The Tool Bag Pros Buy With Their Own Money

There's a stage every home fixer hits. The tools stop fitting in the drawer, the bucket is full, the belt digs in, and a job in the spare room takes three trips to the garage.

If you've outgrown the bucket and the belt, the next step looks obvious: one of the modular box systems with the pro branding, Milwaukee's Packout or Klein's Modbox.

A new apprentice in r/electricians was at the same crossroads with better excuses. He had a belt, a heavy backpack and a small bag an instructor had given him, and he asked the working electricians how he should carry his tools. He also admitted what most of us are thinking: he wanted "the 'pack out' type of thing", it just didn't fit in his Camry.

The answers were a lesson in how little the pros carry: a five-gallon bucket, cargo pants, a pouch with a hook on it. Then one brand name kept coming up, first in that thread and then in threads where nobody had asked about it.

I have a veto pro pack and occidental bags. I'm a Commercial JW. Veto carries everything I'll need... Having been thru many different bags and tools, I'll say go for quality always and spend the money.

u/two_knight_sofa, in r/electricians

A Commercial JW is a journeyman wireman, the fully qualified electrician on a commercial site. That's who this piece listens to: people who carry tools for a living and paid for this bag themselves.

Who's carrying these

Back in the apprentice's thread, the bag his instructor had handed down was one of the small closed ones with a handle, and he called it "really durable" with a lot of storage.

A tradesman who'd moved on to a cart said his Veto service bag holds his everyday carry "and then some". Another told him that whatever else he ended up buying, that little Veto bag would be the tools he brought in on every job.

r/BuyItForLife is a tougher room, since the whole point there is stuff that lasts. Someone posted a photo of theirs under the title "Best toolbag I ever had, has lasted me over 10 years now".

The replies added a trade the electricians couldn't: a service plumber who's used a Veto SB-LD every day for three years summed it up in one word, "Bombproof".

Then there's r/Tools, where somebody asked for everyone's take on Veto bags and a couple of hundred replies came back.

A field mechanic with twenty years of mobile repair behind him owns eight, the oldest five or six years old with no failures. Another has had one for seven years and calls it still perfect. Someone who works in a tool shop that has shipped thousands of them says the people who buy one come back for another.

A journeyman who'd carried the same bag since his apprenticeship put it more bluntly than any of them:

I see apprentices everywhere with Milwaukee bags now and I just shake my head. Most of them are on their second or third bag and I'm like this blind love for the red tool is dumb. Spend the money on a Veto bag and it will serve you well.

u/wickawild, in r/Tools

Why not a pack-out system?

The pros' objection to the box systems is about where they belong. Boxes live in a van; a bag is what walks into the house.

One electrician in the apprentice's thread had just bought Klein Modbox and was happy with it, then added that they aren't cheap and there's "no sense in buying expensive boxes unless you have the money and NEED that convenience."

A service tech in the same thread was blunter: "Don't be that guy that rolls up with pack out that weighs 100lbs."

For a home fixer that's the whole case. Your tools don't ride in a van. They go from the garage to the dripping tap to the flat-pack in the bedroom, and the thing that does that trip well is a bag you can carry in one hand, with each tool in its own pocket so you're not digging.

What owners grumble about

The praise is loud enough that the complaints are worth more. The same few come up across the threads:

• Weight. One owner in r/Tools found theirs "Too damn heavy!", gave up, and switched to CLC bags: "Not as Gucci, but so much lighter." All that organisation and toughness weighs something before a single tool goes in.
• Size creep. A service tech's advice is don't buy the XL or XXL unless you're big and fit, or "the bag is man handling you" through doorways. The smaller ones exist for a reason.
• Pockets that swallow tools. A backpack owner said the pouches "love to eat tools to the point where I need pliers to fish them out", and that it goes from tidy to chaos in half a second of rummaging. He still rated it far above the Klein backpack it replaced.
• A settling-in period. They're "a little like puzzles", as one owner put it: expect to shuffle the layout for a while before it clicks. Another found the bag "a little too solid" out of the box and said it needs breaking in.
• The handle. One otherwise happy owner hates the look of it. Taste, but noted.
• Theft. Because it holds so much and is easy to snag, a loaded one is a tempting grab. One service tech has had two stolen, each with a small fortune's worth of tools inside.

Is a Veto Pro Pac worth the money?

It's an expensive bag, and none of the owners quoted here pretends otherwise. Veto's own price list runs to a few hundred dollars, with the backpack at the top of the range.

The most useful answer came from the one commenter who seemed to be talking to people like us rather than to other tradespeople. The quality isn't in question, he wrote, but "unless you are in the trades, or otherwise using tools on a daily basis, it's kind of hard to justify the purchase". The same comment then lands on the test that matters: "If you use your tools a lot, spending a few hundred on a nice bag isn't all that crazy."

Not everyone under the ten-year post was sold, either. One reply reckoned "The older Kleins are the real star here imo."

The field mechanic with eight of them opened with "You don't NEED a veto bag" before explaining why he has eight anyway: too much money in tools to treat them badly, and customers who aren't paying his rate to watch him dig through a heap.

If your tools come out most weekends, you're on the daily-use side of that line, or near enough to it. If they come out twice a year, keep the bucket and put the money into a better drill.

Backpack or bag?

Veto makes a whole range and the threads name half of it. Two shapes matter for a home fixer.

The backpack is the Veto Pro Pac Tech Pac, and it's the one the r/Tools backpack owners were describing, both the pouches-that-eat-tools complaint and the "miles better than my old Klein" verdict. Both hands free on the stairs and the ladder is the argument for it. Weight is the argument against.

The bags with a handle are what the apprentice was given and what the plumber runs. They carry in one hand and don't have to go on your back. The plumber's SB-LD has an open tray for the hand tools you reach for most and, beside it, a closed bay Veto built for meters.

If most of your trips are from the garage to the kitchen, that's the shape to look at first, and the smaller sizes are the ones the service techs were steering people toward.

Whichever shape you pick, take the service techs' advice and buy smaller than you think you need. The whole point of a good bag is to carry less.