3 Old School Automotive Tools That Even Experienced Car People Might Not Recognize

Younger folks have their fair share of benefits for having been born later in our human existence. We have the internet, work-from-home jobs, and convenient meal delivery services. And yes, people of older generations might have been luckier in other areas, but when it comes to the automotive conversation, there is one thing for certain you can't take away from them — working on their cars was undoubtedly different back then. Why? because of the tools they had.

In an older car, more miscellaneous components had to be checked by hand when compared to today's cars — aka, a bunch of old car problems we're glad don't exist today. This led to the wide use of specific, yet fairly rudimentary tools we would almost never use now. And the more advanced machines they did have all those decades ago generally provided lower quality information (and less of it) than even the hand-held digital tools you can rent or purchase in 2026 for less money.

But, arguably, the most consequential determinant of the continuous change in tools is the cars themselves. As the automotive industry advances in design and development, so do the tools used to maintain them, leaving part-specific tools and many others sitting on the dusty shelf labeled "outdated." The items you'll see in this piece represent this exact phenomenon. However, we want to get one thing straight beforehand — we are not saying that no one uses these tools, but rather that your average modern automotive repair business or private individual shop/garage may not have these. And if they do, most of these tools likely won't be used frequently, either because their design has been improved or their original applications have been phased out of use in modern cars.

The phrase "drum brake" should have already made it clear that this tool is outdated. In a drum brake assembly, there is usually an adjuster located inside the housing that can change the idle position of the brake shoes (the pieces that are forced outward toward the sides of the drum in order to create friction and slow down the vehicle). Some drum brakes had an automatic adjustment for brake wear over time, but as brakes get older, friction causes the material to degrade and become slightly smaller, which can drastically change brake pedal effort and performance.

One may want to adjust the shoes for multiple reasons, whether that be dialing in a new set of shoes or compensating for wear on existing ones. In any case, this typically entailed adjusting the stationary position of these shoes to be closer to the inside face of the drum to improve brake feel. To properly adjust these components back in the day, you'd need a drum brake spoon, which latches onto the star wheel on the adjuster and moves the idle position of the shoes depending on which direction you turn the star wheel.

Obviously, most modern cars stopped using drum brakes decades ago. The enclosed, heat-trapping design was a big contributor to how brake fade happens, while its counterpart, the disc brake, has several benefits over the old drum, including better heat dissipation, wider performance applications, and improved adaptability to different weather conditions. As a result, the brake spoon largely lost its mainstream purpose in life. However, some modern cars still utilize the old ways. Even the Audi Q4 E-Tron uses drum brakes (at the rear), as they are cheaper to manufacture and can work well with EV applications.

In most 1960s-era passenger car applications, for example, you'd only find leaf springs on the rear axle, though many heavy-duty trucks and off-road vehicles also used them on the front. Made up of anywhere from one to multiple long "leaves" of arched steel, these components would typically lie longitudinally in parallel with each other underneath the vehicle, attached to the rear axle with mounting points on the frame.

The leaf spreader comes in when it's time to remove the leaf spring. In the average case, the tool is a solid threaded rod (or a pair of them), with an extended portion that rides on the main nut, moving as the heavy-duty nut is rotated. By placing the tool between the leaf spring's shackles and expanding the rod by threading the nut, the inward tension of the spring is released from the shackles, allowing for an easier removal or maintenance process.

Some say you don't need a tool for this if you can compress the spring with a well-executed rear-axle jacking, but we can't confirm or deny if these claims are true or not for specific vehicles, and, in general, a specialty tool dedicated to your particular task is nice to have around. However, most people don't need them anymore. Some trucks still use leaf springs, but the vast majority of modern cars have switched to coil-spring, independent suspension systems that are far more compact and easier to tune and maintain, leaving the spring spreader either in the past or buried in your 80-year-old neighbor's garage.

Before tire-changing machines did all the work for us, mechanics would have to remove tires from wheels manually. One of the first steps in this process was breaking the bead and loosening the rubber from the wheel. It sounds about as easy as deflating the tire and prying the rubber right off, but if you care about your rims and don't want to damage them, it becomes far more tedious. In order to do this, they used a tire spoon — a pry bar of sorts that varies in length and has a spooned and rounded edge on one side. Another name for this tool is the more common "tire iron," but that definition can also describe the lug wrench under your trunk carpet, so tire spoon it is.

In the tire-changing process, a mechanic would use the tool to slowly work around the edge of the wheel, carefully breaking the bead with the spoon edge of the tool on both sides of the tire. The process also may include a second tire spoon, used to separate the bead in larger sections between the two irons.

As far as automotive purposes go, the tire spoon has certainly lost popularity over the years (the motorcycle community still uses these from time to time, and some shops still use them in conjunction with modern tire machines). As mentioned earlier, serious at-home mechanics and professional shops have access to automatic tire machines that can break beads accurately with no damage to the wheel. But the tire spoon is one of the only tools featured here that do have other practical uses. Anyone who works on older cars, or cars in general, knows a nice thick and sturdy pry bar is a must have.