There is no end to the nice tools you can get, but I already can't remember what I do or don't have, and for common tools it takes far too long just to find the size I want in a pile of similar tools. Realistically, if I were younger I'd probably buy even more tools as long as they were high quality and theoretically useful. However I've already reached the point where I've begun discussing it with my daughters who will have to deal with it all in 20 or 30 years when I switch from pulling spanners to pushing daisies up. They fully intend to just give everything away to anyone who will take it. In other words, it will then all join the endless list of stuff being sold on ebay by someone who has no idea what it is or what it does. They are even expecting to have to give money to someone to have him take away my nice milling machine, just because it weighs more than a ton, has to be dismantled to take it out of the workshop, and then has to be taken up a driveway with a 26% slope. In this situation you soon start to feel a bit selfish whenever you are tempted to make their task harder.
Realistically, how often do you expect to perform that operation that calls for the special spanner?
About ten years ago, along with two other guys I worked weekends for 18 months getting a deceased relative's collection of antique cars into a condition where we could send them to auction. That was a project that had to be done, not a hobby, so we had to do it differently. A fair number of jobs had to be done with special tools we didn't have, so we made them, in the quickest way we could that would give a good result. In the process, a number of beautiful Stahlwille spanners were reworked with grinder and oxy-torch. It nearly made me ill, but it was a matter of getting the job done without making a career out of it. If you were going to work on those Scott Bonnar mowers for a living, I'd encourage you to buy the tools you need to make the job profitable within the limits of what people are willing to pay - and that means using high-quality special tools. Hobby jobs, though, are a sort of therapy: we do them like some other people do crossword puzzles, to keep their minds busy doing something that makes them feel better rather than worse.
