My grandpa passed and we were cleaning out his garage, found a coffee can full of old drill bits and a bunch of them were those old black oxide ones that actually cut metal instead of just spinning and smoking. Kept the whole can for free because nobody else wanted to sort through it. Half of them still sharper than the set I paid forty bucks for at the store. Same deal as your sockets, the good stuff is hiding in the junk nobody wants to touch. I always dig through the bottom of the box now, that is where people toss the odd sizes they do not feel like dealing with. My wife thinks I am nuts for spending an hour on a five dollar pile but she stopped laughing when the drill bits saved us a trip to the hardware store.

How many times have you heard about a tile actually cracking from a whip though? I run a whip on every flue I can reach with it and have for about six years now. Put it this way, if the tile is so thin that a nylon whip takes it out, that flue was already gone and a rod brush would have finished it off the next sweep anyway. The guys saying whips are for lazy workers are mostly the same guys who take two hours to do a cleaning and charge for it. I still keep rods on the truck for the nasty tar jobs and for anything the whip can't reach, but for a standard 40 foot run that whip is just faster and the tile does not care either way. I did crack one tile once, but it was already spalled from a chimney fire years before and it fell apart if you looked at it wrong.