WildBear Tools

The bottom drawer brought more at the auction than the toolbox did 👆🏼

When Walt Dykstra's garage was auctioned off, the bottom drawer of his toolbox brought more money than the toolbox did. Nobody who knew Walt was surprised. Walt ran a 2-bay shop on the edge of a town of 900 people in northern Iowa for 41 years. I swept his floor at 16 and turned wrenches for him until I was 24. My name is Joe, and most of what I know about fixing things, I learned standing next to him. The rest of the toolbox was ordinary. Sockets, a few good wrenches, a hammer with the handle wrapped in friction tape. Walt wasn't a tool man. He bought what he needed and he made it last. The bottom drawer was different. Every tool in that drawer had been bought for exactly one job. Each one was wrapped in a shop rag, and on each rag was a strip of masking tape with the job written on it in carpenter's pencil. The customer's name, the car, the bolt. There was a crowfoot for a power steering line on a farmer's Ford. A cut-down box wrench for the back of a manifold on a Buick that belonged to the lady who ran the library. A long skinny socket for one sensor on one truck. Maybe 40 tools. Maybe 50. Most of them had been used once. A few had been used twice. One, as far as I know, was used 3 times in 30 years, and Walt talked about that one like it had paid for his house. People gave him a hard time about the drawer. His brother-in-law, mostly. 40-some dollars for a wrench you use one Tuesday and never touch again. You could have just charged the man more and taken the radiator out. Walt had one answer, and he gave it the same way every time. "A tool you need once is a tool you need." I didn't understand that until I was in my thirties. The point was never the 40 dollars. The point was that Walt had been the man in that town for 41 years who didn't have to say "bring it back Thursday" or "it'll be 8 hours of labor to get at it." He'd already paid for the answer, once, years ago, and it was sitting in a rag in the bottom drawer. Walt died in 2019. His daughter held the auction the next spring. The young guys from the shops in Mason City and Algona stood around that open drawer for a long time, reading the tape. They didn't bid on the box. They bid on the rags. I bought one. It's a box wrench, cut short and bent about 20 degrees. The tape says "Gene's IH – starter, top bolt." I don't know who Gene was. I've used it twice since. Both times I thought about Walt. So here's what I'm actually writing about. It's a flat steel bar, a little over 15 inches, about as thick as your finger. There's a roller chain running inside it. You put your socket on the bottom end and your ratchet on the top end, and when you turn the top, the chain turns the bottom one to one. That lets your ratchet sit somewhere it can swing while the socket sits on a bolt it can't. That's all it does. I've had one in my own bottom drawer for 2 years. I've used it 4 times. One of those was the top starter bolt on a neighbor's IH, and the bar went down beside the starter where a ratchet never could, and I thought about Gene, whoever he was. I'll be straight with you about what kind of tool this is. It's a bottom-drawer tool. Most weeks you won't touch it, and some years you might not. It's for the one bolt you can see clear as anything and can't get a handle to swing on. Nobody can tell you when that bolt is coming, or what it'll be on. That's how a tool like this ought to be owned. It's also why it's hard to advertise, because the honest version is "this will probably sit in your drawer." Walt would have bought it anyway, and written the job on a piece of tape the first time he used it. I can't tell you when you'll need it. Nobody can. If you want to see it: https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench Whenever you get around to it. P.S. Walt's daughter kept one thing out of the auction. It's the roll of masking tape, half used, with the carpenter's pencil still stuck through the middle of it. She told me she keeps it in her kitchen drawer and has never once thought about throwing it out. P.P.S. The specs, plainly. A3 carbon steel, zinc plated, 15.4 inches long and 16 millimeters thick. 3 drive adapters and a quarter-inch hex socket come with it. It's rated to 53 foot-pounds. Past that the chain slips instead of hurting the bolt, so break a stuck one loose first and use this for the reach. If it doesn't have the WildBear logo on it, it isn't ours. 30 percent off. Order direct. P.P.P.S. 60 days to send it back. That's there so you know it can go back, not so you'll rush. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench