Believe me when I say, having the right tool for a job can make the difference between getting the job right and making an utter mess of it which you immediately regret: not just financially but in time and materials wasted – because there is almost nothing as frustrating as realizing you could have done a job better or finished it five times quicker because you were using the wrong tool.
Now tools come in all shapes and sizes as a maker; many are specific to particular specialisms, others are tools you find yourself reaching out for again and again just because they’re so damn useful – my advice with tools has always been if you know you need one – buy the best you can afford, and very few shop brands come as close in build quality or consistency of finish as Makita.
I love Makita tools. They’re solid, feel good in the hand and resist wear like no other brand, and I’ve been using these since my earliest days in commercial radio when I was just as likely to be found in a crawlspace, or a racks room, as I was learning my craft in the studio itself.
These local stations were hands on – everyone worked to keep the station on air – and it was in those rack rooms and in studio crawl spaces I learnt (often the hard way) that you should always pick the tool that’s going to get the job done right, first time, and the byword for that level of efficacy was Makita.
That’s where I come to this: my latest buy to help in the total rebuild of my current workspace – the Makita 39 piece screwdriver bit set, which I have to say is classically Makita: everything from the bits to the sculpted hex ratchet are made in metal, the bits are color coded for easy loading showing you at a glance if you’re picking up a Torx, Philips, Pozi, Square, Slotted or Hex bit and the case is fully indexed: meaning every component has it’s own defined tight fitting slot to ensure you’re never faced with a jumble of components when you open it.
And the case – well this is where I love Makita even more, because I’m a sucker for a well made container, and this one is no exception, you could pitch this like a baseball and it’d bounce intact, solid injection molded plastics with rubber bump stops and a strong clasp means this small box of tricks is going to look and work as nicely in ten years time as it does today – and when you’re buying tools, isn’t that exactly what you want?