A long time ago I found that by organizing my work area, it made everything else easier and less frustrating. It is kind of fun for me to do it.
Maybe the organizing is left over from my carrier duty. Tight and limited spaces, requires organization.
My workbench in my first house was always a mess and tools were in a variety of toolboxes. Everything was harder. So the second house I got organized as I had a huge unfinished basement and plenty of room.
This house, I didn’t really feel properly moved in until I had finished building my workbench. It was 2.5 months later.
The garage had a 1st and 2nd pass but finally got 100% organized over the last few weeks. Combined with the redo of the craft area I think after 21 months I’m done with the organizing.
The problem with a perfectly-organized workspace is that then, when you do get a new tool, there isn’t a place for it already, and you have to find one, possibly redoing much of your existing organization to make room.
We’ve been in this house a bit over a year and I still need to figure out how best to utilize the space in the garage. My wife has hoarding… tendencies, so theres a small mountain of crap that pretty much overwhelms the space. If we could get rid of 90% of that junk – and it’s truly junk – I’d have room for a workbench and tool storage.
Since we’ve always been tenants and I’m not much of a hobbyist I’m getting a late start on my tool collection. Most of what I have are small hand tools and a few yard tools, most of them fit in the big tool box seen in the pic.
I’m assuming what you (and the OP and everyone else in this thread) is referring to when you say “impact driver” is a traditional battery powered drill/screw gun with an impact setting or feature and NOT what I picture as being an traditional impact driver: a pneumatic tool that has a (usually) ½" drive head on which a heavy-duty socket attaches. Mechanics use them a lot: go to any tire and alignment shop and you’ll hear those tools being used all day long.
I’m not always consistent in the terminology for these devices. Impact drivers are usually the things looking like drill drivers but have a dedicated impact drive mechanism. Then there are impact wrenches covering the wide middle-ground between impact drivers and their much bigger brothers impact drills and hammers. The impact wrench is the pneumatic tool used by mechanics. The impact wrench can pull a wheel stud through a brake disk by tightening a nut on it. Most uses on a car don’t require that kind of torque to install a bolt but often it’s necessary to remove one that’s been there a long time. It’s sometimes a necessity for some of the heavy coarse threaded screws and bolts like Grade 8 stuff. The impact driver is mainly used for smaller screws, nuts, and bolts. Many of them only have a 1/4" drive but that will drive a 1/4" lag screw easily. They can be used when a drill driver would do but there is a danger of overtorquing the fastener with an impact driver instead of a drill driver.
Garrett Wade are an online [I also think they have a physical store?] that sells all sorts of amazing stuff - tools, tools, and more tools of niftyness! They occasionally buy old warehouses and end up selling neat crap like antique Sabatier knives, once they had Japanese ultra fine cabinetry saws, and arcane tools like dovetail jig makers. Every time mrAru or I go window shopping on their site, we have to restrain ourselves from buying really cool tools!
An impact driver has a 1/4" hex chuck. It’s primarily used to drive self-tapping screws into wood using hex bit. But I’ve also used mine to tighten/loosen standard hex bolts and nuts using an adapter set. Of course, it can’t produce much torque when doing that. When I need a lot of torque (e.g. loosening lug bolts), I’ll use an impact wrench. An impact wrench has a 1/2" square drive.
Hex bit sets often include a 1/4" drive adapter. If you have 3/8" and 1/2" socket adapters already you can use them in combination with a 1/4" adapter if it doesn’t become unwieldy. A set of hex drive sockets is nice to have also.
