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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

When doing e.g. vehicle mechanics you need like 4 spanners of different shapes and sizes for each nut size, and like 3 different sockets of different lengths and tap width for each nut size.

My wife accuses me of buying slightly different tools for fun (which I do), but, like, you really need those slightly different tools.

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I go shopping for, like, a pair of tweezers, and for some reason come out the other end with a kit of 27 different kinds of tweezers for $19.97. And then I stare at them for an hour and tweeze stuff in all the various ways. Then pick one and put it in the desk drawer, and all the others go in a baggie in a box marked "small tools". And every once in a while I think contentedly about how rich I am in tweezers.

My first thought is that this is kind of ridiculous. BUT. I bought a cheap pair of tweezers like 15 years ago and they are fantastic. The amount of flex is perfect. They're easy to use, but you can also apply a fair amount of pressure with them. It's just the one pair, and in a panic after misplacing them for a week I tried to find a back-up pair. Well, now I have a lot of tweezers. Cheap pairs. Expensive pairs. Made in Japan. Made in U.S.A. But still only one good pair. Dammit.

I have a lot of tools, especially specialty tools for electrical, and most of my hand tools are a piece of steel shaped slightly differently. Many variations on pliers, hammer, wrench, screwdriver.

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