Tools

I am looking to buy some power tools. They are for just a small garage workshop where I can tinker around. I don't need professional tools just basic DIY stuff. Someone mentioned Screwfix or toolstation. Can anyone recommend any of these or know of any better.

Thanks

Simon

Reply to
Simon
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I think you'd be best starting by explaining which tools you want, for what purpose and your budget. Remember, it's a tool that you're buying, not a stockist.

FWIW, Screwfix will sell from the crappest Ferm to the lovely DeWalt - so all we can say about the stockists is that they might sell the tools that you want.

Reply to
Mike Dodd

You would find it helpful to look at the group FAQ.

There are sections on there for each main tool type covering things to look for.

You can then decide which are appropriate for your needs.

Reply to
Andy Hall

Have a look at:

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you know what you are looking for both screwfix and toolstation are fine - delt with them many times.

Also look at:

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- very wide range of stuff and well worth ordering a copy of their catalogue

Others worth looking at include:

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Reply to
John Rumm

I am looking for a bench drill, a planer, router, and a sliding mitre saw.

I will have a look at the faq. I dont want something that will break in 5 minutes nor do I want to spend a fortune, just middle of the range stuff. Its really where to buy them from, i am a little clueless where these things are concerned. I am building vivariums from a garage at home

Reply to
Simon

and what are the vivariums made of ??? glass steel wool plastic give us a clue

Reply to
Mr Fixit

You have picked a set of tools here where in some cases you can reasonably use an inexpensive one, but in other cases either you can't because it will be inadequate to do the job properly or will have poor longevity.

Bench drills.

Most are coming from China or Taiwan these days unless you go for a second hand old British one. The main things to look for here will be size capacity - i.e. height from chuck to table; and depth - centre of chuck to pillar. Are these enough for your needs? Accuracy in terms of eccentricity of the chuck is probably less important when working with wood than with metal and plastics, but it needs to be reasonable. Power. Check that the motor is powerful enough to produce the torque required at higher speeds needed for drilling certain materials with certain drill sizes. It would be a good idea to get one with multiple speeds, changeable by belt. However, this is a machine where you can get good results relatively inexpensively.

Planer.

Do you mean a hand planer? These are fairly limited in terms of accuracy - it's hard to ensure evenness along the length of a piece of timber in terms of depth of cut and squareness. If you are trying to make cabinets accurately and without gaps (important for vivaria), this could be an issue.

For some hand planers (I think Bosch do one), there is an accessory to make a simple benchtop planer from it.

Alternatively, you could get a better result from a benchtop planer like the Axminster WP150. I've tried one of these, and they aren't bad for what they are - being limited on size and not having support for feeding the work on and off. That could be addressed by constructing some tables front and back to at least support the work. To do significantly better, would need a floor standing planer with longer beds - these start in the £300-500 range.

Router.

It depends here on what you want to do. If you want to do substantial trimming or making of rebates etc., you really need a decent 12.7mm model. The smaller 6.35mm models really are not up to this. This is a tool where buying a cheap one really is a false economy. The manufacturers save on the quality of the bearings on the slide mechanism and it is either sticky immediately or rapidly becomes so. Motors may have a substantial motor rating on the label but the mechanical output is often poor. There really aren't any 12.7mm routers worth having under £150. The best value for money for something worth having is the Freud FT2000 (£168 from Screwfix). The sub £100 12.7mm models from the DIY stores are very poor if you want to produce reasonable results.

Sliding Compound Mitre Saws.

This is one where the market is quite polarised. You can go for the sub £150 models. Once you look past the obvious issues of capacity, the two main aspects are quality and feel of the slide mechanism and repeatability. If you are attempting to make a lot of identical pieces for a project, this is really important, and on this class of saw this is a limiting factor. You will need to keep rechecking settings as you work. Making some templates to set common angles rather than relying on the scale is a good way. The best advice in this class is to go for the best you can afford and avoid the gimmicks like laser devices which add no value. You need to mark and cut to the line.

To do better than this, the price jumps to around £400. In this class, you have the Makita LS1013, DW708, Elektra Beckum etc Comparison with the others is like chalk and cheese. They all produce repeatable results and operate smoothly and easily.

Another thing that you might want to consider is a small table saw. If you are cutting panels, these are much quicker and easier than using a circular saw and guide. On the cheaper ones, the rip fence is generally the main limitation - usually being a clamped eluminium extrusion. Normally there is a means to fasten both ends, but it does mean that time in setting up for the cut has to be taken. Nevertheless, this is a good way to cut panels repeatably and reasonably accurately.

If you can wait a month and are within access of London, you might want to consider going to the International Woodworking Exhibition at Alexandra Palace (17-19 Feb)

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is not as grandiose as the title suggests (I suppose that "international" means that people from north of Watford are invited too), but they have stands from all of the major manufacturers and suppliers with examples of most of their range. Many of the distributors are there as well, so you can find examples of the unbranded/own brand tools also. These tend to be generic, so you can easily figure out what is what.

Later in the year, (November), there is the Axminster Power Tools exhibition (held in Exeter. This one is a bit larger than the IWE with a slightly different mix of exhibitors.

Reply to
Andy Hall

Can be many things.

Laminated chipboard is the typical offering of the pet shops. These have to be carefully sealed with a bead of silicone sealer all round. For home construction, accuracy is important (1mm or less), or the pieces won't fit properly. Either way, they do tend to deteriorate with warmth and ingress of water from cleaning.

I've built them in the past from ply laminated with glass fibre matting and epoxy. This gets around the deterioration problem.

More recently, I've used a polyethylene or polypropylene vivarium with glass sliding doors and have then built that into a wooden cabinet for more aesthetic appeal. This is more easliy maintainable and durable than something built completely from wood. I'm using this for keeping snakes whose habitat would normally be tropical rainforest with 28-30 degrees and 80%+ relatively humidity. Laminated board cabinets don't stand up to this for any length of time, however well they are made.

Reply to
Andy Hall

Well stop that right now! You'll spend a fortune and still not be able to do anything useful. Running out to the shop and throwing money around is the typical approach, but it doesn't really work that well.

If you have to shop, buy yourself a nice cordless drill with a decent quality charger. They're always handy. But that's about the limit - anything else you should buy because you need it for a particular job, not because you think it would be good to have. Otherwise you end up with a shelf full of electric eel-peelers, still in their boxes and unused. Or worse than that you buy some brightly coloured Black & Decker thing that lets the smoke out the moment you turn it on.

Grab some catalogues. Screwfix, Axminster, probably Draper and look at Google too.

Buy the best you reasonably afford, which usually means at least three makers up from the bottom grade. Erbauer or Ryobi are usually OK -- Ferm, B&Q or Axminster usually isn't. Some (like Skil) range from the very good to the very bad and you have to look at individual models.

If you ask yourself "How can they possibly make it for that money", the answer is usually "Because it's unusable rubbish". Yes, it's cheap. But if it doesn't actually _work_, then it's a waste. A tool that doesn't work for a basic DIY user is just as much a waste as a tool that doesn't work for a commercial user. yes, maybe it was only 20 quid - but if you really like throwing away twenty quid on plastic, get an Airfix kit, it'll be much more fun.

Tools that are useful and should be on a list that you might think about getting "soonish" for doing "typical" DIY are:

SDS drill You need a hole in your house? Don't faff around the hard way, get an SDS drill and do it in seconds.

Jigsaw Cuts all the timber you'll probably ever need, including those tricky closed curves. £100 gets you a good one that really is much better than the cheap stuff

Circular saw Of limited use, until you need to make big boxy furniture out of plywood. Buy cheap, but get it a better blade too - the "universal" blades they supply aren't really good at anything.

Sander A tiny amount of money on a 1/4 sheet sander buys a better tool than the same money on a 1/2 sheet sander. Ryobi are decent. Delta sanders don;t do anything useful, until you buy the expensive ones.

4 1/2" Angle grinder Marvellous for anything involving metal. Buy cheap, wear it out, then buy a Metabo. Buy a big range of varied abrasives too, along with good ear defenders, goggles and good gloves.

Biscuit jointer.

50 quid jointer and some plywood makes as much cube-shaped storage or furniture as you could want. Not a tool you use for long, but it's one that you benefit from not by how much you use it, but by how much effort it saves over doing it the other ways.

For many of the other tasks (crosscut saw, screwdrivers, many sanders) then spending about half that money on the equivalent hand tool gets you a top-of-the-range hand tool that actually works far better. You'll also find that spending generously on the consumables (blades, abrasives) makes even a feeble tool work quite usefully.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

If you are anywhere near Twickenham (SW London top of M3) D&M Tools in Heath Road have a terrific range on display. Note half day closing on Wednesday.

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Reply to
Tony Bryer

For guidance on woodworking tools try :-

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'm what might be called a middle grade amateur wood worker - I can cope with most techniques but don't do them frequently enough to develop any skill in doing them speedily. My philosophy has always been to buy inexpensively and then go up market when I find that the tool is worth having and is earning it's keep. There is really no point in my opinion in spending 'throw-away' money on tools that are new to me - so the cheap first time buy is to be replaced by a better quality tool when it dies. Ironically so far only a cheap battery drill has fallen into this category - all the other 'cheap' tools are doing fine.

Rob

Reply to
robkgraham

many thanks to you all, much appreciated

Reply to
Simon

Hmmm ... how about these:

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?cId=101380&ts=78144&id=14001The latter is discontinued and presumably relpaced with the GST 120BCE, which is £120, so a big jump up. The other choice is to try and get a good one second hand on eBay.

Anyone used either of the above?

a
Reply to
al

The Bosch GST 100 (and the GST 75 before it) are good jigsaws. For that price, snap them up.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

What I've found with cheap tools is some are ok, some aren't. Its a bit of a gamble, unless you've got recommendations. Certainly dont touch a cheap codless, you have to spend a fair amount on those to get anything other than carp.

Should I upgrade from the old rawl drill?

At least it cost me under 20 to find out. I made it useful by gluing some very coarse fibre-sandpaper on, something like 20 or 30 grit.

Caution: always use indirect vent goggles, never direct vent. Unless you like hospitals. Wide range of abrasives you say: what do you suggest? I only use 3 these days, diamond for most things, and a metal grit disc for the few things diamond doesnt like, eg sharpening tool steels. And another grit disc for plastic.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

Reply to
John Rumm

Oh balls, so it is!! Thanks for the eagle eyes! Don't have any other 110V tools, so it would be a bit of waste to get a converter just for this ... :(

There's a DeWalt one for about the same price there ...

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that would be an OK bit of kit too ..?

a
Reply to
al

Not used it so can't say for sure. Looking at the picture it is hard to see if the sole plate is cast or stamped, although either way it does look reasonbly solid (the more ridgid the better).

Axminster have the Makita 4340 at about 105 at the moment. A bit of a step up in price, but a really first rate machine.

Reply to
John Rumm

I don't often wear goggles - I prefer a faceshield.

Everything! I use my grinders a lot, so I really do buy a trial sample of every new abrasive that appears.

Mostly I use flap disks, some rigid cutting disks, a lot of twisted cup brushes, and a few weirdies.

I rarely use hard grit wheels - flap wheels have replaced those almost entirely. I also like the Norton flexidisks (foam padded) for curved surfaces as they don't make flats so easily. I prefer the Hermes blue coated disks (from CSM Abrasives) as the best abrasives, and they also go to 120 grit.

Twisted cup wire brushes are my normal way of shifting paint, tar, mud and grot. I only use twisted cups as the others just shed too many bristles (definitely faceshield not gogles, and a thick shirt too). There are some plastic mesh paint strippers from Screwfix but these are incredibly fragile if you catch an edge. Beartex seem to last longer.

I don't use diamond cutting disks, as my 9" grinder gives better reach with these. I do have a diamond stone surfacing disk though that seems handy on odd occasions.

Sandpaper disks are infamous for digging in at the edges, but 3M make some that are non-circular (image a 3-sided 50p piece with the corners chopped off). They work well on flat surfaces, but don't leave the edge scores behind. RS sell them.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

They're called "knotted".

What can I use to clean the inside square hollow section (about 40mm)?

Reply to
Chris Bacon

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