The Cage Nut Tool Edition

Noah here. Just over two years ago, I moved out of Brooklyn and bought a house in the suburbs. The transition has been smooth, and I’m enjoying this new chapter in my life. Of course, like any city transplant, I didn’t have a particularly substantial set of tools. Life in an apartment is generally fine with just a screwdriver, some hex keys, and maybe a drill if you’re feeling particularly handy. For anything bigger, you can usually call the super or a handyman.

But I’m no longer a renter, and so I’ve been slowly building up my toolbox (which is now a tool bench). My general approach has been to take my time and buy things as I need them. When I do that, I try to buy something from a quality brand that will last me a while/forever. I’ve been particularly enjoying buying German tools, ever since someone on WITI Contributor’s Slack introduced me to KC Tool.

Why is this interesting?

There is an obvious satisfaction to holding a quality tool, and having the right tool for the job is an old enough cliche that it’s just that… a cliche.

But once in a while—and so far this has mainly come in the form of networking equipment—there’s some very niche tool I buy for something that genuinely makes me smile. It goes past being just “the right tool for the job,” and into some new category of satisfaction. Most recently, it was this strange little contraption for installing “cage nuts”—the little nuts you install into a server rack to secure your equipment.

This strange contraption markets itself as the “World’s Best Cage Nut Tool,” and you know what? I think it’s true. It takes the incredibly annoying task of having to squeeze a cage nut and handles the whole thing with some real flair (look at that thing!). You place the cage nut onto that little metal part on the end and squeeze the blue handles to secure it, and then position it right into the server rack and let go. It’s definitely not the most useful tool in the world (in the grand scheme of things I am not installing a lot of rack nuts, and doing so is not that difficult), but the fact that someone built this thing for people that are likely installing many more of these things in a week than I will in a lifetime makes me happy.

The cage nut tool now sits pride of place on my toolbench (next to this Klein radial ethernet stripper, which is also perfect). I'll probably use it less than 50 times in my entire life, but every time I see it, I'm reminded that somewhere out there, someone looked at the annoying task of installing cage nuts and thought, “I can fix this.” And then they did. They built this ridiculous, specific, perfect thing.