No matter what work you do at home, whether it's your vehicle or working on your house, your tools are a personal choice and can make the difference between a short or long job, easy versus hard.
Camo Screws
Let me give you a retired guy's piece of advice. Stop buying phillips head deck and drywall screws.
Camo screws are basically a hex head screw. They are far harder to strip, can take more torque when screwing them and almost never slip.
The Tools
When I decided to start the tiny home project at the Shack, I made some key decisions.
- Since we're off grid and rely on a battery bank and a generator, power tools should be cordless as much as possible.
- Cordless tools should all be the same brand and easily available.
- Cordless tools should have several factors - quality, weight, ease of use, powerful enough to do the job.
- Corded tools shouldn't take so much power that other appliances have to be unplugged.
All of that taken together might seem like a daunting task and rely on spreadsheets, calculations and intense searching for families of tools. But the choices weren't that hard to make.
Cordless tools
Left: My collection of cordless tool. NOTE: Circular saw not pictured.
Whether or not you like WalMart, you have to admit there are a lot of stores and most brands are the same from store to store. You can buy the same thing in Maine or Alaska. So when I was looking at cordless tools, I started with a series of outlets that they can be purchased from:
- Amazon
- Lowes
- Home Depot
- WalMart
- Tractor Supply
The only one that I discounted almost right away is Tractor Supply. They don't really have a "house" brand, so I discounted them right away.
Amazon has just about every cordless tool brand you can think of, however they don't stock house brands that other stores do. But, they're delivery ability kept them in the running. I've even gotten several "next day" deliveries at the Shack from Amazon! Them guys deliver anywhere!
Shopping at WalMart for cordless tools reveals that they have a brand called "Hart" which is produced under the corporate umbrella that also makes Milwaukee, Ryobi, and Hoover. Since I have a Ryobi inverter bluetooth generator, I'm familiar with the quality of equipment that that corporation makes.
Left: My vast supply of batteries and chargers.
Both Lowes and Home Depot sell most brands of cordless tools so you could get a tool at Lowes and pick up battery packs at Home Depot. And each of the big box stores has "exclusive" brands like Hart is to WalMart. For instance, Lowes is usually my goto place for building supplies. But when I wanted the Ryobi inverter generator, that's exclusive to Home Depot. For my solar security lights, Lowes had the brand I wanted but not Home Depot.
So, in the end, the cordless tools I started buying is the Hart brand at WalMart. This is because the tools, supplies and batteries are available at any WalMart store anywhere.
To date, I have the following vast collection of Hart cordless tools:
3 4 amp hour batteries
4 2 amp hour batteries
1 1 amp charger
2 2 amp charger
1 4 amp charger
Drill
Circular saw
Multi-tool
Recip saw
Nailgun
Impact driver
If you buy a Hart cordless tool, what you're getting is a Ryobi with a different color. Made by the same company with the same internals with the same batteries. They're the same thing.
Now the nice thing is that all the batteries work in all the tools. All the chargers will charge any of the batteries. The lithium batteries last a long time. The quality and feel of the Hart tools is impressive. The cost is mid level - you're not getting a super good price but you are getting really good mid level cordless tools.
Tool Sets
What I mean by "tool sets" is not things like wrenches but rather things like drill bits, screw driver bits, hand screw drivers and small sockets.
I discovered by accident (I wasn't actually looking for a particular brand or quality) I picked up a DeWalt set of screw driver bits. This thing is the best and most awesome driver bit set I've ever owned!
DeWalt does a great job of making the cases to hold these little bit. They're not some plastic hinge things that will wear out in a year but have actual metal pin hinges.
At this point, I have the DeWalt driver bit set, their drill bit set and their combo 1/4 inch drive socket and screw driver set. All are pretty inexpensive and all are top notch quality - the driver bit set itself has an extra box of a dozen extra #2 bits.
The whole idea of keeping brands of tools and things like driver bits, drill bits and small socket sets is that you both know what you're getting and also can replace any bits that you lose or break pretty easy. For instance the bit set I got at WalMart, the drills at Lowes and the socket set at Tractor Supply.
