The Campaign for Real Tools

Club Administrator Simon Davey considers that Real Tools are in danger. Light hearted, but with a serious point for conservation of resources.

Since it’s the time of year where many of us are out in the - freezing - garage preparing our pride and joy for the forthcoming season, I thought Mono members might like to share some of my thoughts, and feelings, about the tools we all use. In particular I want to praise “Real Tools” – those trusty partners that stay with us through thick and thin over years of (mis)use. I might even start a competition to find the best Real Tool in the club.

Of course if you’re new to the sport, or rich, or both, it’s very likely that your tools will be pristine, and of the type and quality only seen in F1 team workshops and on the side of “Snap-On Tool” vans. Real Tools aren’t like that at all. It’s my experience that over time Real Tools undergo a kind of evolutionary, or mutation, process which suggests that they are in fact some type of independent life form. Eventually each Real Tool becomes a unique entity which is quite unlike any other tool in the box, and may even mean it has burrowed into an evolutionary niche so narrow it will only perform one specific task. This “life form” hypothesis is of course completely in line with the observed behaviour of tools in the wild – they also have the mysterious ability to hide in places that could only have been reached by a really determined living entity.

So what are the forces that drive “tool evolution”? What makes a “Real Tool”? For example what is the equivalent of natural selection – survival of the fittest – for an open ended spanner? Take the _ inch AF open ender. I reckon this to the world’s most common racing car tool. I have a standard ones, tight ones (usually worn 12mm spanners – sometimes filed out) which I use for worn fixings; and worn ones, for fixings which are not tight, but hard to get at. So simple wear is a key evolutionary factor – many of my Real Tools have worn into their special applications. I have 12mm sockets worn so they can be hammered onto rounded 1/2 AF fixings, 3/8 inch open enders worn so they are a tight fit on tricky 10mm fixings - the list is long and intricate, each worn tool carefully preserved for its unique application. It even includes things like torque wrenches: I keep my new precision torque wrenches exclusively for engine work, as they age they become “at circuit” Real Tools used mostly for tightening wheel nuts.

An even more dramatic mutational factor is misuse and breakage. This can produce useful new species of Real Tools. My welding tool box contains whole families of screwdrivers which are now used for clearing molten metal off components that I am “de-brazing” for one reason or another. Each now has an exquisitely formed steel-bronze alloy tip which has a shape perfectly suited to the task of flicking red-hot molten braze about the workshop. You can’t buy stuff like this from Snap On! You don’t even have to resort to misuse here: completely normal use of a screw driver – for instance by using it as a chisel or crow-bar and hammering three kinds of s**t out of the handle until it disintegrates – can also result in the birth of a new Real Tool, in this case a wonderful drift formed by the remains of the steel shaft, ground flat at the blade end, it even includes the handle grip flutes which enable to it be positioned even when bent – marvellous.

Allen keys are another excellent illustration of what it takes to be a Real Tool. I own no generic allen keys at all. I have a key which is ground short, and only used for oil pump and exhaust manifold bolts. I have another which has a special identifier on it for my pit crew. This lives in a nest in my battery trolley, and is only used for adjusting wing mirrors when I have kicked them getting into the car in a panic. I have yet another, recent, addition which has a welded extension and is only used for the brutal process of fixing the lower gearbox bolts on the Swift. And so on – but primitive “allen keys” in my tool box? No.

Don’t even start me on hammers. All I will say is that one specie of hammer is absolutely vital to the proper preparation of the single seater racing car, and it appears to be nearly extinct. This is the small copper/cloth faced mallet. Not your rubber rubbish – the Real Tool has a copper face pulverised by years of over-use so that its angle is an exact match to the preferred strike angle of my arm. This is a symphony, an essay, of force applied in exactly the right way – how else but by a Real Tool?

I could easily go on: pliers, wire snippers, socket bars: the list of carefully evolved Real Tools is endless. Please take a look at your own collection and rejoice whenever you find one. Of course to the non-Real Tool aficionado it does mean my tool box appears to contain a pile of worn out old junk – but we know better. Oh yes!

Simon Davey

Startline has added a couple of pics to Simon's. Why not post pics of your best on the forum or email them to Startline and we'll do a gallery? (TC)

Precision adjusting tool – nearly extinct now (SD)

Mutated screwdriver for molten metal flicking (SD)

Home-made tool for getting at master cylinder tops (TC)

Much-loved 1/2" bar (TC)