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Not often do I get excited about buying a new tool but this one is worth telling someone about. For years I have wanted a battery powered, 1/2" drive impact wrench but they were just too expensive for me to justify the cost when it's primary duty will be removing lugnuts. But prices have been coming down I had recently looked at this impact wrench online at Lowes website and it was $119 with no battery and no charger. My local Lowes had it yesterday for $99 and they threw in a free lithium battery so I pulled the trigger and bought it. I already had a charger for my 24v battery powered Kobalt string trimmer that would work so I didn't have to buy a new charger$$$. The box says this wrench is rated at a maximum of 200 ft-lbs but they say online it is 150. I was only looking for 150 so it suits my needs. I think it might go to 200 because it can loosen and tighten the lugs on my truck that I tightened to 140 with my torque wrench with ease. It could do that on it's lowest setting. It has three settings for speed and torque. (see photo) Power isn't what I find impressive about this wrench. I haven't tried it for maximum torque yet. It is the control you have with it the I find impressive. It has three speed/torque settings but it also has a variable speed motor. You have so much control over the speed that I could remove the plastic screw-on lugnut covers from my wheels and screw them back on without over tightening them and breaking them. Apparently as you squeeze the trigger the torque is reduced with the speed. With the same low setting I can squeeze the trigger all the way down and remove lug nuts on my truck that have been tightened to 140 ft-lbs, and tighten them again to near 140 without hammering a lot. I don't think it has the power to remove a harmonic balancer bolt but I didn't expect it to. When I took this thing out of the box I thought I had been given the wrong tool. I worked for the railroad so I'm use to really big and heavy impact wrenches. It's really small considering it's power. Not much bigger than my battery powered drill. I like that because it is light and easy to use. After checking the Lowes website I found that I had received the correct wrench. After testing it for a while it seems to get the job done without straining. I guess only time will tell if it will last but with me primarily using it to remove lug nuts when rotating tires I expect it will last longer than me. ? I put a soda can in the photo to show you how small this thing is. The bottom two photos show the switch that changes the speed and the button you can push to check the battery level.

All my appointments went quickly and I was able to get home early. As it was such a beautiful day I asked myself what I could do on the Black today. What jumped out at me was the pin striping. The previous owner had the driver's door repainted or replaced, but for whatever reason never did the pinstripe on the door. So as I had some time and some gold pin stripe tape laying around I thought "Why not" and got started. I took a damp rag and wiped down the car and as it dried I got the tape and a razor blade out. I never did pinstriping before and after two tries on each end I ended up with something I thought looked pretty good, certainly better then no pin stripe at all.

Talking about battery power stuff...About four years ago I bought an EGO battery power self propelled 21" lawn mower with grass bag. It operates on a 56 volt lithium-ion rechargeable battery. Bought it at Home Depot. The thing is awesome.

I bought the Ryobi version of that. Years ago I bought a Milwaukee battery powered impact wrench, but never bought anymore Milwaukee battery tools so it was an orphan. As I had already been buying Ryobi I thought I would give their impact and driver tools a try and I too have to say I am impressed. The Milwaukee tool? Traded it off to a wood working friend of mine for some work I needed done.

Interesting video and I liked the hood bulge on the Reatta.

pbtexan , Thank you for your thoughtful post. Your kind words mean a lot to me and give me an incentive to carry on. I'm happy you find this website useful and I hope you continue to hang around. We need more people with the enthusiasm that you have.

I'm not planning to do anything soon. We are all paid up on software and hosting fees and I just finished a major update to the forum software so we should be good for a while. I was just venting my frustration with trying to keep a dying hobby alive.