Inexpensive Wrenches

Well, since it costs no more to get things right:

I believe ~1848 is the correct time frame for the standardization. US dates from either 1776 or 1789, depending on your desire.

Whitworth is the only thread standard that makes sense, everything else that came after it was a retrograde step.

Well, I found a couple of cheap wrenches. I was on eBay and saw a couple of jumbos. One is a 1-1/2, 1-3/8" open end, and the other is a

So now the arbor nut is off of the RAS (as well as everything else - it's fully disassembled now). The wrenches seem, well, very wrench-like. These suckers are heavy. While there's no mention of Snap-On on them at all, it looks like Snap-On uses the term Blue Point on some of their tools. IAE, if I bought them new at the price listed on the Snap-On website they'd cost me over $300!!! (Craftsman would be around $75).

I'm wondering if they were really his dad's now, what with "Paul" being etched on each of them.

JP

Whitworth was a thread form designed specifically for use in cast iron (as there was little else in use at the time). So even in the modern world, it still has a use. Under 1/2", it's the same as UNC (within a whisker). If you tap metric threads into cast iron you can often have problems with poor thread form or thread stripping (the coarse metric series is rarer than Whitworth).

Whitworth / BSF (British Standard Fine) have much the same relation as UNC / UNF. Although I maintain a full set of Whitworth tools and do still use them, the BSF kit is just there for historical reasons. I remember my Dad hauling scrap brand-new BSF tap and die sets by the ton load a few decades ago.