Black Friday: Valvoline Motor Oil And Recyclable Low-Quality Tools

If there ever was a combination of good and bad offers for the DIY auto enthusiast, it’s the so-called Black Friday deals.

5 Quarts of Valvoline with a Purolator Classic for $9.99 plus a $5 Valvoline coupon is pretty much the best oil deal I have seen since the G-Oil giveaways.

Impact wrenches that are made of low quality materials and old-school heavy batteries, utter garbage. Some of the manufacturers of these models should be shot on principle alone.

You can also throw in cheap wrench sets into the mix. I know they work in a pinch. But I just hate em’. Too many bad memories.

So what’s worth buying?

The only items I tend to buy on Black Friday are commodity goods. The oil change deals are a perfect fit for my line of work, and are usually the best deals of the year for that automotive line item. I used to also get brake pads, coolant, free spark plugs (as many as 32 a visit), and power inverters which tend to be pretty difficult to screw up.

As for tools, I avoid the Black Friday program altogether. I follow what I consider to be the Germanic school of gradual parts gathering. The expert tells the apprentice what he should buy, and the one learning shuts their mouth and simply buys the stuff without complaint. If you still want to time this sort of thing, Father’s Day tends to be a pretty good time to buy power tools along with the springtime sales. But when it comes to investing in work, I just listen to those who know more than me and get what they value. This Autel OBDII scanner is a great example.

Today will be one of those quiet days for personal shopping. One store, and then I will go home and observe the quiet of autumn. So I guess I should offer a two-fold question.

A) Are there any great automotive deals in your lifetime that still stick in your mind?

B) Was there ever a time in your automotive life when you just kept quiet and followed the advice of an experienced soul?

One of the great rewards of auto auction work is getting to know folks who know far more about certain things than yours truly. They live it. They repair the under-engineered engines and transmission issues, and upgrade those pesky plasticized parts whenever the bean counters are all too happy to shovel low-quality crap to their current customers.

Cheap almost always has a price, but there are a few notable exceptions. So what were yours?