Archived from the Tools In Action forum (In The Shop). This thread is read-only.
Sorry if you’ve seen this elsewhere, but I haven’t found any help, yet.
I had to leave my tools with my brother for several years, and when I got them back, lots of stuff was missing, of course, including the lock bars. Now, I have replaced all the tools, but I’m not sure what to do about the lock bars, and I am applying to service jobs so I need to be able to lock up my tools 🙂
Does anyone know where I can find replacements, or what kind of bar stock I should get to cut and bend to fit?
Here’s the box (plus some tool porn 🙂 )
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And here’s the tool porn; look at all my crap tools! 🙂
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If you’re curious, I have a completely separate box with sockets and plain combination wrenches.
OK, well, in case anyone is curious, I went and bought a 3′ length of metal bar stock, cut it to length, bent an elbow in the long piece and ground a notch out of it.
It’s ugly (maybe I’ll paint them), but it works.
Codejack wrote:
9 hours ago, Codejack said:OK, well, in case anyone is curious, I went and bought a 3′ length of metal bar stock, cut it to length, bent an elbow in the long piece and ground a notch out of it.
It’s ugly (maybe I’ll paint them), but it works.
That’s pretty much what I would have done.
i really dont think you had any other option besides buying a new box.
I just thought that it was weird that I literally could not find any information on the subject; surely I’m not the first person to lose the lock bars to a chest, has everyone else just thrown the entire box away?
Or is the solution just so obvious that no one else has ever asked? 😮
In some cases people probably bought replacement parts because they were available (I know that Craftsman seems to have replacements readily available online), took it as an opportunity to upgrade to new chests, just ignored it because they don’t worry about their tools being stolen, or just decided to try and make their own. If you search long enough on the internet you’ll probably find someone asking the same thing.
If I was looking to replace bars on a chest I’d probably search for replacements, post somewhere about finding them for the specific chest, and if I can’t find them try to make my own just like you did. Some people probably do the search, find no results, and then skip right to making them.
> If I was looking to replace bars on a chest I’d probably search for replacements, post somewhere about finding them for the specific chest, and if I can’t find them try to make my own
Yea, I was just surprised because I did search and didn’t see anything. I was actually tempted to make a video of it 🙂
It’s pretty much an antiquated design and you can’t really buy parts for those chests other than locks(because they’re pretty universal). You’d think there would be tutorials of how to fix it, surely people have lost them by being cut for theft…or just lost bars. It’s cheaper than buying even the cheapest replacement box, so why wouldn’t someone want to fix it?
You will probably want to upgrade that box at some point, something bigger and thicker steel so you can load more but definitely the right thing to do until you get a steady service job…it’s sad to see all the big boxes being sold because a job didn’t pan out, you know those guys are losing tons of money on those.
BMack37 wrote:
3 minutes ago, BMack37 said:You will probably want to upgrade that box at some point, something bigger
Yea, it’s already too small; I don’t have room for my Dremel, tap & die set or angle grinder, and my entire socket set is in another 3-drawer box. Plus I still need a bunch of big stuff: Bearing kit, compression tester, radiator pressure tester, brake caliper wind-back kit, slide hammer, etc.
I’ve got to make some money before I spend too much more money, though 🙂