The Tools That Help Save Your Sanity (And Your Knuckles)

All of us love working on cars, but everyone knows a project can find yourself much more frustrating than expected. We may not all get trench foot while wrenching, but loads of us have run into stuck bolts, cramped engine bays, or countless rust that may turn a two-hour project right into a two-day ordeal. Today, I’m here to deliver you from such despair, and teach you the tools that’ll make your wrenching life a breeze. Or, not less than, mildly less frustrating. 

For me, personally, there are just a few big frustrations I run into when wrenching. My automotive tastes run small and modern, which implies loads of cramped engine bays with little room to show a wrench around any given fastener. I’m also from the Northeast, land of rusted-on bolts, so we have got some solutions for coping with those. Finally, now we have a single solution for all forms of problems: Hard-to-find parts, oddly specific tools, and more.

In my youth, I once owned a Jeep Wrangler with a cavernous engine bay that would fit any variety of tools, lights, or small European nations between the engine block and the radiator. Since then, I’ve exclusively owned meticulously-engineered space-constrained Japanese and German vehicles that hardly allow you room to suit a wrench, let alone turn it. From that frustration, I’ve found one of the vital useful power tools around: The cordless ratchet. 

Is a cordless ratchet stronger than a cordless impact? Almost universally not, no. Will it’s useful in pulling off lug nuts? It would not. But whenever you barely have room to squeeze a socket wrench somewhere, the cordless ratchet will feel like a lifesaver with its ability to only spin those frustrating little fasteners. It is so, so significantly better than cranking a socket wrench one click at a time for what looks like days if not months on end. 

Sometimes, though, precision is not the problem. Sometimes you’ve a giant, easily-accessible bolt, and it’s just rusted so firmly in place that you just begin to wonder if it’s welded. In those situations, a cordless ratchet won’t make it easier to. Hell, a cordless impact probably won’t move the needle. In situations like that, you could turn to most old-fashioned of force multipliers: A very big stick. 

That’s to say, a breaker bar, so named for its ability to interrupt loose stubborn nuts. There are purpose-built solutions for this, extending Harbor Freight handles that fold up nicely and neatly to slot in your toolbox, but sometimes there is not any alternative for the nice old approach to putting your floor jack handle around a socket wrench and pulling with all of your strength. I’ve managed to snap sockets doing this on some thoroughly-stuck brake caliper bolts, so it might be value using impact sockets for those who’ve got them. It might even be value buying your next automobile from a state that does not salt its roads in winter. 

What for those who need precision and force? Well, then, I really don’t envy whatever job you are working on. For pulling out small screws like Phillips or flatheads which have rusted into place, you could look to something like a hand impact driver that converts the force of a hammer hit into rotation. I, nevertheless, propose something even cleaner: Impact screwdrivers. 

They appear like regular screwdrivers. They act like regular screwdrivers. But when something’s really, truly stuck, you possibly can hit one with a hammer and watch it turn — barely enough to interrupt the screw loose, because you actually don’t need greater than just a few degrees for this. That turn comes because the hammer is forcing the screwdriver into the screw, too, to avoid stripping. The screwdriver I linked is comparatively low cost and widely available, but you could even have the opportunity to search out something similar at your local ironmongery shop. 

Last but not least, the massive one: A 3D printer. This is not a small, low cost, or easy tool by any means, but it surely’s amazing what number of problems it solves multi function device. Only for kicks, a brief list of automotive prints I’ve made out of my very own printer:

• Alternative brackets for my track-prepped Miata
• A light-weight, compact alternative center console for that Miata
• Chain measurement tools for various motorcycles, sized to the right in-spec chain slack for the bike
• A brake reservoir wrench for my F800GS, which had probably the most frustrating front brake reservoir I’ve ever seen
• Under-seat storage on my F800GS
• Phone mounts for multiple vehicles
• Camera mounts for multiple vehicles

A 3D printer is not just a tool for solving problems like “the manufacturer now not makes this trim piece I want,” it is a tool for solving problems like “I wish I had a wrench that bent at this weird, specific angle to achieve this one exhaust bolt.” Once you purchase the printer, individual prints are dirt low cost — it suddenly becomes reasonable to print those weird one-off tools you would not otherwise hassle with. At that time, the flexibility to print real and functional automobile parts almost becomes a bonus.