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Sodding thirteen millimetre spanners ?


Phil Perry

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Many friends tell me that their toolboxes seem to be bereft of 13Mil open ended spanners ( Or Crescent wrenches if you're a septic )

 

I did a tool check in the summer  ( yeh, I know, I get bored easily being a retired Gent )  It appeared that I had around a dozen . . . even though I have only owned TWO Ford products since being kicked out of OZ as an undesirable in late 1983. . . and as any decent Ford Fiddler knows,  there are lots and lots of nuts desirous of that nomenclature of Crescent Wrench. . . . NOT that I could lately be accused of climbing underneath my Fiesta 1.4 to unslacken anything. . . .

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Well there ya go. A crescent wench is an open ender. I learned something new so my day isn't wasted.

I always laboured under the belief that a crescent wrench was yankie for a slotted ring.......

 

But now that I think more about it,  a slotted ring does sound rather like a painful condition to suffer.

 

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The descriptor "crescent" doesn't apply to the design of a spanner. It comes from the name of the company that made that type of hand tool, much in the same way the "Hoover" became a word to describe domestic vacuum cleaners, as well as many other brand-related words for common items. Crescent, originally called the Crescent Tool Company, is a brand of hand tools. It is best known for its style of adjustable wrench.

 

Crestaloy.jpg

 

I have always thought that "crescent spanner" was what these are called image.thumb.jpeg.2b673a79154d422374489bd2d4efdb0b.jpeg

Of course, there's the English King Dick. King Dick was the name of a prize winning bulldog belonging to the owner of the Abingdon Engineering Company, which was rebranded as King Dick Tools in 1945 after a successful run of products named after the hound, the most famous being King Dick Spanners, of which there are still countless original models in service to this day.

 

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57 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Of course, there's the English King Dick. King Dick was the name of a prize winning bulldog belonging to the owner of the Abingdon Engineering Company, which was rebranded as King Dick Tools in 1945 after a successful run of products named after the hound, the most famous being King Dick Spanners, of which there are still countless original models in service to this day.

Is that where the saying King Dick comes from? As in "that bloke thinks he's King Dick".

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Last time I saw a set of Crescent spanners (thankfully we haven't lowered ourselves to call them 'wrenches'... Yet), the set contained a hundred Crescent spanners and only some were 'open end'. The rest were Crescent ring spanners.

 

As you said, OME, the name Crescent has been Hoovered by the americans.

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Those vintage adjustable spanners shown above are officially called screw hammers. The one shown below is a shifter and as it is shown is being used incorrectly.

The load should be applied to the adjustable pars of the spanner as near to the main body of the tool. As it is shown above the spanner should be turning clockwise.

Now I know where all my 13mm spanners have gone, but I can't remember lending them to Phil.

13mm is probably one of the most useful sizes as it fits a lot of circular saws and whipper snippers. Next is the 11mm which is just right for AN nuts, either AN3 or AN4, I forget which.

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I always find there,s one size missing !.

Some were between 17 & 22 mm.

Those spark plug sockets are 2/3 rds useless.(  Memory ) 14, 18 & 22 mm.

OK for the vintage car mechanic. But who uses 22 on an aircraft motor.

(  don' advertise old spanners, or they will disappear , ( BSA brake adjusting spanner )).

spacesailor

Edited by spacesailor
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"Get the Crescent" has always meant "find the adjustable spanner", in my neck of the woods. And the 12" one was the most common.

 

They were also nicknamed, "the nut-f***er" for the regular ability of their jaws to spread, and round off any nut.

 

In my workshop, the most common metric spanner I'm always looking for, is the 10mm ring-open ender. For most of my machinery, which is largely American origin, or simply old, a 3/4" and 9/16" ring-open ender are the most used spanners.

 

At one time, there a bloke of outstanding ability, spoken of in hushed terms. That was the bloke who could remove a gearbox from an FJ Holden using only a Crescent shifter, and a 1/2" x 9/16" ring spanner.

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I have to drill a hole down the centre of some HDPE rod to run a 10mm cold rolled steel rod through it. A 10mm drill hole is too tight. A 3/8" is too sloppy. The best result comes from using a 13/32" bit. According to the manufacturer, that will give me a 10.35 mm hole. That's 0.175 mm, or 0.008", slop all around the rod, and I can take up any slack with grease. 

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