Thought those expensive cable testers were a rip-off, but I caved

For years I used a cheap $20 tester from Amazon and figured it did the job fine. Then last month I picked up a Fluke from a guy in St. Louis for $150, just to see what the fuss was about. Turns out my old tester missed a bad crimp on a customer's line that was causing intermittent signal drops. Anyone else get schooled by upgrading a tool they thought was fine?

4 comments

4 Comments

lily_torres311mo ago

Man I got a fluke years ago and it showed me all the mistakes I didn't know I was making...

pat_stone1mo ago

Same with cheap kitchen knives. You think you can't cut straight until you use a good one. Or cheap headphones that make everything sound muddy. Bad tools hide the truth from you.

pat7811mo ago

Noticed that too with @pat_stone's point about headphones... cheap ones mask all the little details in the music you never knew were there. Same thing with cheap wrenches - they'll round off a bolt head before you even get a good grip on it, making you think the bolt was stripped from the factory. Good tools don't just work better, they show you where the real problem is hiding instead of making you guess. Once you've used something that actually tells the truth, it's hard to pretend the cheap stuff was ever doing you any favors.

emmam891mo ago

Started noticing the same pattern with other tools too. Cheap multimeters will tell you voltage exists but not how clean it is. Same with those budget thermal imagers that just show blobs of color. Seems like we pay for the lies our cheap tools tell us, not the truth. Once you see what you've been missing, it's hard to go back.