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Read this thread: http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=174910
Then discuss here.
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I take that back. I do remember 1 guy that had a half empty SO Classic 78 and then traded it in on a Classic 96. He didnt have any kind of cart. May have been others, but he is all I can recall at the moment.
How to stop leaving tools in vehicles. I’m lucky as I work alone. So I can have a tool peg board the tools I use have a place on the board. when the job is finished I check to see if any are missing… Tools just cost too much not to.
Jane 😉All of my tools are important because I need each and everyone of them to make more money. Here is what I do in order not to lose any tools.
1) I work with a segregated box. I do not leave any tools on the floor period. I put them inside my box.
2) Inside my tool box I have sections in which there are indentations for my tools. So if a tool is missing there is an empty space.
3) At the end of each job I check around and under the vehicle and to see that all the tools are back in the container.
Organization makes the job easy. Keep organized and clean and you save valuable time which equates to money.
Ever since I became a tech I have never lost a tool until Monday. I was replacing the speakers on a 2001 Nissan Altima. The rear speakers were in the trunk and this was my last job before it closed so it was late at night. When I finished the job I closed the trunk and the next day I noticed I left my flashlight, screwdriver, soldering iron, and a crimping tool in his trunk. I was really annoyed and upset but luckily the owner called back and gave my tools back. I couldn’t stop thanking him for it.
Great story. A lot of people will not return your tool. If they are trade inclined they will keep it for themselves give it away or throw it in the trash. There was a guy in a shop that use to steal peoples tools and they way he did it was you etch his name into your tool and say ahhh I don’t have it all of my tools have my name on it !
There are two times that come to mind quickly:
One was when i dropped my Streamlight Stinger DS Flashlight out of my pocket on to the passenger seat of a Jaguar I had been working on. I didnt realize it for about 30 minutes and i checked my pocket and it was gone! I was thinking ‘oh man, there is no way that customer is bringing it back.’ And pretty upset i lost a $109 flashlight (as any tech knows, a good flashlight is a godsend when doing any kind of underhood/underdash work).
30 minutes later my service manager comes to me and said the customer (who was Jamaican) just came back with the jaguar, and said the the customer said”Yo mochanic be leavin his torch behind in ma car. Be lookin like a bright one too, make sure he be gettin it back and thank him again for the good workin on my jag!”
The second time was much worse, and i still kick myself for it.
I was working on an older 90s chevy 1500 pickup that a customer had brought in for torsion bar bushings, tie-rods, balljoints, control arms, and alignment, This guy had done what looked like a lot of off-road time as everything was covered in caked-on mud/grass.
Anyway, i was fighting every last bolt on the thing as it was already 20 years old and what looked like OE parts and covered in dirt. Long story short, i got the job done and i was finishing the toe/camber adjustment on the alignment rack and had apparently forgotten a small pair of channel locks between the motor mount/frame underneath. (i had put them there to hold while i was pushing on the control arm to adjust with a pry bar) I didnt realize for a few days that they were missing, and had attributed it to either me misplacing it, or loaning it out and someone didnt return it.
Fast-forward a few months: This same customer comes back and said that he had been having a fluttering noise when he revved the engine and sometimes going over bumps. He ended up taking it to another shop and they had diagnosed the sound as the cats being broken down inside (apparently he said he was getting poor gas mileage to them as well). So they replaced the cats for ~$1200, yet he noticed the sound was still there… This time he came back to our shop thinking it was something to do with the suspension work he had done. Of course he said he had the cats replaced and a few other repairs i cannot remember, as I ended up being off this day. Obviously the guy was a bit upset because he couldn’t find the source of this sound, and apparently no one else did either.. So another of our techs checked it out and found my channel locks wedged between the front right motor mount and the control arm. Apparently it had caused a squeak when going over large bumps, which is what the customer heard.. and the locking mechanism was rattling when he would rev the engine.. which the other shop misdiagnosed as a bad catalytic converter. Also the rubber covering that was on the handles was completely worn away.
So anyway, the other tech said he did find a pair of channel locks left under there, and he knew they were mine, but of course he didnt tell the customer or anyone else that. Thankfully the customer wasnt too upset about it. He was of the opinion that his cats were bad anyway due to bad gas mileage/low power and said that they helped out with that.. but not so happy that the other shop sold him $1200 in cats for the rattling noise that ended up being my channel locks that i had forgotten and left there. When I came back to work the next day.. the tech came up to me and said “hey, do these look familiar?” and i wondered where he found them.. he said ‘remember that chevy truck you did the front-end work on a few months back..’ .. and he proceeded to tell me the story.. Man, i felt bad after that.. and it just goes to prove that anyone can make a mistake like that. Im just glad it wasnt anything more serious.
Im actually more careful with shop rags than i am my own tools.. ive heard horror stories of gas/oil soaked rags being left under hoods, finding their way down to a hot exhaust manifold.. and catching fire. I’d rather lose a tool anyday than be responsible for that. So be careful out there guys! I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping tools im using in my roll-around with me the second im done using them. i’d rather have a messy toolbox after a job, then missing tools. I still have those channel locks to this day to remind me of that incident and this was probably 5 years ago.
I constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY lose valve core tools….Where I work it seems we are constantly getting EVAP codes so you have to pull the valve out to smoke the system…seems like everytime I put the valve back in….I set the tool on the cowl, put the smoke machine away and forget about the tool haha
Most expensive thing I lost was my snapon 1/2 ratchet. Most frustrating thing was when I left my bay door remote in someones car, it was such an old opener that it took a week to find a new remote that would work with it.
7/16″ wrench was the first tool I ever lost in a costumers car a snap on to boot . While for the most part I’m a team player and all I was knowen as one of the biggest hard asses in the shop when it came to loaning tools and the next job I needed that wrench (don’t know why I didn’t have a spare of some sort) and had to barrow from another tech . I got a lot of ribbing for it the rest of the day which I deserved. In the end I lightened up a lot on my no one but me touches my tools policy !!!
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