Best Garage Seats: Wheely Good Idea

We’ve addressed the whole Craftsman/Sears bankruptcy schmozzle in the past but it’s worth repeating. No, one can’t walk into an old-fashioned stuffy department store and pick up one of these things. Yes, the Craftsman brand still exists and it’s fine to go ahead and buy something bearing its name.

This is the most traditional of creeper seats – a simple round padded stool with a tray underneath it for tools and assorted detritus. The seat is adjustable foe height, as you’d expect, along with swiveling around a full 360 degrees (so feel free to pretend you’re a kid at a soda counter in the ’50s).

This option bubbles up to the surface of our list thanks to the brand’s presence in your author’s garage for the better part of a decade. A Torin flat creeper was deployed to fix horrible old vehicles and prepare derby cars until the base got wet and the thing split in half. A metal spine instead of a board would have helped immensely.

Here we find a seat that is square in shape, making good use of the space underneath by providing a segmented tray and keeping your tools within reach. This is a budget choice and its price point likely explains why my own Torin creeper was made of cheaper materials. However, it held its shape until I dunked the thing in a river, so I cannot complain.

Expanding the definition of ‘seat’ a bit is this rolling creeper designed to be kind on yer knees. Not every DIY repair requires sitting down like Norm on Cheers; sometimes, kneeling makes for better leverage or tool height. This unique creeper aims to give your knees a break.

Essentially a set of rolling knee pads, this little creeper features five 2-inch diameter swivel castors that apparently won’t mar the finish on your dirt floor garage’s highly polished epoxy garage working surface. A built-in tray and holder stand ready to keep your small tools and parts handy.

Despite being marketed under the Big Red brand name, this creeper seat is all black. That aberration aside, its seat takes the under-butt storage to a new level, incorporating a small toolbox instead of a simple plastic shelf.

Three drawers stand ready to accept a variety of tools that can measure over a foot in length (translation: your ratchets will fit but not your breaker bar). The whole thing is rated for 350 lbs but it isn’t immediately clear if that includes tools or just the operator alone. A trio of round holders is great for spray cans or, um, beverages.

Taking the concept of creeper seats and ratcheting it up several notches is this option from a company called Traxion. It bears a seating perch designed to look like the chairs found in racing cars instead of a simple flat surface on which to park your keester.

Here’s a bonus – the large Gear Tray spins so you can easily access tools and parts, which sure beats fumbling around for the right item (though you know the size of a socket by feel, right?). The lack of a fifth caster wheel on a round base gives your author pause in terms of stability.

This is a unique solution to a question that few people have asked. In one configuration, this item is a flat creeper that permits the user to roll themselves under a car. In the other, it deploys into a seat like everything else on this list. The trouble with items that purport to perform multiple tasks is that they tend to perform neither one overly well.

The frame is said to be made of steel, though your author wonders about those extra two casters getting in the way when this thing is folded into use as a seat instead of a lie-down unit. Similarly, the risk of pinching one’s fingers is a lot better than nil with this thing compared to a standard creeper. However, it can be folded flat for storage, so that’s a plus.

Thanks to a square steel frame and durable plastic body, the seller of this creeper seat claims users won’t feel flex or sagging when they sit and roll. It’s unclear if they’re talking about the seat or the user themselves. We suspect the former but ya never know.

They have a point, as the frame of this thing is solid on two sides, a design decision that surely makes for a more robust unit. Its wheels are made of rubber which is unique in this arena. Also contained in the seat is a pair of pull-out trays that feature molded-in cupholders.

Yeah, we know – it isn’t technically a seat. But it is a variation on the creeper theme – so in that vein, it fits. Not all of us are working on the family SUV or that shameful brodozer. Some of us need a low-profile creeper in order to wend our way underneath a race car or something road-going but sporty. In other words, there isn’t always an abundance of clearance under the car on which you are working.

That’s where low-profile creepers come in handy. They still provide almost an inch of clearance off the ground, making sure they’ll clear an air hose or scattered bit of detritus, but they also keep the user close enough to the ground that they can scootch under a Mazda MX-5 with a busted suspension.