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If I were to attempt to re-buy any large portion of my tools all at once, I'd consider it an absurd amount to spend. But over a lifetime of things breaking, yo

If I were to attempt to re-buy any large portion of my tools all at once, I'd consider it an absurd amount to spend. But over a lifetime of things breaking, you'll get a lot of large quotes for professional repairs, or replacement of a much bigger part than what actually broke. When the washer fluid sprayer on my old Tacoma failed due to decades of a wire rubbing against a sharp metal edge, I was quoted $300 for the whole harness, and 2 hours of labour at $100 an hour. Suddenly, the $120 soldering iron didn't seem so expensive. tldr: I'm only 30 and own thousands of dollars worth of tools, but at no point have I ever spent more than the quote to fix the problem at hand.

fuzzfactor 3y ago
>What do you do with dual soldering irons? I still use the cheap soldering irons, carry about a dozen different ones for different occasions in my truck in a travel case. One of the most challenging was a fish-finder on an offshore boat where the very expensive underwater sensor was just fine but it was only the business end of a long waterproof multi-shielded power, analog, digital cable which was what the marinas replace whole-hog when somebody ends up with the cable caught in the propellor or something like that. Can't bring that kind of thing to the bench anyway.