My wife says every family has this drawer. I do not believe every family has this drawer. Do you have this drawer? Do you know a good solution to this drawer?
We have a silverware drawer, organized, maxed out. A sharps drawer, organized, maxed out. Ziplocs, organized, maxed out. Bbq tools and oven mitts, organized, maxed out. But all this shit has no particular category so fuck me right. I gotta have an awkward necessary crap drawer. Maybe I should post all my drawers and crowdsource me some sense into my kitchen.
The average person has fuck-all experience with power tools, they don’t use them every day. They can pull the trigger and it goes brrrrrrr but they don’t know what the options on the rotation piece are, they don’t know about different types of chuck, they don’t know which gear setting to put their drill in. They use it for the absolute minimum amount of time possible and then put it away. You’re clearly a professional if you’re using them every day, most people are not.
I don’t know whether the 7 minute claim is true or not, but the idea that most drills barely get used and spend most of their time sitting about is not very difficult to believe. I’m quite a handy person, and even my drill spends most of it’s time doing nothing because I’m not drilling every single day, just as and when DIY jobs come up.
In a world drowning in ewaste, and lithium being a precious resource, why are we collectively wasting so much on individual drills when, as JubilantJaguar said, we could own these things communally and not create so much waste.
The idea of a communal toolshed for your street, block, tenement, whatever, isn’t the same as having tools sitting at work. Work for most people is a commute away. Communal toolsheds would be local. They ideally shouldn’t be any more than 10 mins walk away. Can you really begrudge a 10 minute walk for the sake of your wallet, environment, and community?
This also helps the young get into DIY easier. Most of my mates growing up barely did any DIY or tinkering, not because they weren’t interested, but because the cost of getting the necessary tools was prohibitive as a teenager. It’s taken me years to accumulate the toolbox I have now, and many of the items in there are hand-me-downs or second-hand. A communally owned toolshed gives everyone instant access to tools regardless of personal wealth or resources. If a power tool dies, £150 spread between multiple households is nothing compared to £150 for an individual household.
Managing it, caring for the tools, ensuring they’re returned, and in a good state, are obviously hurdles to be addressed, but if communal toolsheds were the cultural norm then they could easily be overcome. We manage to do it with books easily enough, why not anything else?