Stocking Your Toolbox Part 3: Hand Saw, Wrenches and Pliers

We’re gonna talk saws today, your basic hand saw. Now this is one of the tools that’s been around for hundreds of years actually. The handsaw is used in a lot of different things. This particular example here has a very fine toothed blade. This is used for wood working, cutting things like baseboard or moldings, anything that requires a fine cut. These also come with a lot of different tooth sets all the way up to very coarse that’s good for sawing rough carpentry and that sort of thing. So the hand saw comes with a variety of different tooth sets for a variety of different uses. It’s a very handy tool and one that you should have at least a couple of these with different tooth sets in your tool box.

We’ve got some pliers out here on display on our work bench. You’re going to find a lot of different uses for pliers and they come in a whole lot of different varieties. Now you’re probably familiar with the regular old slip joint pliers. These are used for gripping a variety of different things and you can adjust them two or three different widths. So, these are good for twisting off bottle caps and gripping hot things if you’re doing a little breezing or welding. You’ve got your needle nose pliers. As you can see, these are called needle nose or long nose pliers for the obvious reason, that’s what they look like. These are for very fine work. They’re used a lot in electronics and jewelry making and that sort of thing. Then you got your slip joint, or water pump, pliers and these again are sort of similar to the regular slip joint pliers, just that they have a lot more adjustable range to them and they’ve got an angled head which gives you a lot more leverage. So these are useful in a lot of different applications, mostly in plumbing and automotive. And then, of course, you’ve got your good old vise grips. These are clamping pliers. You can adjust the jaws to various sizes and then they will clamp and hold. So these are good for if you’re gluing something together, a picture frame or whatever. These will hold that until the glue sets and they’re useful for a lot of other different things as well. So, lots of different kinds of pliers and if you want to build a good comprehensive toolbox and have tools for just about any project you want to take on, then you want to have several different kinds of pliers in your tool box.

Today we’re going to talk about adjustable wrenches. This is a very, very handy tool that can be used in a variety of different applications from automotive to plumbing to just about anything you can think of. An adjustable wrench is used when you don’t have the right size open end or box wrench and as you can see, it adjusts by using this little funnel wheel to pretty much any size you need. Now, these come in different sizes. This obviously is for larger nuts and bolts. You’ve got your medium sized one for your medium sized nuts and bolts and then your little guy. These actually come smaller than this. You can use those for very fine work. So, the adjustable wrench you wanna have two or three different sizes of these in your tool box and you’ll find that they’re very useful for a variety of different projects.