Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on this site is written and signed by one person. This page says who, how the judgements are reached, and — just as importantly — what he is not.

How I got here

What made me start writing things down was a habit shared by tool catalogues and product pages alike: the figure a tool is sold on is rarely the figure that decides whether it does the job. A diagnostic scanner is advertised on the number of codes in its database, while what decides its usefulness is which systems it reaches once the engine is not the problem. A trolley jack is sold on its tonnage, when the figure that decides whether you can use it at all is the height of its saddle when fully lowered. A jump starter is sold on peak amps, a number measured over milliseconds that no standard governs. A torque wrench is sold on the size of its case rather than on the part of its range where its stated accuracy applies. Every page I found while looking for an answer had the same shape: a ranked list, a score out of ten, an affiliate button, and not one figure I could check against a manual.

That is the whole subject. Garage tools rarely fail outright. They quietly do less than you were told, in a way nobody connects to the purchase. A scanner that reads the engine and nothing else, bought by someone whose fault was in the ABS. A jack that will not fit under the car it was bought for. A socket set with twelve-point sockets that round a fastener the six-point version would have held. A cheap pressure gauge that reads a tenth of a bar high and quietly leaves four tyres soft. None of that is on the front of the packaging, and all of it decides whether the thing does its job.

So this is the page I went looking for and never found. I read what manufacturers publish, I verify every product reference market by market, I track what these tools actually cost — consumables included — and I say plainly when a figure is not published at all. That last part carries more weight than it sounds: most of the disappointment in this trade comes from a number nobody printed.

I keep notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which adapter fits which housing, what a rated capacity does and does not tell you, and the buying mistake each category invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I am not a mechanic, an automotive engineer or a technician, and I do not pretend to be. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, report every manufacturer figure with its source, and tell you which number the maker left out.

What this site covers

Everything listed here is taken from the catalogue of this site, and each entry links to its own page. When the catalogue changes, this list changes with it. It is a list of what is covered — not a list of what I own.

What I care about

Three things, and they shape every page here. The number that gets quoted is usually the wrong one — a scanner sold on codes rather than on the modules it can talk to, a jack sold on tonnage rather than on the saddle height that gets it under the car, an inflator sold on a pressure no tyre needs rather than on the duty cycle that says how long it can run, a jump starter sold on peak amps rather than on the watt-hours that decide how many attempts you get. What the thing costs over three years decides more than what it costs today — scanner updates become a subscription, polishing pads are a consumable, clamps corrode, and a socket set whose case cracks is a set you will be picking off the floor for a decade. And the thing that matters most is rarely on the specification sheet at all: whether the tool is pleasant enough to reach for, because a jack too heavy to move and a lamp that never holds a charge both stop being used.

What I am not

I am not a mechanic, an automotive engineer, a technician or a bodyshop painter. I hold no qualification in any of them, I have never worked for a manufacturer or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on any professional title. This site describes a product — its construction, its materials, its published specifications — and stops there. In particular, every rated capacity, stated torque accuracy, cranking current, working pressure and duty cycle on this site is reported from the manufacturer with its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker rates a jack at 3 t or a wrench at ±4 %, I report that the maker states it — I am not a testing laboratory, and no product here is described as lifting more safely or tightening more accurately than another on the strength of a specification alone.

And this site is emphatically not a workshop manual. It does not publish tightening torques for any vehicle: those belong to the manufacturer of the car, per fastener, and a number repeated second-hand is worth nothing on a wheel. It does not describe brake, suspension or airbag procedures. And it repeats one safety statement rather than assuming it: a jack lifts a car and axle stands hold it — nothing on this site describes working under a vehicle supported by a jack alone. If a page here touches a rule, it describes it and points to the authority or the manual that publishes it, and goes no further.

No verdict here asks for your trust on the strength of a byline; what each judgement rests on is set out on the page it appears on, and you can read how this site reaches a verdict in full.

How I work

Every figure names its source: a manufacturer specification, a manual, a declared rating, or the weight of long-term owner reports.
No price, product reference or specification is ever invented. Where a figure is missing, the field is left empty and the gap is stated on the page.
Product references are verified against Amazon before publication, per market. Where a model is not sold in your country, you are sent to a local search rather than to a page that does not exist.
Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is checking a connection on the car you already own rather than buying a tool, it says that instead.
Nothing here is sold with fear. No page opens with a breakdown story, and where a product changes very little between generations, the page says so.

Why this site exists

Because garage tools are sold on the wrong numbers, to people who are about to work on something that has to hold together afterwards. A code count is printed where a system list belongs. A tonnage is printed where a saddle height belongs. A peak amp figure is printed where a capacity belongs. A piece count is printed for a set that is half screwdriver bits. And the parts treated as afterthoughts — the coupler, the adapter cap, the pad, the impact socket — are usually what decides whether the expensive thing was worth buying.

There is also a part of this that is not about buying anything. The single most useful sentence on this site is that a scanner reports, a jack lifts, a wrench repeats a number, and none of them supplies a diagnosis. Writing it the other way round sells more equipment and leaves a reader with a car in pieces. Plenty of what improves a home garage costs nothing at all: checking tyre pressures cold against the placard on the door pillar, cleaning battery terminals before deciding the battery is dead, reading the jacking points in the handbook rather than guessing at a sill, and finishing wheel bolts with a torque wrench rather than an impact gun. Those things are cheap and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of new equipment is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and date the correction on the page. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · Montrollet, France