Did (or does) your tool collection pay for itself?

[sam5570]

this is easy in 1977 i had a pregnant wife and 13 dollars to my name i started working in service station and bought some tools along. today i own over 80.000 dollors worth of hand and air tools so yea my tools have more than paid for them selves many time over i still buy tools the reason i know the dollar amount when i sold my business i had to do inventory for taxes.my tools paid for 7 years college for my daughter and now allows me to do what ever i want.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

I could make a case where one has to figure in the time spent doing the job with the $500 paint sprayer vs. the $10,000 you would spend having it done, BUT, repeat BUT:

NO doubt the do-it-yourselfers are going to do a MUCH better job of painting than the hired help is. If you know you are going to have to fix it when you (bleep) the project up, you will be much more careful with the planning and prep work. Not to knock the people who do painting, etc for a living, but if there is a way they can cut corners and save some time, they will do an 80% job, and that is just human nature. You, on the other hand, will do the best work you possibly can. It's as simple as that.

You got that right. When I painted my house, I not only bought the airless sprayer, I also bought a good pressure washer, and spent days doing nothing but prep. I pressure washed, scraped, TSP washed with a push broom, pressure washed again, and primered any bare wood. Then the wife and I laid on two coats of the best quality paint and backrolled to make sure it was stuck down. It's been on for 10 years, and we are talking about painting again just to change the color of the house. Even on the south wall, the paint is not peeling.

 

[JDgreen227]

I posted about the hand tools previously but didn't mention the tractor. Invaluable when it comes to grading the road, digging trenches, feeding round bales mowing, etc.
I do have a anvil that weighs 150# that gets beat on often but at $4 a pound I will never be able to justify that to my wife. At $4 a pound that was a steal out here in Oregon.

Despite my huge collection of tools of all kinds, the only anvils I have are the ones cast into my numerous 4 inch bench vises...if I did have an anvil that was larger, I doubt I would use it for much because I don't work with metal often. One time I saw a picture in a magazine that featured somebody's home built portable anvil, he welded a steel pipe to a pair of car rims then filled the rims with concrete and mounted the anvil atop the pipe.