Wasted $200 on a fancy fish tape that just snapped week one

I bought that glow in the dark fiberglass fish tape from the supply house thinking it'd save me time on a big commercial job. Ended up snapping the tip off on the third pull through a conduit with a tight bend. Stuck with a regular steel tape now and it's never let me down. Anyone else get burned by overhyped tools that just don't hold up?

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2 Comments

simon7172mo ago

Blame the packaging and hype for that one, not the tool itself. Too many products sell you on cool features like glow in the dark instead of just being tough and reliable where it counts. The real pattern I see is people chasing flashy upgrades when the boring old stuff does the job better every time.

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the_rose2mo ago

The boring old stuff often has decades of real world testing behind it while the flashy new thing might have been designed in six months to hit a price point. Glow in the dark handles and titanium bolts look great in a store display but that stuff rarely matters when you're actually using the tool hard. Here's the thing nobody talks about either, those boring tools hold their value way better because the market is flooded with people trying to unload the gimmicky stuff after they realize it's not an upgrade. The hype cycle is designed to make you feel like your perfectly good old tool is outdated when it's really not.

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