Buying tools as a gift: what actually gets used

Buying someone a tool means betting on how somebody else works. The bet is often lost, and always the same way: you buy the thing that looks complete, the neatly laid-out case, the gadget that does five jobs, when the person would have used one boring £30 tool fifteen times a year. A birthday, a retirement, a first motorbike, moving into a house with a garden: the reasoning is the same all year round.

Sorting it out is actually fairly simple, because tools fall into two clear categories. There is what gets used on every job, whatever the machine, and there is what gets used once every three years. The first category makes gifts that last ten years. The second makes gifts that get lent to a neighbour and never come back.

The rule: what gets repeated, not what impresses

A good tool as a gift meets three criteria at once: it gets used on every job, it saves time or adds precision, and the person would not buy it for themselves because there is no satisfaction in it.

That third criterion is what makes the difference. Nobody spontaneously treats themselves to a chain wear gauge, a smart battery maintainer or a box of nitrile gloves. Everybody uses them constantly once they have been given them. A thirty-function multi-tool, by contrast, ticks the spectacular box and neither of the other two.

Corollary: consumables are underrated as gifts. A bundle of degreaser, threadlocker, copper grease, cable ties, heat-shrink tubing and stainless fasteners costs £25 to £45, gets used up entirely, and is always the thing missing at nine on a Sunday evening.

Three questions before you pay

• Do they already have one? With tools, a duplicate is nearly always useless, except for consumables and the spanners that go missing. A phone call to somebody close to them beats a returns receipt.
• Does it match their standards? This is trap number one. Battery platform, socket drive size, screw drive type, wheel axle diameter, chainsaw chain pitch. An incompatible tool is not half a present, it is none.
• Is there anywhere to put it? A workstand or a roller cabinet transforms life for somebody with a garage, and clutters up a flat. Available space is as real a constraint as the budget.

£20 to £35: what earns its keep in the first hour

At this level you are looking for one decent individual tool, not an assortment. A single good spanner beats a mediocre set.

£35 to £85: the measuring tier

This is the band where you move from doing to measuring, and it is the one that adds the most. An amateur mechanic makes progress the day they stop guessing.

• A decent multimeter, £25 to £70. It settles the majority of electrical faults on a motorbike, an e-bike, a tractor or a mower: resting voltage, charging voltage, continuity, voltage drop. It is probably the best usefulness-to-price ratio on this whole list.
• A smart battery charger-maintainer, £35 to £80. For any machine that sleeps part of the year. It routinely doubles the life of a lead-acid battery, which itself costs £50 to £130.
• A rear paddock stand for a motorcycle, £50 to £130. It transforms chain, tyre and rear wheel maintenance.
• A compression tester, £25 to £70. For anyone buying second-hand or looking after an older machine, it is the diagnostic tool that decides a budget.

This is also where torque wrenches start, with an important reservation set out below.

£85 to £170: what changes the way you work

• A stable bike workstand, £85 to £210. It does not do one job for you, it changes your working posture and therefore how often you service anything.
• A motorcycle scissor lift, £85 to £210. Same logic, with safety on top: you stop working on a machine that is balancing.
• A quality torque wrench. Reckon on £50 to £130 for a small 2-20 Nm range suited to bikes and electronics, £50 to £175 for a 20-110 Nm that covers most of a motorcycle. Our comparison on choosing a torque wrench explains why the ranges matter more than the brand.
• A bench chain grinder, £70 to £175. Worth it for anyone cutting several cubic metres of firewood a year, pointless for pruning two branches.

What ends up at the back of a drawer

• The 150-piece set at £50. The arithmetic is simple: 150 pieces at that price works out at 33p a tool. The sockets have thick walls that will not go down a spark plug well, the ratchet has play, and the bits round off on their third use. You use ten pieces out of the 150.
• The thirty-function pocket multi-tool. It does not properly replace a single tool.
• The adjustable spanner. It rounds off bolt heads, every single time.
• The empty roller cabinet. Giving storage to somebody who does not own the tools yet means giving them a piece of furniture.
• The hyper-specialised tool with no matching machine. A flywheel puller only makes sense for one specific model.

The false bargains

• The £20 torque wrench. A click wrench is a measuring instrument: with no calibration certificate and a mediocre spring, it shows a figure that bears no relation to the actual torque. Tightening wrongly while believing you are right is more dangerous than tightening by feel. Add a usage rule to pass on with the gift: this type of wrench is always stored wound down, back to its minimum setting and not to zero.
• Generic compatible batteries. The pack represents most of the value and all of the safety of a cordless tool. The cells and the management electronics of a cheap third-party pack cannot be verified, and the tool's warranty goes with them.
• The 72-tooth ratchet at £10. The number of teeth tells you nothing about how strong the mechanism is.
• The big socket set with a shiny finish. Chrome that flakes is the sign of poor steel underneath.

Cordless tools: you are giving a platform, not a tool

This is the structural decision, because it commits every purchase for the next ten years. A platform means packs, a charger and a range of tools sharing the same interface. Changing platform means buying all the batteries again.

Two practical consequences. If the person already owns a platform, the bare tool, sold without battery or charger, makes an excellent gift: you pay for the tool and not the pack, often 30 to 50 % cheaper. If they own none, better to give a coherent first set on a widely distributed platform than the most powerful machine from an obscure brand. The selection criteria and the compatibilities are set out in our article on cordless tool battery platforms.

Check pack capacity too: a 2 Ah pack and a 5 Ah pack in the same format do not give you the same machine, either in runtime or in power delivered to demanding tools.

How to choose in five minutes

Start from the machine, never from the aisle. Note the make, the model and the year of whatever the person looks after, then work out the two or three jobs they repeat every season. The tool that keeps coming up in those jobs is the right present, whatever it costs.

If you are still hesitating, the trio that almost never misses, whatever the area: a good lamp, a decent multimeter, a bundle of consumables. And if you want to fill in a kit that already exists without buying duplicates, our list of the tool kit that covers 90 % of jobs works as a base for spotting what is missing.

For the specifics, spark plug socket size, drain plug drive, chain pitch, fork cartridge size, L'Atelier's assistant gives you the manufacturer's figures from the make, the model and the year. It is the best way to avoid giving a tool in the right standard but the wrong diameter.