Buy Cheap, buy twice
 

Needed a sander as I have lent my decent one to someone and forgotten who, the usual suspects werent admitting it so I bought a £15 one from B and Q, I thought for sanding one door, which I was under a deadline for it would be fine, no, it wasnt, badly made and possibly dangerous, I managed one side of the door and a bit of the second side, I could feel it getting hot and the note of the motor changed but I carried on, it got a bit slow, sparked and then billowed out acrid smoke as it started to catch fire, was lit up inside so it got a brew over it (once unplugged), straight back to B and Q to exchange it, the grumpy cow there said she wasn't surprised !


Looked on the shelf and all the others looked like they had been returned, I noticed mine seemed suspiciously dusty and not packed as you would expect so I suspect I wasn't its first owner, how a big company gets away with something so utterly crap and dangerous I will never know, I thought it wouldnt last long but didn't expect it would catch fire in half an hour.

Bought a McAllister one for £33, that seem ok, not expensive but am still hoping I get my Bosch one back !

I tend to agree with this, and usually buy branded tools, having said that I've just bought a home base own brand mitre saw, as long as it lasts long enough to do the skirting board for one room I won't be too bothered though.

I do also still own a draper corded hammer drill that I bought in wilkinsons for about £30 5 years ago which is still going strong, outlasted my Bosch cordless drill that's for sure.

You should have taken pics of it and followed up with a law suite.

the good old saying "you get what you pay for" yes it should of lasted a tad longer but at that price it's fate was already written.

I was expecting to get one door out of it, for £15 it was worth not hand sanding and having it ready as promised, I got five hard years out of a cheapy £30 pressure washer from there, battered it senseless and only it falling off a shelf killed it.

The more expensive mainstream stuff is usually repairable and parts are available - when something goes wrong with the own brand stuff, its either attempt a diy repair or chuck it and replace it.

Pinkies saved from undue wear and tear And Indoor fireworks for less than a score , you just can't please some people

I think we remember far more when something cheap goes wrong.

Today my £1500 Canon printer has failed again for the 3rd time in its first 12 months. For that money I wouldnt have expected it but technologies just aren't built to last today.

Our society has demanded cheaper and cheaper products and now we are paying the price as products last so much less time than they used to.

Turn back the clock 15 years and boilers, washing machines, cookers, fridges etc lasted years and years (my folks gas boiler from the late 70's still works troube free) now we are lucky to get 5 years out of anything.

Never used to be like that.

Chop

I bought a B&Q ownbrand angle grinder for 15quid to cut off the rear droplinks on the car. Its been fantastic, one of my better buys as it has got some serious use lately.

One thing to definitely not cheap out on is drill bits. I got a set of draper drill bits recently and they are absolute ****e. Made of cheese and couldn't drill through a turd.

The buy cheap buy twice saying has cost me a feckin fortune over the years .... especially when i started modifying the car and trying to keep costs down!

This is a real bug-bear of mine. I fully understand that a cheap tool will be less powerful than its expensive brand name counterpart, probably less comfortable to use, noisier etc. However, I still expect it to bloody well work, regardless of how cheap it was.

I needed a circular saw a while back. Its not a tool I have a lot of use for, and nobody nearby could loan me one at short notice so I bought the second cheapest one in the DIY store (BricoDepot in France, which is part of the same group as B&Q in UK)
The thing was impossible to use. It pulled to the left no matter what. I'm not some cack-handed mong and know what I am doing with tools, but couldn't get this to work. I could FORCE it to cut straight in thin sheets, which left a ragged edge, but couldn't force it through anything thicker without it curving off to the left. Its a brand new tool with a brand new blade though - I should not have to FORCE it at all.
Back to the shop and the guy told me that was normal. I eventually got a credit note and the guy put the box straight back on the shelves.
In the end, I got a Bosch saw, which is great. But it cost a lot more than I wanted to spend for a tool that gets so little use.

I have dozens of examples. - The space heater (At €500 it was not exactly cheap either) that gave the heat output of a wet fart, the blender than worked once, the hedge trimmer that got hot enough to melt itself, angle grinders and power drills that strip their gears......

No, a cheap item will rarely be as good as an expensive one, but it should still do its job and last for a year or so of average home use.
Far too much stuff nowadays gets churned out of Chinese factories, shipped across the globe and dumbed almost straight into landfill.

Our dad was a sucker for doing the buy cheap thing on tools,i used to say how many screwdrivers have you bought this year so far,he had bloody loads of them cheap nasty spanners and screwdrivers scattered about.
He would throw a fit at me for spending £200.00 on a set of spanners etc,HOW MUCH :eek:
Then i would say but dad these will last me a lifetime,by the end of the year,you would of spent probably more on cheap sh1t screwdrivers than i have spent buying a decent quality set.
Sanders jigsaws, all fooking cheap,in the end i bought him some bloody quality powertools for crimbo/birthdays,and they are still going 4yrs later.

:)

Don't worry chop, I have £650k of Canon printers in our print room and another 48 mfds around the rest of the office and the engineers are in daily (although I guess they are doing a bit more volume than yours)

On the tools side of things:

Yes, cheap drill bits are pathetic and the biggest false economy.

Bike tools: mate got a £30 complete kit of own brand 'tools' which is what I paid 20 years ago for just my Parks cable cutters (which after heavy use still work perfectly.)

Think I've had around 5 phone calls to come round and bring various bike tools round when his cheapos have snapped over the last 2 years.

Always buy quality whenever I can

When I read the thread title I was expecting to open it and see 'buy smart, buy S-mart!!!!' :lol1:

Its always hit and miss IMO.

I have a £20 unbranded DVD player that been faultless for years, plays rewritables and plays .avi and .mpeg format files without having to re-encode it into a DVD. However a £200 Panasonic DVD recorder didn't want to know. And after 14months it died. It was repaired by Panny as a goodwill gesture, then failed again 12months later :mad:

Had the same problem with a samsung DVD recorder that started scratching discs...binned in favour of an LG that is half the price and nicer to use (better remote and menus etc).

I bought a £30 JCB branded sander that vibrated me more than it sanded. Took it back and bought a bosch at twice the price, much lighter, quieter, much less vibration so didn't blur my vision, and better dust collection.

But I have bought a £20 B&Q circular saw and thats been great....I chopped up a 20ft Schum tree with it (I was slightly drunk and had no chain saw :o ), along with old doors, table tops and anything large that needed burning or wouldn't fit in the car.

I have a £25 nu-tool SDS drill and used that for years and that is great (only exception is it has no safety clutch), but the £25 Nu-tool 24volt drill I had was rubbish. I took it back for a refund and bought a Hitachi Li-Ion for £200 odd quid....which had a faulty chuck (pity as it was a great drill). They had no further stock, so I ended up with a Makita.

Drill bits, yes you get what you pay for - especially with masonary bits (avoid chrome plated ones like the plague). However I only use the SDS drill for masonary and find that SDS bits tend to be alot more durable than straight shank bits. Most HSS steel bits are ok, so long as you don't force or bear too much weight on them and moderate the speed (let the bit do the work and don't let it overheat) and use lube for drilling big holes ( :norty: ).

Tools: I'm currently using "protek" cheap and cheerful ratchets and screwdrivers in my tool kit. Not bad. Although the first thing I did with the ratchets was take them apart and grease them with Li-poly grease, as even the new Snap-one ones don't have enough grease in them - which wears them out prematurely. However a Pro-tek side cutter lasted about 2 days before I chipped off the nose of the blade when trying to pull out a rusty split pin :mad:

My main tool kit is mostly Kamasa....the "old school" Kamasa. Had it since I was 15 years old. Taken apart and assembled countless cars, engines and lawn mowers. New Kamasa stuff is rubbish in comparison. BUT some modern Snap-on is somewhat dubious nowadays too. A snap-on car-starter/charger blew up on its first attempt to start a car. Our digital snap-on torque wench has previously packed in and also resets due to a design fault with its battery cover. FFS its a £400+ torque wrench! And some of the new snap-on ractchet spanners have fell apart just after a few days of use! :mad:

I still have some of my grandad's tools...."B*stard" files and "King-Dick" branded spanners :D :lol1: BTW: B*stard means medium as inbetween course and fine, not a illigitimate child of a rasp and a crochet file :)