Tools. They can be wonderful things, helping you get out of mechanical snags in time for work the next morning. However, they can also be nightmarish, cantankerous appliances that don’t always live up to expectations. Today, I’m asking you what your least-favorite tool is.
Last weekend, I decided it was time for new fluids in the gearbox and differential of my 325i. Now, the BMW 188L differential doesn’t have a drain plug, but instead simply a fill plug through which you suck the old fluid out. Annoyingly, it’s not at a brilliant angle to get a traditional bottle in there and tip in new stuff, but it’s still reasonably accessible enough to use my tool cabinet nemesis — the manual fluid transfer pump.
You know the one I’m talking about, the sort with ports in both ends that you stick tubes in and manually pump like you’re filling a bicycle tire with petroleum products. The $8 Harbor Freight special by any other name, for when you’re short on time, planning, and money to get something decent. Since the full sections of tube are quite unwieldy, I sliced off reasonably-short sections of tube and carried on my merry way.
[Editor’s Note: I completely agree with Thomas. These pumps suck! They work fine for low-viscosity fluids like automatic transmission fluid, but you try pumping something thick quickly, and these hoses are popping right off! -DT].
As luck would have it, the tiny piece of tubing I cut for the discharge end of the fluid transfer pump shot out of the pump, through the fill plug hole, and into my diff. Arsebiscuits. A 20-minute job just got more complicated and wasted some fresh fluid. The remedy was simple — use a pole jack to support the pumpkin, pull the cover without removing the diff mount, and then lower the diff while swiveling the cover just enough to fish the piece of vinyl tubing out using needle nose pliers before re-sealing the diff. Not the hardest job in the world, but certainly an aggravating snag.
Believe it or not, this isn’t the most spectacular failure I’ve ever had with a fluid transfer pump. Back in high school, I was pumping diff fluid into my Crown Victoria when the pump itself failed, completely ExxonValdez-ing the concrete slab of my parents’ garage. Sorry, mum.
At this point, I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll just get a big syringe for the next time I need to do gear oil. Sure, filling a small diff with a 200 ml syringe will take five or so injections, but it beats the aggravation of forcing thick fluid through a manual transfer pump, even if 75w90 isn’t even that thick.
So, what tool do you absolutely hate to use? What never fails to fail? Do you also hate manual transfer pumps, or do you despise something even more? To the comments we go!
(Photo credits: Harbor Freight, BMW)
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I dread breaking out the screw extractor because something has gone very wrong and I’m applying desperate measures.
I also dislike the toilet snake but it’s the only effective way to unclog late 90s toilets
Phillips and flathead screwdrivers.
Why are fasteners requiring these still around?
They should be tantamount to cave man tools by now.
Every time I’m forced to grab a flathead screwdriver for something I feel like I might as well be chiseling my own tool for the job out of obsidian.
Phillips I get, but to me, flat head screws feel so out of place on a machine like a car. A wooden cabinet, sure, but not a vehicle.
That splined clutch centering dildo thing. Because any job that involves using it is a shitshow.
Buy an old air cooled VW: Easy fun cheap and satisfying job changing clutch discs on those with the whole engine out.
A suction gun is your friend. For putting in gear oil the right answer is to buy the Valvoline stuff in the bags. Being a bag it is flexible so you can get the spout in some pretty tight places and then just squeeze the bag until flat.
Two thumbs up here on the Valvoline bag. When recently filling the freshly-reconditioned transmission in my WRX STi, I found that the bag can be easily refilled with the help of a funnel. This was a good thing because Valvoline doesn’t sell the correct fluid for the manual transmission (without the NS LSD additive) in the bags. So, the rear diff got the Valvoline synthetic that came in the bag, while I repeatedly refilled the bag with 80w90 HP gear oil from a gallon jug. Did you know? The STi transaxle holds over 4 quarts!
I’m old school, for my motorcycle I have a hand lotion style pump that screws I to a quart bottle of gear oil that probably came from Valvoline in the late 90s. I’m guessing because that’s when I started using it after Kal-Gard disappeared.
Vacuum style brake bleeders! All they do is suck air around the bleeder screw!!!
Forget it if you’re trying to bleed air from the system.They make so many bubbles you just cant tell.
Hell i can’t tell if it’s bubbling old fluid or bubbling new fluid.
And even if you can seal the bleed screw with thread tape (and that’s a giant IF), it’s still incredibly slow due to the natural vacuum pressure limit.
And if all that isnt enough,if you let the catch container fall over the hand pumper will fill with fluid which then goes *everywhere*.
Why do these things still exist?! Why isnt everyone given a tattoo at birth warning never to buy one?
Grab a glob of grease and wipe it around the bleeder screw. No more air leaks, at least for a few back and forth opening and closing cycles on the bleed screw.
I hope whoever’s idea it was to forbid blue brake fluid on the market gets air in their brake system which they can never bleed out.
I put a big clamp on the base of the catch bottle so it won’t fall over. But I still struggle with that whole contraption.
Pneumatic vacuum brake bleeders are the cat’s ass (referencing recent posts). Set it up, run around to pump the pedal a few times and presto!
Bolt extractors. They fail half the time, creating more problems that they solve.
Jumper cables? Tire iron and/or jack? Not so much the difficulty but the implication of why it’s needed.
Agreef. When the cables just wont “bite” so you have to jiggle them, usually in the rain 🙁
External spring compressors, the kind you can rent from the parts store with a pair of threaded rods with hooks. They’re marginal from a sagety standpoint and generally skeezy. Last time I had to replace springs on a car with struts, I had a shop do it rather than deal with those. I’m too old for that shit. I’ll have to get the good kind to remove the front springs on my Fiat, and those should be good for anything.
Flux-core MIG welders. They’re precision designed to force me to make poor-looking welds with crappy penetration. I can weld nicely with shielding gas MIG, do a fine job welding steel with a TIG welder and even gas-weld an exhaust with an oxy-acetylene torch and a coat hanger in a pinch, but flux-core MIG makes me look and feel like a buffoon.
There’s no good job involving a toilet plunger.
I’m glad toilet plungers exist. Needed one way too many times…
Hot take:
No specific tool beyond a cheap or poorly made one.
The tool itself has no impact on the job beyond it’s inherent quality and suitability to the task at hand. It can only work as well as the user an operate it.
It is a poor mechanic who blames his tools.
Poor as in unable to afford good tools?
Poor as in bad at their job.
If you know how to use a tool, use it properly, and invest in quality tools rarely do you run into issues…
Honestly? A plain-ass Philips or straight screwdriver. If the screw/bolt in question has any sort of torque or rust, it’s game over for those damn things. Getting the amount of downforce and torque required at the same time is always frustrating as hell.
Even worse if it’s a Japanese standard cross head, which a Philips will SORT OF work for, and is found in abundance on motorcycles. You know, vehicles which are almost entirely exposed to the elements 9-10 months out of the year. Spouse’s rusty-ass Yamaha being a culprit here.
Philips drivers and screws are designed to cam out. JIS and Robertson may look like Philips but they are completely different. Philips are designed so that unskilled workers with power tools won’t break them when assembling a car for example and taking it apart is somebody else’s problem if not actually discouraged.
It sounds like you need an impact driver for screws. You know – the kind that you hit with a hammer. I first bought one in order to remove the retaining screws on Honda brake rotors. Like this:
PROTO, Hand Impact Driver Set – 60MK86|JHANDIM – Grainger
You just need JIS screwdrivers. I use them for all screws with a cross (Phillips or JIS.) I hardly ever use my standard Phillips ones now.
If EPA approved gas can doesn’t win, this site is garbage.
Anything that needs an air hammer. Dangerous, worthless tool.
Oh, and my wife’s vibrator. Feels like I’m being replaced.
Spoken like somebody who has never used a screw-buster.
Sounds like his wife is already using the screw buster
I only need to use my air hammer a couple times a year, but it is a lifesaver when I need it.
I just bought one last weekend… oooh the power!
Beg to differ. An air hammer saved my sanity on a front end job. When whaling on a pickle fork didn’t do it, out came the air hammer with pickle fork attachment. A minute later the ball joint was separated.
The needle scaler. It is designed to efficiently remove your ability to hear while transport rust from your workpiece, around your safety glasses, directly into your eyes.
Rental coil spring compressors. They never quite fit right and are always sketchy AF to use.
I hate power tools, but especially power tools reliant on battery power.
Power tools lead to powerful screwups too quick to fix before they completely mess something up and sometimes powerful injuries. If you don’t have the time to fix X thing after messing it up then take the time to get it right the first time round.
More than half the time I go to use a power tool reliant on batteries said batteries are dead or have so little usable battery life they might as well be dead. Honestly I hate batteries and electricity is still spicy magic to me.
Any tool not designed for what you need to do… (I learnt wrenching with broke haïtians, I’ve seen a lot of not-to-do things)
FWD wheel bearing press kit that you use with an impact gun. I really suck using that kit.
I screw up a quarter of the bearings I do probably, I’m covered in grease by the time im done the job and my back is killing me. Its like a going to war with your car.
Crescent/box wrenches that are just a bit too thick to fit into the space you need them to.
The 80s Monte Carlo SS made me hate hydraulic floor jacks. The nose on that car meant every oil change began with a solid ten minutes of barely moving moving the jack handle before the tires ever left the ground. Switched over to drive-on ramps and never looked back.
Haha, 88 Trans Am was the same. I used to drive it on some 1″ thick wood planks just to get the nose up enough to get the jack under.
My 2002 Ford Mustang has the exact same issue. That (and the location of the filter over the steering rack) makes DIY oil changes fairly annoying.
I found that low profile Rhino ramps are low enough to JUST clear the front of my 2000 Firebird (Formula). I bought them back in ’01 when I got my first 4th gen, and they’ve come in handy for every vehicle since, including the ’00 I still own.
Freakin’ snap ring pliers. They’re almost never equal to the task. Not strong enough and the pins snap but the bigger pins won’t fit in the holes, the pins aren’t perfect and won’t grab the ring so they pop out, the angle is wrong and you can’t get down into the recess to grab an inner ring, there’s a bit of the jaws sticking out past the pins and they bump into the rod/piston so you can’t get the pins to the inner ring, they’re too bulky, they’re not bulky enough, they don’t have enough leverage to bend the ring…it’s always something. They’re a joyous marvel when they work, but they almost never do.
Cheap gear pullers. Mine all have 3 “arms” – and one invariably comes off every time I use it because the screws won’t stay tight. I could use thread lock, I suppose… but I still hate them.
Tie rod/ball joint pullers. They’re like some evil heavy-duty jack in the box. Put the puller in place, tighten it… a little more… a little more… c’mon, this thing should have come loose by now… a little mo–BAM! Startles the crap out of me every time.
Yeah, not a fan of auto repair Jack-in-the-Box. As well, my cheap Amazon set has a bunch of different sizes for the end nut, and not all are ratchet-compatible, just for a bit of extra annoyance.
I had a Mazda5, and I loved almost everything about it.
The one thing I HATED was the rear brakes. They had screw in pistons in the calipers, and the tool I rented to change the pads was so difficult to use and much more fiddly than a normal piston compressor.
What is the purpose of that style if brake caliper?!? It’s the only vehicle I’ve ever had with them, but a friend told me his Audi had them.
Most vehicles made over the last 20 years have them. It’s for the the parking brake. There’s really 2 designs out there, ratcheting calipers or drum-in-hat rotors. They both have their issues.
The screw out pistons are typically used on rear brakes where the caliper performs the job of parking brake (as opposed to a drum within the rotor hat that acts as the parking brake). Why this function requires a screw out piston, I don’t know.
This comes down to the fact that the piston on a caliper integrated parking brake system can be actuated in two different ways: with hydraulic pressure when you step on the brake pedal OR by the rotation of a screw (driven by a cable system or an electric motor) when the parking brake is set. The screw adjuster needs to be reset when installing new brake pads, as the system has gradually adjusted to the decreased pad thickness as the pads wore down.
Engineering Inspiration – Parking Brake Adjusters
Instead of renting/buying a unitasker for this, I just use a pair of stout needle-nose pliers. It’s a bit hard on the forearms but gets the job done.
Are you an Alton Brown fan by any chance?