The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Tool Chest Another Craftsman Disappointment

I bought two new combination wrench sets today, one for my brother and one for my son. After getting to the truck I was looking them over and discovered they were made in China. What a crock. So much for Craftsman hand tools being made in the USA. A good lesson, read the label BEFORE buying.

There's no point in reading the label first, there seems to be nothing available not made abroad anymore. I should stop in at Western Forge just down the street from work and see what they are actually making these days. They used to make a lot of the craftsman tools.

Ain't Kobalt made in USA? I know Snap On Tools are - but they are very expensive.

Tiny, remember that Sears is Kmart now and the total lack of quality merchandise will make sense. Just yesterday I was in a Sears auto center getting a periodic tire rebalance and a customer was there looking at portable air compressors.

Every version on display was made in China and the guy left empty handed, refusing to buy that junk.

Next time you're in the Sears tool department, try finding drill bits labeled "High speed steel". No more of those at Sears. Now they tout "Black Oxide" and "Titanium" that are just coatings over industrial revolution era carbon steel drills that are labeled "For wood, plastic and soft metal".

Just like a drunk hitting bottom, maybe tool quality is hitting bottom too.

I'm gettin ready to start a new job and I have to buy some tools so I was in Sears last week looking for items I need. I found that many of them are still made in the US, but a lot of the sets, esp. the fancy ratchet end wrenches, are made in China. Of course anything made out of plastic or rubber seems to made offshore, but when I looked at labels on the hand tools I was suprised how much they sell that is still made here. Like ya said, it's good to read the label before you buy.

The ratcheting box end wrenches are manufactured by Danaher, same people that make Gearwrench. Yes, they are made in Chimna, but they are good tools and are backed by the warrantee. BTW, Kobalt tools are also manufacturerd by Danaher, as are K-D.

tcox Be careful what you buy from Snap-On too. Look at their air grinders as some are made here and some made off shore too.
Blue Point is the wrench brand name for off shore and Snap on is the the American brand. Same with Mac, Matco and Cornwell.
62Blue
Don

I started buying my hand tools nearly 60 years ago when I was a kid in grade school. On my way home from school I would wander thru the Sear-Roebuck & Co store and drool on the tools that I was planning to buy. Any time I had a spare buck or two I would pick up a couple of sockets or a box wrench. By the time I had outgrown the two wheeler and moved on to four I had accumulated a workable set of Craftsman wrenches. Almost every one of those original wrenches are still in the tool box and used often on these Stovebolts.

I also have a few of my dads tools that he purchased back in to the 20’s and 30's when he was a working mechanic. I inherited his big old heavy Thor gear driven 1/2" drill and it’s still the one I grab when ever I get into the heavy stuff. I use it to pull Silver & Deming drills for the really big holes. Better brace yourself though, cuz when it hooks, It’ll throw you right off the frame.

Nope, they sure don't make 'em like they used to! I like your comparison of Sears to Wal-Mart now days, that's so appropriate. What a shame that a great working mans store like Sears or the rest of our proud manufacturing industry for that matter, has been allowed to degrade to the point it has.
I'm just glad I grew up back than rather than now, we truly did see the best this county had to offer. God help the future generations in this country.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

I learned the other day that the more expensive Sears tools have a life time warranty, the cheaper tools require a proof of purchase for a warranty. Better read before you buy or keep proof of purchase for 50 years.

yes if the tool is stamped "SEARS" there is no warrenty, they still do warrenty the Craftsman hand tools.

good ol' craftsman, it seems to be headed down hill for years. if you got old ones maybe you should hold onto them.

Gee I wonder why the economy and employment numbers are what they are.We don,t make anything here anymore,I used to buy Craftsmen tools when I started working on boats in the 80,s they were goood tools and untill I could make enough money to replace them with snap-on and mac they served me well,but I have noticed in the last ten years or so that the quality has gone to crap and there warranty is not the same as it used to be.I guess that is why I love restoring old American trucks because it reminds me of what we used to make right here in the good ol,USA.

On some items Crapsman sells nowadays the warranty is only for 90 days and that is if you have the original purchase receipt. I found this out the hard way last year. My lifetime collection of tools includes Craftsman, including my Dads old set, K-D, MAC, Blue Point, Snap-On, Indestro (best pliers), PowerKraft (old monkey wards) and Stanley screwdrivers which I prefer over anything. Like most of you I also have a few seldom used WonTon specials.

Can't beat Victor in gas torches or Hobart/Miller for welders.

I had to laugh when I read Denny's remarks about the old Thor 1/2 drill. My Dad also had one of those and boy are you ever right about it breaking your arm if it got caught. That darn thing weighed 8 or so lbs and had as much torque any drill I ever had hold of for the size. Probably only had about 175 RPM and used a piece of 1/2" pipe that screwed into the top to help hang on. Wish I had kept it just for the memories but I'll take my Milwaukee drills and saws over it any day.

My Milwaukee hole shooter 1/2" will break your arm in a heartbeat.
I think the old 7lb.piece would be a little forgiving unless it is larger thatn 1/2"

Yes I can relate to the Thor Drill Motors and a couple others we had at work. We had a 3/8" and 1/2" Milwaukee that only had a stirup type handle that when it hung up would twist you up if you did not use the pipe side handle. These two had a lot more torque than the drill motors these days.
62Blue
Don

Was tool shoppin yesterday at Home Depot, got a gift card from the inlaws to help get the tools I need for my new job.
Need a couple new vise grips and the only brand they had was, well, vise grip. ALL made in China with the little "made to specifications" stamped on the packaging. OK, so maybe they ensure that the quality is as high as they want, still not buying them. I'll just recondition my old ones & prolly get another couple decades out of them.
Channel-Lok is still US made, and they have a good variety of tools, and if the pliers I bought stand up to abuse I may replace some of my older beat up stuff as money allows.

Walked out of the store with just 4 items, 10" channel locks, 18oz ball peen, 6-pc set of pin punches, and a Stanley Fatmax razor knife, all US made. $50 doesn't go very far when you buy US made, but I'd rather pay more once than a lot more over time!

There was a day when people would oooh and aaahh over something if it was imported. Now we’re shocked if we find something that’s made in our own country. Ninety percent of U.S. residents live within twenty miles of a Walmart, and less than one percent of Walmart’s merchandise is made in America. Also, if it says ’Made in America’, but not ‘Made in U.S.A.’, then it’s probably made in Mexico(middle America), or, technically, anywhere in the western hemisphere. Even ‘Made in U.S.A.’ means assembled in U.S.A. from parts imported from China and Mexico by illegal immigrants. I don’t mean to rant and rave, it’s not China’s fault, or Mexico’s. It’s just too bad we can’t buy parts for our vintage trucks made by the guy that lives next door who understands quality.

Make that almost 12 pounds Dave.
http://www.pbase.com/dennygraham/image/131604195
She still has the original soft flexable rubber cord on it, wish you could still get that type of cord instead of this stiff cheap plastic crap everything comes with now days.

DG

I was talking to my cousin who now lives in SC (and has for a while). He was a regional head for the Eastern US for a large well known tool supplier (hand tools, drills, etc..). He has since left the company (or actually retired at 50 to golf). The company sells under their own brand name but also supplied Sears and other larger brand names.

He said at when he started the company had 15 US factories building the tools, that went to 9 and now there are none. He was very positive about the quality of the US build product and very iffy on the quality of the offshore product they are importing. I had a good laugh when he told me about a test he had run using step drills. He set up a large scale test comparing foreign and US built step drills for a client – the better quality domestics lasted for many drills, while some of the offshore ones failed at less than half a dozen drills. The client – a very well respected US brand – actually passed on the cheaper drills due to concerns with their brand reputation.

But in the end I guess, cost rules.

Cost does rule, not that consumers see much difference on thier end. Just started the aforementioned job and as part of a basic aircraft structures class they offer a company purchase program where we can buy needed tools at bulk rate over several pay periods with no interest. Not a bad deal really, all the air tools with the exception of a cleco nut runner are industrial grade stuff from Ingersoll Rand. While I'm not at all suprised that 7 out of the 10 cast iron bucking bars had defects on the working faces, my rivet gun failed right out of the box. We were looking at it and discovered the problem. Right below the data label is a smaller label that says "Made in China for Ingersoll Rand",...

In that same class I mentioned above one of my new "Made in the USA" Dasco Pro punches snapped like a pretzel stick. Yesterday, another one broke. That's 2 punches out of 6 that popped the 1st time I used them. Of course I cant find direct contact info for the company without sending them snail mail, figgures.

I just replaced them with cheap Chinese made Craftsman punches, no sense replacing cheap Chinese junk with more expensive American junk, garbage is garbage even at twice the price.
Just flippin sad,...

Here is contact information for Dasco Pro

Dasco Pro
340 Blackhawk Park Ave
Rockford, IL 61104
Phone: 800-327-2690
Fax: 815-962-4972

What were you doing when they broke?

I was looking for an electronic contact, but they dont have a website. Seriously, who sends letters these days? :p


As for what I was doing, I was knocking aluminum rivets out of 737 airframes. Standard routine: drill into the body of the rivet, snap off the head with the punch, punch the body out. No big deal and every other punch I used worked fine for the exact same task. I dont know if I got a bad lot that were over hardened or what, but two failures on the very 1st use on the 1st rivet? it's just messed up when I borrow some no-name POS punches that lasted me the rest of the day,... Twice.

I was recently in a Sears store killing time and found they had both Craftsman wrenches and sockets that were stamped USA. I was under the impression that they no longer made their tools in the USA. It was good to see this.

On another note, Buck had started producing their knives overseas and now they are starting to bring some of their production home to the USA again.

almost everything is made in china, at my job we deal with foundries over in china and thinking that our foundation would save money. These aluminum castings would come back with sand from the sand molds casted into the aluminum along with stress cracks everywhere. So you get a cheaper casting but you end up spending more money on the job repairing it. Ive noticed some people are slowly starting to "wake up" and realize that you get what you pay for, hence part of the reason why our economy is poor, were sending the money over seas.

Seems like the American workers are pricing themselves right out of work.Do ya think?

Just curious Dale. Before you retired what did you do and how much were you paid? Let's say you made widgets and were paid $10 per hour plus benefits. There's a fellow in another country who'll make widgets for $2 per day. You're saying you were overpaid?

Spose I should have the good sense to keep me yap shut, but that never stopped me before. Besides, I haven't been saying much around here lately, been stuck on the radios bench all winter.
Have we, the worker priced our selves out of the market? Sure we have, industry has been on a down ward spiral since our heyday in the 60's. You don’t suppose greed has anything to do with it do you now? You can’t blame the blue-collar worker for all of it; after all he is at the mercy of the lords and ladies of industry who govern the price of goods.
After the big war, Ajax manufacturing management feels that 10% or 15% isn’t enough profit so they’ve been bumping up the profit margins a few percent every year to satisfy their thirst for more toys or to appease the stock holders. Small business, a professionals used to be happy making a good living and putting some away for their old age but now they close the doors or sellout to some conglomerate if they aren’t showing 100% profits at the end of the year. Everyone wants to retire rich at fifty-five and spend the next twenty-five years on the golf course while some sucker on the bottom foots the bill.
We are as painful as it is to admit, in competition with the rest of the world that is rapidly catching up with us. China, India, and many other, what used to be third world countries, are gearing up with the latest technology in their factories and educating their workers while we’re trying to keep our heads above water with our old worn out industrial machine. If you take a good look at what the leaders of our economy are doing you would see that they are grabbing all they can because they can see what’s coming. Automation is going to kill the work force so they won’t have the income from use they used to have. I can’t think of any other reason that board members and executives of most companies have earned the kind of salaries that they are taking.
We’re maybe a decade or two away from the bottom because the average American still has enough disposable income to blow $20 on a movie and popcorn, $100 to see a ball game or blow the same to spend a couple hours with 20,000 other suckers at a music concert.
Call me a defeatist but I truly believer the house of cards is going to come crashing in on our kids and grand children.
Are we pricing ourselves out of the world market, you bet we are!

Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL

Denny - you're carrying the individual attributions too far, the entire problem is that human culture has been addicted to unsustainable exponential growth since forever and the planet is running out of space and resources to maintain that approach .... also take note that the developing world, China in particular, is running up against the same restraints, the house of cards is going to collapse on humanity and the planet, not just you and yours, because we're consuming ourselves out of house and home

in the post war era your parents were happy with a thousand sq ft home for an average size family, with maybe a carport as a luxury - now folks think they need 2-3000 ft and a 3 car garge, heated and plumbed, or [judging by folks here] a large seperate finished shop building .... all about context

Bill

Along those same lines, my daughter is working on her masters degree in environmental studies, is into minimalism and has been looking for something to write a paper on. I suggested she chronicle the progression of how we've gone from "Cave to Castle" to clarify just how and why we got to this point in our society.
Not to say that I haven’t fallen victim to materialism, I’m just as bad as the next guy, me with five cars or trucks, a barn out back of the 2,000 sq.ft. house, a basement full of my hobbies and just my wife and I living there. But giving all of that up would be like giving up my meat and potatoes. I suppose it has a lot to do with the way I was raised and lived all of my life after all I was born a capitalist.

DG

What a terribly uneducated thing to say! Help your fellow Americans out and buy American goods. It is important now more than ever.

Glad to see ya check in Denny. Been wondering about ya!

Politicians..... Greed...... Control. Do I need to say more?

While keeping up with the "Jones" has done a lot to improve ones life it is the desire for MORE that has put us in harms way. Blame it on the Banks, politicians and corporate greed who have made it so easy for folks to over extend themselves then become victims of their own desires! Not to mention a lot of folks want to accomplish in a few short years what you, Denny, myself,and alot of us, have taken years to acquire or acomplish.

Part time jobs with NO benefits ect are to whet the appetite of CEO's, upper management and owners who don't give a rip about nothing else. I've been there, sat in board room meetings, and listen to their plans.... worked for companies that built overseas for one reason only.... .MORE!

OOOO, I better stop. If you don't know whats going on in this country then I pity you. Until there are JOBS for Americans to work and manufacture things here we will never dig out and the politicians will make sure we don't. Its called Control.

I just brought home a new Craftsman Valve Spring Compressor. Unwrapped it to find it was very cheaply constructed, clumsy to work with, and before I could even get it to compress a spring, the prongs bent to the point of being useless. My decades of enjoying walking the aisles of the tool department at Sears have come to an end. I'll never go back.

she might get some ideas/insights from this book and it's follow-ups around exponential growth vs finite resources - if she hasn't already read them

Bill

Thanks Bill, that's right up the same alley that we go down every night at the supper table.
Think I’d like to read that also.
As "doomsday" sounding as it is, I've said for years that the human race is like a cancer on old mother earth. And exponential growth with finite resources is exactly what is happening. Why just in my short lifetime I've seen all of the rural country that I grew up in turned into shopping centers and eight lane highways. The wide open farm fields that I roamed in when I was a kid in the 40's is now covered with high rise buildings and paved parking lots. The apple orchards that were on many farms now accommodates tens of thousands of bungalows with their paved streets and concrete sidewalks and mini-malls. This here place in the country that I'm talking about was only twenty miles west of Chicago fifty or sixty years ago. I'm now located sixty five miles west of Chi town and it's beginning to look just like it does back where we moved from.
Hope I'm not around when those foreign countries that are already over crowded decide they have to have more land for their ever growing population. We taint gonna have a chance in a war against a country with ten times our population and us with a burned out industrial machine unable to turn out the weapons we need to fight a war. That was what saved the free world back in WWII, we were able to gear up in a few short months and start producing tanks, planes, ships and what all for the war effort.
And to think, all the blame falls right on Sears for throwing us to the wolves and marketing those cheap Craftsman tools.
Denny G

Denny, that book series might be a bit dry for family perusal, more appropriate for your girls academic situation .... but I'll agree that population size and growth is an increasing problem - particularly in terms of food cost and distribution

Bill

how about getting back to old trucks. This is not a political forum

Your right new guy, there's just so much going on around here lately, I don't think we can afford to get off subject.
Denny G

I still have and use the tools I was apprenticed with back in the UK , http://www.kingdicktools.co.uk/ Nothing beats having a 10'' King [censored] Cresent wrench/Adjustable Spanner in your Overall side pocket, Wonders how many Bolters will now look up King [censored] tools so they too can claim too have a genuine 10 inch King [censored] ;o)

"Nope, they sure don't make 'em like they used to! I like your comparison of Sears to Wal-Mart now days, that's so appropriate."

Denny, you are so right. Sears is owned by Kmart now so what can we expect?

The buying public is partly to blame for the lowering of tool quality, and quality in general because so many buyers look at price only, don't you think?

One has to suspect low quality at the prices some of this junk sells for. For example I don't see how the China junk at Harbor Freight can even be shipped from China for the prices they are charging for tools.

You get what you pay for, huh?

How's VCCA treating you?