In article , AZ Nomad wrote:
On Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:46:49 GMT, Doug Miller wrote:
In article , AZ Nomad
wrote:
On Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:20:46 -0400, aemeijers wrote:

I'll pay some extra for quality, but I won't pay 2x or 3x or more. Not
being a wrench-turner in my day job, plain old Craftsman is 'good
enough' for me. (actually, all my tool boxes at the moment are plastic,
living in a damp world like I do...) Not that I have room or need for a
roll-around anyway.

My experience with craftman is that they are worse of a ripoff than any brand
in
existance. I've had more craftsman tools break than the cheapest crap I've
bought at k-mart. For the price of a single craftsman socket, I can buy a
whole
set at k-mart and they won't crack or fly part under 50 ft-lbs like the
craftsman sockets will.

This is pure nonsense. Apparently you've been buying the Sears brand, not the
Craftsman brand. I've done nearly all my own automobile service since I was 18

(I'm in my 50s now), including several engine and transmission rebuilds, and
use almost nothing but Craftsman tools. In more than thirty years, I've had
exactly three Craftsman sockets fail in use.

It was the craftsman brand. After 4 replacements of the same socket, all
unable to handle 40 ft-lbs, I bought a whole set from kmart for the same
price and they had no problem with the torque. This was pre-merer, around
1985. I don't know if craftman was better before that, I'm not sure where
you'd find craftman from the 60's.

Obviously they made a bad batch, which you had the bad luck to get hold of. As
Mark Twain once wrote, though, "A body should be careful to take out of an
experience only the lesson that is contained in it, and no more. A cat that
sits on a hot stove will never do so again -- but neither will she ever sit on
a cold one, either." Your mistake is condemning the entire brand line on the
basis of one incident, one time.

The vast majority of my Craftsman tools were bought pre-merger, too -- and
*none* of them "from the 60's" (when I was in grade school) -- not one of mine
is older than about 1976, give or take a year or so.