Are MAC Tools Any Good? What To Consider Before Buying

It was a quainter time, gauzy and film-grained in our memories (or, more likely, the memories of our parents or grandparents). A busy day was made a little more manageable by the arrival of the milkman, the cloth diaper delivery, and the Charles Chips truck. The Mac Tools truck would deliver that ball peen hammer you've been waiting for. All those products were pretty good (or at least came in a reusable tin), and Mac Tools certainly built up a high-quality reputation over the years. On the other hand, having your own personal potato chip or tool sales rep can be expensive.

To be sure, tool companies that deliver their tools by truck are more expensive than their big-box-store competition, and companies like Mac rely on the quality of their tools to justify those prices. To some extent, the trucks have become gimmicks; you can get their products online, after all. But in the landscape of high-quality tool truck brands (these days, that mostly means Mac, Snap-On, and Matco), Mac stacks up pretty well in terms of price. Some products are priced similarly across these brands, and others vary. Generally, as we found in our roundup of eight hammer types and when to use them, Snap-On is pricey. When we compared all the 10mm 12-point combination wrenches they offer, Mac was consistently more affordable than Matco and Snap-On (on average, 69% of the price of Snap-Ons).

While Snap-On seems to enjoy a slightly better reputation (beating out Mac in the Pro Tool Reviews fan voting for best mechanics' tools, for example), Mac products usually fare pretty well when put to objective tests against Snap-On and Matco. When Project Farm and the Torque Test Channel put the aforementioned combination wrenches to the test, Mac won the day. Todd Osgood of Project Farm found Mac the best of 21 brands tested, and TTC went further, saying that with their new R.B.R.T. wrenches, "MAC Made a New Wrench Outperform 100+ Years of Snap-On, Facom, Wera & More." The R.B.R.T. wrench earned 10.66 out of 10 (you read that right) against 45 of the best wrenches made today for being exceptionally precise and strong, while not rounding off fasteners.

Of course, things aren't always so glowing. In another test, a Max ratchet outperformed Snap-On consistently, except in the one test that matters most: the failure load test — in which Max handled a 15% smaller maximum load than Snap-On. Tests of flex-head ratchets found Snap-On the second best and Mac the second worst. When TTC tested tool truck pneumatic impact wrenches, Mac just edged out the competition by virtue of scoring the highest ft-lbs/inch score ever in TTC's testing. Mac got TTC's second-highest recommendation in the category. So, again: not perfect, but Mac appears to have earned its reputation.

Techshop's Andrew Markel says that tool trucks give professionals a resource that predictably delivers quality, service, and integrity. That perception might be more myth than fact at this point. While tool tests don't typically include long-term stress testing, all seem to find tool-truck tools are consistently being outperformed by brands like Milwaukee. It's not difficult to find legitimate complaints about Mac service– which is usually experienced via the franchise rep on the truck. Integrity is a subjective mishmash of all the available information and more, and you can't break loose a rusted-on bolt with any amount of it. It's better to evaluate more concrete matters.

On those concrete, quantifiable matters, Mac seems to fare very well. In most of the tests we reviewed, Mac handily outperformed Snap-On in most categories — while usually being cheaper. They often compete with non-truck tools in terms of quality, though not generally in price. Tool trucks are a very old-school way of doing business that some are, predictably, beginning to question. In the Internet age, waiting weeks for a product (that you might need immediately) simply doesn't make a lot of sense. No list of tools every homeowner should have includes a bunch of tool truck tools because the professional quality and concomitant high prices aren't necessary. But if you do buy from a tool truck, you'll indeed save money and get quality tools by going with Mac.