I got those as well–the ball end metric/SAE set from a little while back. They are garbage. The ‘ball end’ isn’t anything near that. There’s burrs all over the place. The coating is uneven and flawed. It’s going to take a half hour of cleanup with some sandpaper and a deburring tool before the two sets will be useable. I’m not sure the ball end ever will be on some of the smaller ones as they were never formed properly–they’re too long to act like a ball. Well, maybe a football…
That’s been the only one that sucked, though. The DVMs were good as were the mini screwdriver sets. The digital calipers were surprisingly good. I do with they had a thumb wheel and/or a stop screw. But for the price, they were quite good. The fractional measurement setting has proven to be surprisingly useful.
I don’t think that’s accurate. More like “you rarely get more than what you pay for.” You don’t always get even what you pay for. There are plenty of brands that charge a lot for the exact same junk that you can get more inexpensively elsewhere.
Many of my friends are of the mindset that you should always buy the super duty heirloom quality tools and that anything else is just absurd. I disagree with them. For a first tool, I prefer to buy the cheap one. Because, at that point, I don’t know what features/qualities are important to me. I don’t know how much or in what way I’ll end up using the tool. By the time I’ve outgrown or broken the cheap first tool, I wll hopefully have learned enough about what I want one for, how to use it, and what features/qualities are important, that I can buy a good one to replace it that has the qualities I find useful and nothing more. Since most tools follow the hockey stick graph for price vs features/quality, knowing what you don’t need can save you a lot of money.
Plus, maybe you don’t need the tool or your use ends up being infrequent, etc. Then you saved even more money by not buying the crazy high quality tool. An example of that for me is the 1/2" impact drill I bought. It’s crazy better than a normal drill for masonry work, but I’m unlikely to ever bore more than 100 holes in masonry ever. Do I really need the $1000 drill? I think the $19.95 one from Harbor Freigh will do just fine. Sure, I could just borrow a $1000 drill from a friend, but who wants to be that person?
