People say buy cheap, buy twice.
Not always. Sometimes you buy cheap once, discover you've bought rubbish, then keep it for years because throwing it away feels like admitting it has beaten you.
My latest example is a Terratek rotary tool. I thought it would be useful for the GT6, the bike and all those little jobs where an angle grinder would be considered excessive.
It boasts 234 accessories. That sounds impressive until you open the case and discover that at least 200 of them are tiny circles of sandpaper with a hole in the middle.
They fit on a minute screw mandrel, apparently. I say apparently because it is not immediately obvious which attachment they belong to, and by the time you've worked it out the enthusiasm has begun to drain away. Once fitted, they last just long enough to prove you assembled them correctly.
Counting each one as a separate accessory is rather like selling a toilet roll as a 200-piece bathroom system.
The rest are not much better. The sanding attachments wear out almost on contact. The grinding stones disappear nearly as quickly. The burrs clog up and stop cutting. Some of the attachments may have a purpose, but I have yet to discover it.
Then there is the tool itself. A rotary tool is supposed to be small, controllable and suitable for fiddly work. This one is enormous. It is like trying to do watchmaking with a road drill.
Sam Vimes had a point about boots. Terry Pratchett's theory was that poor people often spend more because they can only afford things that wear out. Buy the cheap boots several times and you end up spending more than the man who bought the good pair once. This is the workshop version.
By the time the supplied consumables have worn out, which does not take long, decent replacements are not particularly cheap. Buy proper sanding discs, decent burrs and grinding attachments that survive more than a brief introduction to metal, and you may as well have bought a better rotary tool in the first place.
So I have learned something. Next time I see a tool advertised with 234 accessories, I shall count the sandpaper before I reach for my wallet.
