I see these Craftsman wrenches advertised-kinda pricey and wonder if anyone has used them yet and what they think about them-thanks
My brother in law gave me the inch and metric sets for my birthday, and they are GREAT! There are many places you can't fit a regular rachet, and these slide right in.
Yes, but... I bought the metric and standard sets for work, but I went with the Gear Wrench brand available at Ace hardware. I still have the original set of metric wrenches, the standards decided they wanted to live with someone else.:af: I use them in an industrial maintenance environment and have not had any problems with them in the 5 years that I have owned tham, and they get used hard every day!! I love them.:TU: :TU: :TU: :TU:
Biggest problem I've found is that most places that I can't use a ratchet, I can't use these either. They're significantly thicker/wider then a regular combination wrench.
i currently own three different brands of these wrenches ... i have a set of Gearwrench brand (SAE) and they are very solid and function well. my only gripe is that to change direction they must be flipped over (i have had these about 3 years so they dont have the direction changin lever like some newer ones)... and hence they are built flat ... i never realized how unhandy a flat wrench might be at times ... but they are still great.:TU: one other set i have is a brand called "Westward" (METRIC) they are excellent on the box end and the ratchet part seems to work a lil better than the gearwrench ones..but the open end is made with these little ribs inside the open end ... i dont know what their plan was on this, but all it seems to do when you use the open end is make it fit sloppy. i wouldnt buy this brand again unless they were real cheap.:boring: my other set is a set of Cresent brand (SAE) that have a tilted head like a regular wrench. they have a switch to change direction. but they slip once in a while like they have weak springs inside the ratchet part... AND when you try to read the size on the wrench, you can easily be confused because there are numbers stamped at one end of the wrench that have nothing to do with wrench size ... tryin to send a kid to th toolbox for a wrench could take alot more time than usual if they read the wrong numbers. i wont buy this brand again.:moonu: thats all i know.
From my experience if you got money burning a hole in your pocket and want to spend it on tools skip ratcheting wrenches and get a set of Snap-On (my preferred choice) or Mac, standard combination wrenches. As often as not the ratchet wrench will not fit into the space available to do the job the regular wrench would. If there is enough space, you could probably have gotten a regular ratchet of some sort in there anyway. Besides when you round the bolt off with a set of Snap-on's or Mac's you can rest assured knowing that anything short of a "heat wrench" (that's spelled t-o-r-c-h ) would have rounded the bugger off. It took me about 6 months as a co-op at the dealership to round a bolt off with a regular craftsman wrench and learn my lesson. The old guy told me to try the bolt again with his Snappy's and out it came. regards
another cool thing that gearwrench makes is these little things that fit in your gearwrench like and nut but they have a thumb wheel and a lil nub that turns them into a 1/4, 3/8, or 1/2 inch ratchet .... makes for the slimmest of ratchets.. works very nice.
