If you aren't going to be wrenching every day, then most of the cheaper brands of tools will work just fine.

My brother and I started with Craftsman when we started working on our own cars, but we started upgrading to Snap-On when we started wrenching professionally, especially when needing more specialized automotive tools.

When we started buying from a Snap-On truck, we were lucky enough to have a dealer that would sell on time without a credit account mostly because he would come by every week to collect. He would give $500.00 worth of credit and back then that was enough to buy several sets of wrenches or sockets.

My only suggestion when buying sets of wrenches and sockets is to check for and to fill in any missing sizes. It used to be normal not to get odd sizes like 7mm, 9mm,16mm and 18mm in the sets being sold by all brands including Snap-on, so to have a full set you might have to buy some individual wrenches and sockets. And don't think you won't need them as them m!@#%r f^&*()g engineers just love making life difficult.

I remember having a hard time finding a 16mm or an 18mm flare wrenches or crows feet back in the 1980's and 1 or the other were needed for working on 122 or 1800 to replace the stock clutch hydraulic hoses.

And I remember being pissed off at GM when I had to remove some bellhousing bolts for 1 of their early V6 engines and I needed a 16mm flex socket that didn't come in my Snap-On set I had purchased a few months earlier.

The funny thing is the bolt was not actually metric, but was GMs cheat for the metric mandate which was to put metric heads on bolts with either UNC or UNF(American standard) threads. I was pissed at GM because they could have used the way more common 15mm or 17mm head, but nooooooooooooooo, it had to be an oddball 16mm.
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Eric
Hi Performance Automotive Service (formerly OVO or Old Volvos Only)
Torrance, CA 90502