Ouch! Be Gentle With Me!
There are two reasons something at the auto parts store didn't sell.
1. It was useless to begin with.
2. It's useless now because it's outdated.
I found an especially useless, and slightly scary, tool in the bin. It is a combination battery and tire brush. I can tell you that when you're cleaning your battery terminals you need a very stiff brush. For this purpose, the combination tire and battery brush seems like a pretty good tool. But shift your focus to your tires, and wow, is this a good idea? I've been told that you needed a pretty stiff brush to clean up whitewalls back in the day, so I can only hope this beast of a brush is a throwback to those times. Nowadays there's just no good reason to abuse your rubber sidewalls in this manner.
The point is this, don't buy a tool to do two jobs if it can't do both of them well, and a tool seldom does two totally different jobs well at all.
Comments
I agree that there are a lot of tools out there that claim to do two jobs, but do neither job well.
To go a step further, I recommend buying the best tool that you can afford, since you only suffer once with paying the high cost of the tool , but you will suffer from the shortfalls of the cheap tool every time you try to use it! Go to www.maxxeon.com and check out an example of a premium tool that does its job extremely well.
I would never use any tool that was used to clean battery terminals on anything else! You can see what the corrosion does to the terminals! Imagine what battery acid will do paint, plastic, cheap rubber, brake linings, etc, etc, etc! BTW, this past weekend, I spent a half-hour cleaning mild corrosion from my car battery terminals. The only “tools” I used were paper towels, a “goop” made of baking soda and water, and a smidgen of grease as a protective lining!