The last few jobs I did had me travel a fair bit, and as part of those trips I did lots of commissioning and installation work of low voltage and standalone electrical equipment (solar/battery) without work, or the site/client providing the tools. Due to the nature of some of the places I was travelling (MEA and SEA primarily), you really couldn’t guarantee what would be available on-site. As an example, one of the sites I visited in the Middle-East only had a single (corded) power drill on site, shared by at least dozen workers! The chuck was completely munted and you had to chisel at it with a flat head and hammer to secure a drill bit.

As part of this work, I always brought with me this commissioning tool bag or “go bag”. The bag encompasses all the basic stuff I would run into in the field at my previous job and I think would cover most engineer/technician duties as well (with a slight bias to more electrical work).

I’ll provide a list of the tools at the bottom, but below is a video of me going through all of them with some data points on the reason why I’ve picked them. The video form is much more suitable to go over all my thoughts and show off the tools, and gives me an excuse to play with my camera gear and editing suite.

Tool Bag Tour Video

What’s Not Brought Along

There are a lot of luxuries that I can’t bring due to size and weight concerns. Luxury ites like ratcheting crimpers/cable cutters, wire strippers, SDS drills and whatnot simply are too bulky, or I had to simply expect that the site will have one, otherwise I will have to buy, borrow, beg, or simply have to macguyver a solution on-site.

Flyaway Kits

This is all a bit different to my aero/def work where we had gucci flyaway kits (FAK). If you’re not familiar with FAKs, they’re pretty much self-contained tool kits that had the basic equipment to complete most of expected jobs it was built out for. They’re really really nice. My experience with these tools helped dictate what I ended up getting for myself. Example FAKs are like this B1 LAME kit or this Avionics Kit. FAKs don’t have to be just for tools, it’s a catch-all term for self contained kits that are meant to be easily air-transportable and quickly deployed when needed… i.e. deployable servers count too (not the EC2 kind).

Tool List (work in progress)

Bag

• Veto TP-XL Tool Bag

Power Tools/Testers

• Milwaukee M12 Impact Driver
• Fluke 325

Drivers

• Wiha Slim Vario Multi-bit Driver (PH1, PH2, Zeno, 3, 4, 5)
• Wiha Picofinish Drivers (PH0/PH00/2.5mm)
• Wera Ratcheting Screw Driver + bits
• Wera Flathead Screw Driver
• Wera Flexible Driver
• Picquic Stubby
• Picquic Timmy Turner Mini Stubby
• Milwaukee 150mm and 300mm Locking Extensions

Bit Sets

• Nut Setter/Driver Kit
• Security Bit Kit
• Custom Impact Bit Set

Pliers/Wrenches

• Knipex Installation Pliers
• Knipex Side Cutters
• Marvel Cross Cut Pliers
• Knipex Adjustable Pliers Wrench 180/250mm
• Knipex Cobras 250mm

Knives/Cutters

• Dewalt Folding Adjustable Knife
• Black Panthers

Other

• Lufkin 5m Unilock Slim
• Stabila Pocket Pro Level
• Milwaukee Inkzall Markers
• Pica Marker
• Cabinet Keys
• Lock picking kit

I do also have a larger tool bag for when size and weight are less of a concern. I will cover this in another post. It’s pretty the same kit with additional tools/luxury items.