[Oblarg]

I've tried to make a point of looking for useful tools that other teams have found - it's surprising how many things that we struggle with for which there are existing, easy solutions just waiting for you to learn about.

Some big ones:

Center drills. My god, these are invaluable. Extremely hard to drill decent pilot holes without them. They're self-deburring, too, since they have built-in countersinks.

Deburring tools. The kind with the little spinny blades on them. Huge effort-saver.

Rivnuts. Much easier than tapping in many situations.

Scribes (pref. carbide-tipped). We used to do all our marking with sharpies. Then we upgraded to masking tape + mechanical pencils. Scribes are better than both. Being able to "feel out" the mark with the tip of a center-punch is invaluable.

Transfer punches. Duplicating hole patterns is a crucial thing for a team with limited machining resources. Match-drilling whenever possible is great, but sometimes it's not possible or very difficult, and for those times transfer punches are a life-saver.