8 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so do the tools used to maintain them, leaving part-specific tools and many others sitting on the dusty shelf labeled "outdated."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.

To understand the gap tool, one must first grasp what a spark plug gap is and how it affects the function of the ignition system. Very basically, the plug gap is the distance between the two small electrodes on the end of a spark plug. It sounds inconsequential, but even the smallest change in distance will vary the amount of energy the ignition system and coil need to jump the spark across the gap and initiate the explosion inside the combustion chamber. If the spark is too big, you run the risk of overworking the ignition system and plugs, but too small a gap could lead to incomplete ignition of the air-fuel mixture in the cylinders, killing performance across the board.

Enter the gap tool. The vintage-type units looked much like a quarter, except the gap tool coin has a carefully measured, gradually sloped edge on the outside of the coin with corresponding measurements listed on the inner side of the tool. To measure the plug gap, you put the thinnest part of the edge between the electrodes and turn the tool until you feel resistance. The measurement corresponding to the spot where you felt resistance is your gap measurement.

Unfortunately for the gap tool, its usefulness waned as modern plugs grew more resistant to erosion or degradation through the use of precious metals, as well as hyper-accurate gaps set by manufacturers. Altogether, folks with newer cars don't need to manually measure gaps anymore because it's already perfect from the factory, or, by the time the precious metals erode, the spark plugs need replacement anyway. It is worth mentioning, though, that it can still be beneficial to use this tool to check your spark plug gaps, especially if its on an older car.

The average contemporary car has more sensors and computer-controlled systems than you could ever imagine. It's estimated that a normal modern vehicle has around 100 or more individual modules throughout the car feeding information through its engine control unit (ECU). Even better, due to 21st-century standardized on-board diagnostics, a mechanic or DIY wrencher can plug in a scanner and access all of that information in their hands. When it comes to performance tuning, the possibilities of computer control are virtually endless.

Before all of this newfangled machinery, though, engine technicians had much less to work with. Introducing the engine analyzer. These first showed up in the 1960s, and while they may look like something from the Chernobyl control room, they are quite self-explanatory machines. Essentially, the average engine analyzer is made up of a large bank of various sensors and corresponding analogue gauges that your car may not have come with from the factory. They could read data like engine rpm, battery voltage, coil dwell time, and even the ignition system's spark waveform via a CRT (cathode ray tube) screen.

In the days before more compact electronic, computer-controlled engine analyzers, these would have been handy to have around the shop for diagnostics or general engine health checkups. However, in 2026, using one of these would be like installing a camcorder on your iPhone — it just isn't necessary. Modern cars and diagnostic systems can display many times more data points, quicker and more accurately than an engine analyzer ever could. And they can do it without a kitchen cabinet-sized housing taking up space in the garage. 

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.

A well-tuned distributor ignition system is one of the most important aspects of a clean-running engine, at least for those that use this type of ignition. The only issue is managing the myriad of factors involved. A distributor combines electrical components with mechanical ones, taking input from the camshaft, rotating a rotor, opening and closing points, and sending electrical current to a spark plug that continues a complex four-step combustion process.

Tuning a distributor while installed on an engine can absolutely be done, but in decades of yore, mechanics might have preferred a more accurate and isolated method for this job through a distributor testing machine. They look somewhat like an instrument on an old boat, with a cash register-like shape that can receive a lone distributor and spin it with an electric motor in order to measure several different functions. Through this machine, mechanics could assess mechanical and vacuum advance, ignition dwell, points condition, rpm, and more, providing a full picture of the distributor's performance and how it will apply once installed on the engine.

In the introduction to this piece, we mentioned how some of these tools will fade from popular use either because the design has been drastically changed/improved, or that its application has been phased out by the industry. The distributor testing machine lands firmly in the latter category. There may be an obscure manufacturer based in some person's backyard that still produces cars with distributors, but as far as we know, every modern car now uses an electronic, coil pack ignition system with far fewer moving parts and absolutely no need for testing equipment like this.

The main difference between the older OBD-1 and newer OBD-2 systems, other than their vast gap in ability to monitor engine functions, is the difference in standardization. Before 1996, there were still production cars using early OBD (on-board diagnostics) sensors, but unlike today, the system's functions and accessibility were determined only by that car's specific manufacturer. That means your Chevrolet would likely have a completely different system and scanner than your boss's Mercedes-Benz, even if both cars were sold in the U.S. market. This meant that shops would need various kinds of equipment on hand in order to access the OBD information from a mixed population of makes and models.

Post-1996, the OBD-II system was standardized across all cars sold in the U.S. Not only did it have more advanced monitoring capabilities, but the scanning system was the same across all makes and models, making it far easier and simpler to diagnose issues across multiple manufacturers. Fast forward three decades since the OBD-II system debuted, and not only do we have at-home, relatively inexpensive OBD-II scanners that can connect to your phone, but we also have computers with methods of getting past the manufacturer-specific restrictions.

All facts considered, it's hard to imagine any shop or frequent DIY mechanic using a pre-OBD-II era scanner. Of course, older engine control unit tech can be finicky, and there may arise a situation in which a modern computer can't interact correctly with the outdated software. In that case, it's possible an old scanner could be used to ensure access to information, but with the advancements of automotive scanner technology and other programs, one can confidently say they are a thing of the past.

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.

In a distributor ignition system, the contact breakers or "points" act as a switch for the coil and assist in delivering the spark to the cylinders. The two contact points open and close intermittently for extremely short (mere milliseconds) and specific periods of time. This period of time, when the points are closed and allowing the coil to charge an ignition spark, is called "dwell angle," aka, the change in angle of the crankshaft during that period. Over time, the contact points can become eroded due to constant sparking and contact, leaving a concave bump on one side and a valley on the other.

When this happens, both ignition timing and the quality of the spark can be heavily affected, and a typical flat feeler gauge to measure the gap and calculate dwell can become inaccurate. Luckily, there was a tool for that — the dwell meter. In most cases, this tool uses two wired leads that connect to the distributor's main terminal and the other to ground. With the engine running, the device will provide a dwell angle reading, which one could then compare to the preferred reading in their car's manual.

Dwell was actually already mentioned in our distributor-testing-machine section as one of the functions of that tool, but one could assume that, back in the day, a simple dwell meter would be far cheaper and more accessible than a full testing machine. But regardless of which one cost more at the time, they both suffered the same fate. Coil pack ignition systems became the way of the future, and with far fewer distributor cars still regularly on the road, the dwell meter likely got shoved to the back of the toolbox.

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.