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Comment by geekles | Hacker News Reader

You've never encountered badmouthing from a pro builder about other tool brands? How many did you talk to? Builders make the Ford v Chevy debates look minimal in comparison.

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I think he means more 'craftsman' vs. 'builder' in mentioning professionals.

I don't think there's a time I can remember when Norm Abram (probably now one of the greatest or at least most prominent carpenters of a generation) ever mentioned the particular tool brands he was using.

And looking back on earlier seasons of This Old House, he was hand-nailing thousands of nails a day (nowadays he and everyone else often uses pneumatic tools for this).

I'm sure he prefers a certain brand, but unlike popular YouTube personalities and more 'celebrity' builders, he isn't a brand ambassador for Craftsman, DeWalt, Milwaukee, Ryobi, etc.

But yeah, when you talk about 'builders' (the more common carpenters you encounter on most job sites), it seems like most of them will die on a sword defending whatever brand(s) they've sunk a fortune into.

I'm a DeWalt guy, mostly because I invested in a 20V Max drill a long time ago and have a ton of batteries for all my electric tools now. But I used to use Makita before switching systems. I wouldn't call myself a master carpenter by any means, but like AvE, I find good and bad in almost all the 'top tier' lines from tool manufacturers.

Every "craftsman" I know is fanatical about the tools they . use, be they carpenters, chefs, artists, or programmers. Also, let's just call a craftsman what they are - experienced builders.

Weird. I'd say the attitude exhibited by De Niro's character Sam in Ronin is more common. They're just tools.

You want it written in C for a 16bit bargain basement ALU? I can do that. You want two implementations, one in Pascal and the other in PHP? Not a problem. You want my advice? No? That's fine too, the advice is expensive and who knows after all these years if it's even worth anything.

Ever seen anything built by a craftsman as opposed to a chippy :-)

At my first job we used to build some hydraulic models in hard wood that where works of art.

Our wood shop was so good they made a museum quality piece of furniture for our retiring boss and it was better than the best Chippendale furniture when new.

Having used quite a few different brands over years,I'd say that most of the more expensive ones are just good enough.All the nitty gritty details why Makita does a better job than HILTI or that Milwaukee will last forever are mainly personal experiences.

With most categories of gear, there's a sharp quality threshold that hits below a given price range, and once you are above it, you need not go further to do professionally useful work. It's been a helpful rule of thumb for me.

Personally, I'm biased towards Milwaukee's RED Fuel cordless stuff, because I used a cordless hammer drill of theirs at work and it lasted hours, which signaled to me that if something like a hammer drill going through 1-1/2 foot concrete continuously can last a long time, then a normal drill or an impact driver probably won't die on me while working.

I do like the grips and ergonomics of some brands more than others.

I used to work for a plumbing company,which was divided into two divisions: mechanical ( heavy pipework, industrial heating and any other big stuff) and the rest(household heating, general plumbing,etc.) The mechanical division swore by Milwaukee.They had it all. The rest of us had anything from Makita to Hitachi. Still, something thst got stuck in my memory: a colleague was using high end Hilti power drill to drill holes in ceiling.He did hundreds of holes a day.The drill, despite its superior design kept failing because of concrete dust falling into the drill.Hilti failed to address this when asked how to deal with this,so the guy ended up putting a plastic pipe cover on his drill to protect its internals from getting all the dust.. Worked pretty well.

No, never. I need to invest in power tools myself so I’ve been asking a bunch of coworkers who use their personal power tools at work. The response I hear from everybody, without fail, is “Well, there are a lot of good brands.” I don’t even hear people defending their own choices.

The one piece of concrete advice I got was “Whatever brand you get, go for the 20V, not the 12V”. Last week I saw that same guy at work showing off his 12V driver. So I’m pretty sure nothing matters, and I’ll probably just get the brand with the prettiest color.

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