You cut out the meat of the advice. The point is that you may not need the tools to last a lifetime; you buy a cheap set first, and then replace the ones you actually use with the quality ones, for the reasons you explain. This prevents you from spending excess money on tools you don't use.
Exactly. Buying pro-grade anything before you have proven need is a giant waste.
A while back I was thinking I wanted a standing desk. My first urge was, "Find the best and buy it!" Instead I prototyped something out of an ironing board and a highly adjustable laptop stand. That's been adequate for months, and it's taught me a lot about what will work for me, and what "best" actually means. Eventually I'll get around to buying something professional. But it won't be the thing novice me thought was the right one. And it could have easily turned out that I didn't need one at all.
Sounds like you "shipped" an MVP, figured out what did/didn't work, and iterated. Amazing how this works, huh? ;)
I wonder if people arguing against the "cheapest thing that will work, then learn" also argue in favor of over engineering systems to address requirements that may come months or years from now.
Some people prefer to rent instead of buying cheap tools. And I understand them.
Cheap tools sometimes don't work even once. I had first experience.
- Hacksaw blades that wore out before cutting a tenth small metal part. The good one bought as a replacement made short work of it and was still good for may others.
- Egg beater went up in smoke making slightly thick dough. The good one barely slowed down. It is not the first power tool I had that went up it smoke after moderate use, but that one didn't even last a single use.
- Square that was more than one degree off.
- Sewing needle with a hole too small for threading anything thicker than a human hair.
- Screwdrivers and bits that simply don't fit. At least not without damage.
- Adjustable pliers that slipped every time, could only be used at their widest setting. With terrible grip of course.
All these were replaced with good quality tools, the first purchase was a complete waste.
To be honest many of the cheapoes I bought are very nice. My set of cheap wrenches perform flawlessly. Don't feel as good as the nice ones but they at least perform their primary function. The adjustable ones are crap though, rounded a few nuts before being replaced.
So my take is to use good judgment, the "absolute cheapest" is often a bad idea. The problem is that if you are experienced, you probably have the good stuff already, and if you are not, it is hard to make that judgment.
Personally, when it comes to cheap tools I had the most success when buying store brands from large chains. IKEA tools for instance are not even hobbyist grade in quality, but at least, they perform their basic function and are suitable for light duty work.
I've actually had some good luck with harbor freight tools. some tools I definitely upgrade though - I like wiha #0 #1 #2 screwdrivers, I enjoy a dewalt gyroscopic power screwdriver, and I have a klein 10-in-1 in easy reach for around the house general stuff.
On top of this, before you get some experience using a tool, you might not be able to judge whether it's high quality. And you might not know which dimensions of quality matter most to you. But you can tell pretty quickly whether it's cheap :)
If all that went wrong with tools was that they broke, the rule of thumb could be: when you break a tool, replace it with one twice as expensive. When you lose a tool, replace it with one half as expensive.
Like the power-of-2 realloc trick, the amortized cost of finding the tool you need is at most 2x.
But cheap tools do something worse than break. They ruin work, they frustrate you, they can be dangerous.
(Perhaps in KK's youth, the cheapest tools were still acceptable. But today, the cheapest tools literally cannot do a single instance of the task they're ostensibly made for.)
Once or twice I’ve spent a lot of money on a tool but I’d only end up using it once or twice at best.
On the other hand, I’ve been burnt a lot more by buying the cheapest tools. When I was younger (student days) and couldn’t afford quality tools, they would not “do the job expected of them without creating a new problem”. These new problems (usually rounded off nuts, screws, Allen bolts, etc.) would usually cost more money and time to resolve. I also recall quite a few minor injuries to the hands when a badly fitting tool suddenly slipped from the part it was working on.
Now that I’m older and somewhat wiser, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the cheapest – though often, there may well be no need to go to the opposite extreme of buying the most expensive.
Seconding this. Most of the issues I've had doing manual work has been a result of using cheap or inadequate tools. I don't often find myself thinking "that expensive set of pliers didn't do as good of a job as the cheap set at the dollar store." Whereas every time I buy a cheap tool to do the job it inevitably breaks or fucks up.
For example, once I was trying to run some stainless steel wire to make a cheap curtain rod across some windows. I had assumed that the stainless steel crimp jackets could be crimped with some physical strength and a set of pliers. It was an absolute disaster and finally I broke down and bought a special set of pliers for crimping the stainless steel jackets. They were about 4x as much money as the pliers I was using but they did the job swiftly and efficiently without damaging anything.
I often also see the most expensive tool doing the job more poorly, so I would revise the rule to "spend as much money on a tool as it takes to get the correct set of features and level of durability to do the job." For example, the $4.00 caulk gun does a better job than the $20.00 caulk gun because the $20.00 caulk gun doesn't come with a built-in cutter or a plug popper. So you're paying 4x as much for a tool that can't complete the entire caulking job. So buy the $4.00 caulk gun because the built-in cutter means you never have to risk cutting the caulk outlet wonky again, and the caulk job will be much easier.
Premature optimization. If you end up using a tool only once, buying the best quality tool for that is a waste of money. And you can rarely tell in advance which tool you'll be using often.
If you have infinite storage space and infinite money, ok.
But over the years I've found a small toolbox, close at hand, with super frequently used tools works well.
Working on motorcycles, you could probably do most things with a really nice 10mm, a 12mm and maybe 14mm t-handle wrench. But you don't need every size from 1mm to 100mm too. You could probably have a 1/4" and 3/8" t-handle wrench and use a general socket set for uncommon tasks.
or put another way -- shoot your whole wad on a snap-on tool chest full of tools, and then you have no money for a circular saw or a car lift, or welder or milling machine.
I think there are a lot of variables in the decision on what point in the quality spectrum you chose when purchasing a tool.
Some cheap tools actually do well beyond a "good enough" job, and if you end up only ever needing to do that job once or twice, well "going cheap" can be a good move.
However, some cheap tools are complete garbage, won't even complete the job the first time you use them, and are thus a waste of money.
On the flip side, high quality (and generally more expensive) tools can pay for themselves many times over, but that depends very much on how much you use them. If you only use them once, and you know you'll likely not need it again, you might be able to sell the tool at a lower price after using it, but that may or may not be worth the time and hassle to you.
Also, there are many tools that are just so expensive they are out of a lot of people's price range in the first place.
I personally try to skew to the "higher quality" end of the range as much as possible. This is mostly because I tend to do a lot of things for myself, rather than paying for someone else to do them, and thus the chances that I will reuse a tool are quite high. And I've been burned enough times by cheaper tools, that I go that route far less often, and usually only because I have enough information on the cheap tool to decide it is worth it. Also, for me the cheap tool route is usually limited to those tasks that I am confident I am unlikely to ever do again (and those cases are rare).
In all of the above, I am thinking of physical tools. When it comes to tools in the form of software, I think there is even more variance. There are a fair number of "paying more == having better tools" scenarios, but there are also some very expensive tools that are complete garbage, and there are free and/or open source tools that do the job far better than commercial products do.
All this to say I mostly agree with the original tip, except I would not say "Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find", but rather "Don't absolutely dismiss a tool because it is cheap, consider it if you think you will only rarely need it, and you have reason to believe it will adequately do the job."
The pleasure of saving some $ will be instantaneous and will not repeat. The regret of something having bad (or barely ok) performance is permanent and will repeat every time you use it.
Strong "no" on this one. Always buy quality tools. These are priced at a premium, but unlike "inexpensive" tools will:
• Do the job expected of them w/o creating a new problem
• Be enjoyable to use
• Last a long time (often, a lifetime)