POWER TOOLS!, 2 words that make anyone from the professional to the DIY weekend warrior dream about building a moat and trebuchet for his castle, or at least think about how cool those power tools would look in your mancave .

When I started in the remodeling industry I was about 15 and I was looking for a summer job,  I found a gig installing aluminum soffit  to the eaves of a home in Odessa Tx.and by installing soffit I mean falling of ladders with such grace as to make an Olympic high diver jealous. At that time I was told to use a hammer and nails to fasten the soffit to the eaves, this meant that after every graceful decent off the ladder I had to pick up hundreds of nails from grass, and by grass I mean working  thru the inevitable piles of dog poop, anyway, apparently the company I was working for did not believe in power tools as this would be far to convenient, either that or they were afraid to let me near them. later that summer I worked for a different company in the same industry who used power drills (and allowed me to use them) to install siding, now when I say power drill I mean the kind with an extension cord that constantly got tangled in ladders and bushes, and the concept of drill breaks (this is when the drill stops turning the moment you let go of the trigger) had not yet entered the sphere of thinking in our crew, at that time you had to get really good at timing the release of the trigger so the screw would make it all the way into the wood without stripping. Sometime after that we got into “cordless power drills” (hallelujah) That’s right, I heard a chorus of angels singing in my head, this is what started my love of power tools, no more tangled cords, and better yet, no more nailing upside down(don’t ask). The next BIG upgrade in power tools in my opinion was the Impact Drill, this made installing big screws easier, it was like going from black and white tv to color tv, now I’m not saying that as a child we didn’t have a color tv, we did, but the audio was the only thing that worked on it but fear not! we had a black and white tv that had no audio, so the only logical conclusion was to put the BW tv on top of the color tv then we had to turn both tv’s to one of the three available channels and thereby we could watch Scooby Doo.

OK, way off track I know, I’m told I have AD….Oh look a quarter! OK, back on track, I have used many brands of power drills over the years, I used to be a die-hard dewalt fan for many years until their batteries started to, how shall I put this…SUCK! I then switched to Makita which I was told had better batteries which they did, so I switched over all my power tools to Makita. Well as time goes by my Makita batteries started to lose power and I may have lost one or two along the way, and not wanting to switch my entire set again,  I went Home Depot to buy 2 new 18 volt batteries, well it turns out that power tool batteries are expensive,  really EXPENSIVE  like $100 each, so being properly stingy I got on my iPhone and tried to find cheaper batteries online but at the time I found none, so I looked around the store and this is what I found, a brand new (duh) 18v impact drill with 2 batteries and a charger for $215, so for an extra $15 I got a new charger, impact drill and 2 new batteries, so to wrap up this insane rambling into a somewhat coherent “Tool Tip” sometimes you’ll be better off  buying a new kit vs tying to buy just new batteries.

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I don’t know about you but I’m not sure that was worth reading for that one tip but such is the rabbit trail that my mind travels to its destination.

 

 

Abram