- Oh...
This is bull****.
- That feels terrible.
(laughing)
- We're testing Gator Grips today, Jobe.
- That's right.
The "As Seen On TV" miracle tool
that claims to replace your whole toolbox.
- But could it possibly live up to that promise?
- Well, I sure don't know, but I think we should find out.
- Here's thanks to EBay Motors
for sponsoring today's Tool Party.
We all know that EBay Motors is the go-to site
for parts and cars.
But did you know that they also have tools?
All right, Jobe, let's see here.
Ah, do we have our welding stuff?
- Check.
- Okay. Do we have our gasket scraper?
- Check.
- Okay. Do we have our hammer?
- Chuck?
- That's not what we ordered, right?
- It's not?
Well, no problem.
EBay Motors has a money back guarantee.
So, if it's not the tool we ordered,
well we can just get our money back.
It's as simple as that.
- Whatever you need, EBay Motors is here to help.
So click the link in the description
to shop the tools you see in today's video.
Plus, a whole lot more.
Jobe, let's get back to the show.
- Let's Jerry. Check this out.
- Whoa. You're so good at that.
(laughter)
- So what exactly is a Gator Grip, Mr. Zach Jobe?
- I don't know.
Let's see what their infomercial has to say.
- [Announcer] Watch, no matter what size fastener,
- No matter what size faster?
(laughter)
- [Announcer] Gator Grip replaces a complete toolbox
and fits in your pocket.
- Did you hear that?
- All those tools in there?
- Throw 'em out.
- Pitch em.
- [Announcer] This man is using a regular socket set
he has to change with every bolt.
- What an idiot!
- What a stupid ***hole.
- [Announcer] But this man is using the Gator Grip.
Gator Grip is strong enough to handle
up to 150 foot pounds of torque.
It can remove recessed, odd-shaped,
even damaged nuts and bolts.
- Odd shaped?
This will work on...
Nevermind.
(laughter)
- [Announcer] All you need is the Gator Grip
that fits over 1,000 nuts, bolts and fasteners.
- Over 1000 nuts, bolts and fasteners.
Big claims.
Ah, miracle tool, indeed.
- Not only does this Gator Grip claim
that it can replace your whole toolbox,
but it can do it on the cheap.
These cost, what, 10 bucks?
- 10 bucks a pop.
These things have been available forever.
You can pick 'em up, at plenty of hardware stores.
I think we all have a pretty good idea of how they work.
It's just a bunch of metal sticks in there
on basically a spring system.
When you put it on top of a nut,
the rods that the nut hits move out of the way
and it grips and twists.
It'll just accept a lot of different sized fastener heads,
which is cool, as long as it can turn them
- In theory, this is actually a good idea.
- Yeah, but I remember the first time I saw it,
I was like, oh man, that's so smart.
- When I first got one of these as a kid,
I used it once and it didn't work on the thing I was using.
And then guess where it went?
- Junk drawer?
- Junk drawer.
(laughter)
- Yeah. I think these live in
probably about 60, 70% of the junk drawers in America.
- Junk drawers in America, right.
- Today, we're gonna be testing these things
in a bunch of ways.
We're gonna do all the tests from the infomercial.
Then we're gonna see if these things can work on cars.
Like if you were stuck on the side of the road
and this was all you had...
- Right.
- And then, we're gonna
take 'em to the point of failure; see, when they break.
- This is why you bought 10 of these things.
- Yes.
We're gonna find out if these really replace
the whole toolbox.
- What are you thinking?
- Probably not.
(laughing)
- All right.
So we have recreated that sick infomercial.
- I've always wanted to be in an infomercial.
- Well, you know what?
This is like the next best thing
(laughing)
I'm gonna get it square on there.
Give it its best shot.
- I'm not even gonna look.
(drilling)
Cake.
- No problem.
- Well now the great thing is,
you can move right up to the 9/16th lag bolt
without even changing sockets.
Let's see if she can do it.
(drilling)
(grind)
There you go.
- Pass
- Normally you gotta use your hands for wing nuts.
Not when the Gator Grip shows up.
(drilling)
(laughing)
- Woo.
- Yeah.
- Well, yeah. I mean, that's a pass, too.
You made it look way funnier, but...
(laughing)
(drilling)
- Ooh, Pass!
- Drilled a hole down in there.
Counter sunk it.
- That is so cool.
- Yeah!
- That's pretty cool.
(drilling)
- Dude.
- Are you kidding me?
Like, look at that.
You don't have a ton of surface area
to grip onto it with that.
Now we got one that's even slightly bigger.
My turn.
(drilling)
- All right. Chewed up the old head a little bit.
- Yeah. That's when it skipped.
(drilling)
- Dude. I love that it wobbles.
It's fun.
(drilling)
- I mean, she's through the back.
- She's through the back.
Look at that.
Not bad.
Put 'em all in, took 'em all out.
- Yeah.
- Looks like brand new.
- Mine's got some pins, recessing themselves.
Ooh. They stick a lot now.
Yeah. It's definitely a little hurt, it seems.
- But you know why that would do that?
- Why?
- If the pins are bent, they can't go back on there.
- Oh, that's a good point.
- Right. And that pin is bent. Look.
- You see a bent pin?
- Yep.
- Well, that didn't take too terribly much.
So what do you think? Does it pass? Does it fail?
It did the things, but it killed the socket.
- I say pass.
- So one of the examples
in that beautiful infomercial
was doing some strut tower nuts.
- Yeah, they're doing some suspension work.
- Uh, huh.
- So we're gonna put it to the test,
see if we can loosen a nut
on the top of the coilovers on the E 36.
And then we're gonna try some various fasteners
around the car to see how this would do
in various different roadside emergency situations.
Well, that's gonna be a problem.
- (laughing)
- You know, I didn't really think of that.
The depth that you get is very shallow.
- Right.
- Holy crap.
- That's maybe what, quarter of an inch?
- That's really all you get?
You basically can't do anything with a stud through it.
- Right.
- Bolts only.
- That's a big old fail.
- So let's pick some other stuff.
Okay. Here's here's a 10 millimeter.
Super common size, if you're working on cars,
I think we can all agree.
Oh yeah. Oh.
- Uh-oh, oh
- Oh, wow. (ratchet squeaking)
He doesn't seem to like the 10 mill, so far.
- Is it not doing it?
- It ain't doing it.
- Get outta here.
- I'm not getting outta here.
- No way.
- Not even close.
- Let me try.
- Like I think there's gonna be certain sizes that...
- Oh, there we go.
It was just a user error.
- Well, that's gonna happen
when you're working with me, bud.
(laughter)
I was putting a little bit more pressure on it, maybe.
You know, 'cause I'm buffer than you.
- Yeah. You're strong.
- Because they're spring loaded,
it pushes back on you.
So if it doesn't have a good enough contact surface,
it's gonna slip.
See on one of the pins?
- Oh yeah. You just dug right over.
- Dug right into that.
This is not a one size fits all.
So it pushes and depresses pins, according to whatever...
- Size bolt you stick in it.
- Right.
- And then it tries to
make the closest mating to that it can.
- Right.
But that's not always perfectly 11 mills.
- Right.
- 10 mills or whatever it is.
So because of that, you get some that will kind of
go in at an angle.
And then as you start to put torque to it
drag across the head of the bolt. So...
- Right. Kind of did a little damage with the bolt.
- Right?
- A regular socket would not do that.
You wanna know what I wanna see now?
- What?
- A real small, little guy.
- Oh like this guy?
- A 7 millimeter or a quarter inch
is what it says it can do at it's smallest.
That's a quarter inch.
- Okay.
- And that's pretty easy to get to.
- Right, right. Let's try it.
It's so tiny that it's not getting good contact with it.
It's not getting that (crunch, crunch, crunch) gator grip.
- Oh man, well...
- So for that, that's a big old F.
- I'm gonna call that a failure.
Let's go to the trunk, hit that battery.
See if we can take off a battery terminal.
- This is something
that you would really commonly do
if you have a dead battery
or you need to change your battery or whatever.
- Well, I can already tell you right now...
- Whoa!, who's in, uh...
- This one looks pretty easy. Okay.
- Oh, look at that.
No problem.
- No problem.
Nothing in the way
of you getting on there nice and good.
- There you go. Look at that. Popped off.
- Pop it off, baby.
- All right.
Well now let's step things up a little bit.
I mean, one of the most common roadside issues
that you're gonna be dealing with is a flat tire.
- Yeah.
- So if you gotta take a wheel off
and put your spare on can the Gator Grip do it?
Let's see if you got the muscles for this.
- (grunting) Oh...
- Watch those knuckles, bud.
- She cammed over there.
- Oh, I see it just ejecting itself as you turn.
- It just pushes it out.
- It just wants to come off.
- This is bull****. Stupid ***hole.
- And then you can never really use two hands
on the tool or whatever.
You have to have a hand holding it on.
That feels terrible.
(laughing)
- So we were able to break it loose
with a standard 17 mil socket.
- It, it wasn't easy...
Holy ****.
But it got it off.
- Yeah. It's almost like specific socket
(laughter)
is like better.
- Bent the pins a little bit.
They got smashed in between there.
- Mmmhmm.
Did a little bit of damage to the bolts, too.
I mean, they're not... - Yeah.
- the same as they were.
- Right.
- Sorry Max.
- I think we call this a fail.
- Yeah, dude. This is a major fail.
And this is so irritating, too.
Imagine you're on the side of a road,
- Yeah!
- cars blasting by you,
and this thing is pushing you into the oncoming traffic.
(laughter)
(tires screeching)
- Nooo!
- Let's do a moment of silence
for all the people who have died because of the Gator Grip.
- Yeah, let's.
- [Announcer] Gator Grip holds on tight
to finish the job quickly and easily.
- Another claim that they've made,
is that they can reach up to 150
- foot pounds.
- Yeah.
- We've got a few different fasteners,
so we can put that to the test.
- These're all welded to this angle iron,
so they can't move.
So we're gonna put torque on 'em
with a torque adapter
and measure the peak torque of when they cam over.
Claims a 150 foot pounds, but I'm not so sure.
So we'll see what we get.
(exclaiming)
I think it already went over.
(laughs)
- We got a good grip on it.
- 10, 11.
- I don't know why it's turning so much.
Okay. So we're just rounding that thing off.
'Cause the rods are just kind of skipping over.
They're not getting a real good grip on the head of the bolt
On that, we peaked at 11.6 foot pounds of torque.
So that is to say,
the most torque you could put on a 10 millimeter fastener,
if you were putting one on your car, is 11.6 foot pounds.
- Interesting.
- I'm gonna call that a fail.
That's a pretty low number.
- Didn't get to 150?
- Not even close.
All right, you ready?
- Yeah, ready.
- And we're skipping.
And we're stuck.
32.4 foot pounds...
- That sucks.
- Yeah, that's no good.
This is the 14 millimeter bolt
and, it's gripping pretty well.
So we're gonna add some leverage to it.
- Eighties, 90, 98.5, 9-(crack)
- 98.5 degrees.
Not bad.
- Right.
- We're start to get there. A hundred foot pounds basically.
- And one of the things that's interesting
is that a 14 mil bolt sits directly on that set of pins.
- Mmmhmm
- So it pushes down an even number from the center.
- Mmmhmm. That helps just to get a good grip on the bolt.
About as good a one as we can get.
- Yep.
- Okay. Now we got a 15.
(laughing)
- Tighten her up. Tighten her up.
- [Onlookers] 150...
- 158
- .2
- Heck, yeah.
All right Gator, chomp, chomp.
- Ooh, a little pin damage.
We got a little pin bending there, eh.
- Luckily we have a bunch of these.
(tap, tap, tap)
- God.
Now I'm interested to see how it does on a 17.
Might be a little bit of an in-between size for it.
- Okay. 90, 100, 120, 126, 130, 138...
- Wow!
142 foot pounds. Honestly, pretty similar.
- Yeah. I'm kind of surprised.
I didn't think it was gonna fit in there
as well as the, the last one did.
- Any damage?
- Oh yeah. And we really kind of mashed this one.
- Ooh. She is not springing back no more.
This is just a really shallow-head 17.
I think this is actually an old flywheel bolt.
The Gator Grip isn't gonna have a whole lot to grip onto.
Here we go.
- Right, (murmuring)
- She hates it.
(laughing)
Yeah. It didn't like that at all.
We got to 60 foot pounds, 59.9
- Final step along the way is a 19 mill.
Fits perfect inside this thing
because all the pins are pushed down at that point
and now it's just a 19mm socket.
- Whoa, overloaded the equipment.
We're at 162.1 foot pounds.
Beat the 150 foot pounds that they claim,
but of course it did.
It's basically just a socket.
- It's a socket at that point, so...
- At the high end of its range, it's just a worse socket
that doesn't have as much depth as a normal socket would.
How did we do here?
- Well, like we thought, the smaller bolts doesn't
have enough contact surface for it
to reach that 150 foot pound claim.
- And honestly, their 150 foot pound claim is kinda vague.
It just says it can withstand "up to".
It did do a decent job of rounding 'em off, though.
- Oh yeah.
- Each and every bolt is super messed up.
- All of these are broken that I have in my hand.
All these pins are depressed
and the springs are not ejecting them back up.
It's not like we were really testing these all that hard.
- Yeah. We just did infomercial stuff.
The question for me is, does it replace the toolkit?
Am I gonna throw away three drawers of this toolbox
and replace it with one of those?
- Let this be an indicator of what I think.
- Drop the tools?
- No, drop that thing. (laughing)
- Oh, right. Yeah. That makes sense. All right, cool.
- It's gonna frustrate you more than anything else.
And that's one of the worst things when it comes to tools
and really why we do this show, right?
It's like, what's a tool that is going to be
easy to use, worth your money and not give you
a fricking, screaming- - Aneurysm (both Laughing)
- Yeah. When you're working on stuff.
- This is going straight to the
Tool Party Graveyard, dude.
- No freaking way.
- Bury it.(Jerry laughing)
- If you're curious, hey, what are you guys gonna do
with these used Gator Grips?
Well, we're gonna give 'em to our Donut Underground members
but, we're also gonna give 'em 50 bucks because...
- We feel bad.
Yeah. We kinda feel bad, but also we'll sign these
and give 'em to you, as well.
- So this was a fun one,
putting some As Seen On TV tools to the test.
And if there's any other As Seen On TV tools
you wanna see us test, throw 'em in the comments.
- If you want some sick merch,
like what Jobe is wearing right here,
our new Buff Horse Ranch T.
Look at that- Buff Horse Ranch! Thing is sick!
Go to Donutmedia.com
You can also follow us on Instagram @donutmedia.
Follow me @jeremiahburton
Follow Jobe @zachjobe
- And see you guys next week.
- Yeah, baby.