Most common DIY or hobby jobs can be handled with familiar hand tools and power tools. Often, you can confidently walk into a hardware store and get whatever tools and materials you need without breaking the bank or your arm. Then again, hardware store shelves also have tools that are expensive, specialized, and ultra-powerful.

If you’re a beginner or you’re shopping for a budding tool aficionado in your life, you can probably avoid the tools on this list. It’s not that they aren’t good. In fact, in many cases, it’s that they’re too good, too complex, or too powerful. Except for a few specialized people with specific use cases, most of us just don’t need these tools.

As tempting as these high-end tools might be with their impressive specifications, it’s usually a good idea to stick with tools that match your skill level and needs. There’s also no reason to overspend on a tool that’s more powerful or higher quality when a simpler or more affordable version will do the job.

If you’ve ever assembled a piece of furniture from a big box store (instead of hiring someone from TaskRabbit to do it for you), you probably have at least some experience lining up metal support pieces and bolting them together. Threaded holes are typically drilled in the appropriate places in advance; that’s not usually something the consumer has to worry about. Which is why the Baileigh industrial variable speed air drill, otherwise known as the Baileigh ATM-27-1000 pneumatic tapping arm, probably isn’t necessary for most of us.

It’s an articulating tool with a pneumatic spindle on the end. It spins at 220 RPM to create threaded holes in a variety of sizes (1/4″, 3/8″, 1/2″, 5/8″, 3/4″, and 7/8″). It’s the sort of machine that might be used in a factory to create the holes for screws, bolts, and other threaded hardware. It’s useful in automotive spaces or for machining jobs; it’s not the kind of thing a beginner even needs to think about. It’s a professional-level contraption with a price tag to match. If you’re pursuing a machining hobby or career, you might work with something like this eventually, but you have to walk before you can run.

If you’ve ever been staring at a textured ceiling and wondered how people turn plain drywall into a topographical map of peaks and valleys, here’s your answer. More accurately, here’s one answer. The Marshalltown DuoFlex drywall texture sprayer uses air pressure to spray texture material onto a drywall surface quickly and efficiently.

It features a two-gallon tank capacity and a 1000-hour pump life. It also has a 50-foot air hose and two air outlets, one for air tools and one for attaching either the Quickshooter or Sharpshooter 2.1 hopper guns. The sprayer delivers pressurized air at a minimum of 8.3 cubic feet per minute at 40 psi or 6.1 cubic feet per minute at 90 psi.

It can be an effective way to hide imperfections in drywall installations, but it’s a heavy-duty tool with a heavy-duty price tag, just shy of $1000. If you’re planning some renovations and want to texture your ceilings, there are other, more affordable (if a little slower) ways to get the job done without investing in a big piece of machinery.

Air impact wrenches are powered socket wrenches that create a lot of torque to fasten or unfasten hardware quickly and with relative ease. The Sunex Tools 2,000 foot-pound air impact wrench delivers 3,200 foot-pounds of initial torque and 2,000 foot-pounds of working torque.

The magnesium alloy housing improves heat dissipation and resists impact damage and corrosion. It also reduces the tool’s overall weight to just 2.3 pounds, reducing fatigue during use, while still having plenty of punch. It moves roughly 7.5 cubic feet of air per minute at 90 psi, turning the wrench at 5,000 RPM.

Using one of these for your at-home needs is sort of like hammering a nail by dropping a boulder on it. It will do the job but it’s way more power than you probably need, and too much power can be about as bad as too little power. The Sunex Tools air impact wrench is the sort of tool you might need if you work in a machine shop, an automotive shop, or on a pit crew, but it’s probably overkill for the average beginner.

Certain materials, like concrete and steel, may seem impervious. The MAX 5/8-inch pneumatic concrete nailer proves that it isn’t true. It delivers up to 500 psi to drive fasteners, pinning wood or drywall to concrete or steel beams.

It’s a professional-grade pneumatic tool driven by MAX’s 500 psi high-pressure system. At just 6.4 pounds, it’s a heavy-duty tool, but it isn’t heavy. It packs enough punch to drive a variety of 1-inch to 2.5-inch fasteners, and a large capacity magazine can hold up to 50 pins at a time, so you can get a decent amount of work done without reloading.

The MAX 5/8-inch pneumatic concrete and steel nailer is the sort of power tool you’d expect Superman to have, not your inexperienced neighbor. Unless you’ve been properly trained or vouched for by the Justice League, leave punching holes in concrete and metal to the professionals.

Drywall can be deceptively complicated to work with. If you’re putting up or patching a wall, it’s usually pretty straightforward. You put the drywall into position, fasten it in place with drywall screws, patch, paint, and you’re off to the races. Even if you’re using full-sized drywall panels, you can depend on the floor to support the material while you work. Putting up or patching a ceiling can be more difficult, what with gravity working against you. That’s where a drywall panel lifter can come in handy.

The Marshalltown steel drywall panel lifter can hold an entire panel of drywall over your head, so your hands are free for fastening panels in place. It has a load capacity of 150 pounds, can accommodate panels as large as 4 feet by 16 feet, and raise them as high as 14.5 feet using a manual chain-driven winch.

A drywall panel lifter can be useful if you’re building a house or finishing a basement, but the average person will almost certainly not need one. And if you do, there are more affordable and accessible drywall lifters on the market, many of which can be found at Lowe’s alongside this one.

The NWi 14-inch vial line/surface level, also known as the NWI NTS03 two-second reflectorless total station, is an impressive piece of measuring equipment. It has a reflectorless measurement range of up to 300 meters (984 feet) and can measure up to 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) with a single prism.

It can achieve up to 30X magnification and has internal memory as well as space for expanded storage with an SD card. It comes with two battery packs, a battery charger, a flash drive, a rain cover, and a hard-shell carrying case. The station’s brain can even detect and correct for meteorological or atmospheric refraction and the curvature of the planet.

It’s the kind of tool used by civil engineers and land surveyors when they need to get accurate topographical maps of a large area. If you’re just trying to measure something inside or around your house, you can probably get away with an everyday tape measure or a simpler digital measuring tool like a Milwaukee laser distance meter.

A torque screwdriver can take some of the effort out of hand-driving fasteners. They’re sort of a midpoint between an ordinary screwdriver and a powered screwdriver. More importantly, they let you control the amount of torque you deliver to a fastener so you can keep things right in the Goldilocks zone, not too loose and not too tight.

The URREA multi-bit torque screwdriver accepts various bits to drive a wide variety of fasteners. You can adjust the amount of torque between 1.5 and 15 inch-pounds based on the materials you’re working with. A torque-limiting clutch disengages once the desired torque is reached, allowing you to tighten things enough to hold them in place, but not so much that you damage the fastener or other materials.

It’s an objectively high-quality screwdriver, but it’s nearly $200, and the average person can get all the functionality they need out of a different driver for a fraction of the cost. Unless you’re about to undertake sensitive work with specific tolerances, this driver is doing way more than you need it to do.

Hand trucks are a useful way of moving heavy loads around with relative ease. While a hand truck can be as simple as an ordinary dolly, the Makinex powered hand truck is much more complicated and powerful, with a $5,000 price tag to match.

It’s a powered hand truck capable of carrying up to 309 pounds at a time. It runs on an 18V lithium battery and can lift roughly 50 loads before the battery dies, giving it approximately 15,000 pounds of carrying capacity on a single charge. It also allows users to lift loads between 1 and 6 feet without the risk of muscle strain or back injury.

Users can expand the hand truck’s functionality with optional attachments like a forklift attachment for loading and moving small pallets or a sucker attachment for moving sheets of glass. It’s a tool that would be at home in a warehouse or factory. It’s useful under the right circumstances, but it’s closer to a forklift than an ordinary hand truck. Unless you have some unusual and high-capacity needs, you can probably get away with the same kind of dolly your granddad used.

A good ladder dramatically extends your reach, lifting you tens of feet off the ground, and keeps you relatively safe while you’re at it. The Werner D500-2 48-foot aluminum ladder has a 300-pound load capacity and gives you the ability to climb nearly 50 feet off the ground.

That’s probably way more ladder than the average beginner needs. In fact, it’s more than enough ladder to really get yourself into trouble. Fall injuries and deaths are among the most common workplace accidents, and fall protection is recommended when working at heights as low as 4 feet. You definitely shouldn’t use this ladder without the appropriate protection and a buddy or two for support. Unless you know what you’re doing and you really need a ladder this large, put it back and pick something more reasonable. Your bones and insurance premiums will thank you.

Who doesn’t want the power to slice through metal? A copper tube cutter gives you the ability to, you guessed it, cut through copper tubes and pipes. The Rothenberger two-inch corded copper tube cutter is a hulking beast, weighing in at 106 pounds with two sets of ferocious pipe-cutting jaws.

It’s capable of cutting through copper pipes between 0.5 inches and 0.75 inches, as well as pipes between 1 and 2 inches in diameter. It’s the sort of tool that might be useful if you work in construction and need to lay out plumbing infrastructure, but you probably won’t have much use for it in your home or DIY workshop.

The copper pipes in your walls can be cut with tiny handheld pipe cutters. You can probably handle most basic plumbing jobs with a simpler handheld copper pipe cutter and a few other basic plumbing tools.

A stationary grinder can be used for a wide variety of finishing tasks like creating beveled edges or shaping metals, removing burs and rough edges from metal work, sharpening metal blades, and more.

If you were to add the Grizzly six-inch stationary grinder to your home workshop, it will almost certainly be the big boy on the block, spinning up to 3,450 RPM to deliver a smooth finish to hardened materials.

It uses 60-grit aluminum oxide on a pair of grinding wheels. The internal wheel measures 0.75 inches by 0.75 inches, while the larger external wheel is 0.75 inches wide and 6 inches in diameter. Together, they grind the internal and external surfaces of materials connected to the grinder’s lathe. It’s a superpowered finishing machine designed to deliver high-quality results, but it probably has more bite than the average beginner needs. There are shelves filled with other, more accessible grinders, which can probably handle whatever job most beginners throw at them.

A router table can be used for a wide variety of tasks, from cutting and shaping wood to carving out panel doors, milling molding, and cutting parts from wood or plastic materials. The Axion 15-amp variable speed adjustable MDF router table lets you cut or carve materials accurately and consistently every time.

They can be particularly useful if you need to make a whole bunch of the same identical objects. This one has a 61-inch by 61-inch cutting area and a welded steel frame to reduce unwanted movement. A router table like this one can simplify complex jobs, but it probably belongs more in a professional workshop, not a beginner’s garage. This is the sort of tool a person might rent or use at a maker space, not one you should buy. Besides, most of us would have to break into our piggy banks or take out a loan to cover the $22,000 price tag.

Soldering is a popular hobby among makers and tech enthusiasts of all skill levels. If you’re used to working with wood (a common entry point for many DIY and hobbyists), then soldering opens up a whole new world of metalworking and engineering.

The King County tools 1 soldering iron, also known as the PipeMaster, is intended for plumbers and designed to simplify soldering pipe fittings and joints. It delivers 115 volts of flameless heat and rapidly reaches temperatures of 950 degrees Fahrenheit. It comes with various jaw heads designed for use with differently sized pipes, between 8 millimeters (0.3 inches) and 22 millimeters (0.86 inches).

With pre-soldered pipe joints, all you have to do is clamp the jaws over the pipe, turn on the heat, and you’ll have a sealed joint in about 10 seconds. However, if you’re a beginner at soldering and not planning a career in plumbing, there are much more approachable soldering irons, both in terms of budget and functionality.