rev up your engines, today I'm continuing my never-ending search for
ways you can save money fixing your car, by showing you how to save money buying
car repair tools, now I've been fixing cars for the last 50 years and if I had
bought all the tools I got crammed under this garage brand-new, I'd have over a
quarter of a million dollars of money out of my pocket, but yes, Scotty is cheap
I didn't spend but a fraction of that money buying these tools, because I got a
lot of them used, I didn't have much money when I was a young mechanic, heck
people were making a dollar 25 cents an hour back, then so I bought a lot of used
tools, and that found out one thing about tools very early, brand-new tools can
cost an awful lot of money, but if you're hard for cash and need some quick money
and try to sell your tools, most tools have very low resale value, so take
advantage of that yourself, and here's a perfect example of it lurking in the
back of my garage, my old air compressor I paid $90 for this used from a pawn
shop over 35 years ago,
hey it still works like a charm, it's a professional-grade compressor, 35 years
I've had it still works great, and say you don't want to buy a used compressor
you can get a new one pretty cheap these days, now I bought this backup compressor
for about one hundred and twenty dollars on sale brand-new from harbor freight
tools, granted it's not the quality of my compressor that's the professional one
that I bought in a pawn shop years ago, it's my backup, and if you're not a
professional mechanic like me and just doing your own stuff, one of those
compressors can be perfectly good for one guy running air tools, but really my
old professional one it's so good even though I bought it used and had it for
35 years, I never had to use the back of one yet when I was working, because the old
one hasn't broken yet, so taking a trip to the local pawn shop, hey that can save
you a bunch of money, they have many tools, you can pick through them, and
realize one thing about pawn shops, bartering still exists in that world
just because it's got a price of a hundred bucks, you can barter them down
in almost every single case, because you're paying cash generally and cash
rules, sure sometimes you got to walk out of the store and then they'll say, oh
come back we'll sell to you for this much less, but it's kind of a fun thing
to do I like bartering when it comes to buying stuff myself, learned it from a
grandfather, but here's one warning when you go to a
pawn shop, if you see tools that are actually brand new tools, you want to
check out what the make is, do little research on their quality, because a lot of
them these days just buy the really cheap Asian tools and then sell them
they're not a pawn shop deal, they're just being a seller of cheap tools there
nobody pawned the cheap tools, they just bought them from China and are trying to
sell them, and believe me you don't want to buy the cheapest tools possible in
terms of quality, my knuckles are still in good shape, because I buy quality hand
tools, I don't want them breaking when I'm pulling on stuff, so be really leery
about cheap brand new tools in a package, a lot of times they're just poorly made
you don't want to buy those, I used to buy Sears Craftsman tools, they were
decent tools, this ratchet it had a lifetime guarantee
this is like the eighth one I've had in the last 45 years, they just kept
replacing them, but unfortunately the store used to go too is gone now, they
shut it down, so maybe craftsman isn't such a good idea anymore, in that case
you might switch to Duralast tools from autozone, look at that guaranteed for
life, they got the same thing and it doesn't look like the Auto Zones are
going to be disappearing anytime soon, and it's always good idea to have a store
somewhere near you that sells tools that you use all the time in case you either
break tools or lose it in the middle of a job, so you can just zoom down a street
get another one to come back and fix it, rather than wait weeks for it to come in
the mail, now you really can't fix any modern car without a decent scan tool, so
I'm going to show you how you can save money buying a scan tool, now there's
zillions of scan tools out there, but you have to decide how much money you want
to spend, and how far you want to go analyzing stuff, for example this
creator, hey it's less than 50 bucks, it does live data, it does trouble codes or
erasing stuff, it does some pretty basic stuff and for 50 bucks that does a
decent job, but if you're really serious about fixing your car, this Actron auto
scanner Plus does a really good job, now I paid 250 bucks for this one it was new
and I use it all the time as a professional mechanic, because it's so
fast it's much faster than my giant machines that have to be set up, and I
can often fix the problem with this tiny little thing, so if you can find one used
great or even better get together with your friends. say you got five friends
you eat you only have to fork out 50 bucks. and you get one of these top-notch
scan tools. hey since they fit every car sold in the United States since 1996. you
can use them on all kinds of cars. you're not a professional mechanic. you don't
need it all the time. so you can share it amongst friends. now if you're going to work
on your car you need a good jack, but don't try to say too much money
just buying a cheap little Jack, I mean this little Jack was like $40 at a
discount auto parts store, but I bought this gigantic one at Harbor Freight
tools and it cost me 69 bucks when it was on sale, and I know people are going to
say, Oh Scotty you buy tools at Harbor Freight tools, they sell a lot of junky
tools, well yeah some of their tools are junky and
cheap, I'm not going to argue with that, but some of them are reasonable quality, as
with any tool you want to do a little research, for example I bought a cheap
electric saw from harbor freight tools, the thing broke within a year, it was a pile
of junk, so I went to a pawn shop I bought a Dewalt, I did some research
good tools, it worked great, saved money buying it used but I bought a quality
one, I didn't buy another new cheap one because the new cheap ones are exactly that
they're new but they're cheap, so there's actually lots of ways you can save money
buying tools to fix your car, but what the heck, why not start your search at a
pawn shop, and since this is mechanic Monday, I'll be giving away some tools I
bought at a pawn shop, to have a chance to win just place a clean non offensive
comment on the youtube comments below, and a winner will be chosen randomly by
computer to win some free tools, so if you never want to miss another one of my
new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!