gate.
Such was the deal this morning. I glanced out the back, didn’t notice the open gate, and let the dogs out. Seconds later herself came in and hollered “THE GATE’S STUCK OPEN!”
I go out to find herself, in her work clothes, with a small garden pick trying to clear mud. To say she was pissed is an understatement. We got it closed and I decided to screw with it later.
Later came and I waddled out to fix the gate by jacking it up and pulling off the wheel, and digging out the mud. Long way round to get to this. Look at these sockets I used to fix the gate:
Craftsman, I thought, were decent tools. Most my friends had them. I was given tools for Christmas when I was a teen – All from JC penny, which at one time competed with Sears 100%. I still have them. To the right is a 40+ year old JC Penny socket. The other, about a 30 year old Craftsman. Look at the peeling chrome. Only reason I have it alt all is that back in the day I did something retarded like use my 3/4″ socket as a punch to remove a bearing and had to replace it after Penny’s no longer sold tools.
I’m still not a huge Craftsman fan, which sold off to Lowes. I still use my ancient Penny’s tools. The newest ones I’ve bought are Huskie, which I was warned back in the day not to buy because they’d do what my Craftsman did. But they appear to have upped their game. So far, they are fine.
Funny thing is, the sockets I use most are my impact set from Harbor Freight, which have performed as good or better than my normal sockets at a fraction of the price. But back to the Craftsman socket. I know guys that have Craftsman and swear by them. Works for them, I suppose, but I’ll continue to seek better. Peeling chrome is sad and a clue to shoddy workmanship. I want nothing to do with it. The two sets of impact sockets that I picked up at Harbor Freight decades ago for $15 a set have worked like champs the whole time I’ve had them.
I think it’s time to start surfing eBay for tools .
Inspected By Pat 