When I was a kid I loved going to the toy store. The big one in my town was called Macabob’s and you could have your birthday party there if your parents were rich. Today I feel the same giddy enjoyment when I walk into Harbor Freight or the tool section at Sears. Both of these retailers have a pretty good selection of your standard tools, covering pretty much whatever work you may want to undertake. The thing of it is, your regular wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers and such don’t seem to be enough for some people, and someone is always coming up with some new tool that’s supposed to work better than your run of the mill option. Sometimes those work pretty well. I have a set of box/open-end wrenches each with a little notch on the open-end side that allows grip when turning one way, and releases when going the other, so you don’t have to pull it off the nut you are addressing. It’s a pretty good improvement on an old standard. Sometimes those specialty tools don’t quite fulfill their promise. Sometimes they don’t work at all. I once was given a ball with various sockets on it. The purpose was to give you easy access to the most-used sizes, but the problem was the ball was both inconvenient to use and insufficiently space efficient. I think I threw that one away. Or maybe it rolled away. What about you, have you ever found a tool that failed to live up to its hype? Image: hulala.my