By Robert Emslie
In case you happen to be working on an old British car, a pre-1968 Triumph motorcycle, or a British Railway Pullman car, these will likely come in handy.
For more information on BSW standards check out this article.
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Jeff Glucker
The spanners are Snap-On. The bolt heads will Snap-Off.
Your crazy moon language means nothing to me.
That's not so much an article as it is a mystifying table of numbers and letters.
I'm pretty sure these are the same as British Standard (stop the jokes about those initials right now). I had to buy a set of these weird-ass wrenches to pull the head and jugs on my Norton Commando, years ago. Get this: I still have them, and they were the only wrenches I had that fit the head bolts on the ill-fated Iron Duke in my Jeep CJ8. That engine was just plain stupid. The bolt sizes that my wrenches fit were stupid, too, neither fish nor fowl.
Every time I hear Whitworth, I think of pancake syrup. I wonder how much easier life would be with a set of these things?
I've got 3 MGBs (including the Killer ZomBee) that I never know if I'm gonna need a standard or metric wrench for. Even if the original part was standard, the replacement parts could be either. I've come to the conclusion that a 1/2" combination and a 2 pound hammer will fix a large percentage of problems that don't involve electrical fires.
They're real old ones too! I just went out and looked in my tool chest, and only one wrench had that same style script stamped on it. It was the very first Snap-On wrench I every owned, a 10mm long combination wrench given to me at a mountain-bike race back in the mid-80's by a fellow racer whom I had given my spare inner-tube to. It looked old then, so I'm curious Mr. Robber, any idea how old these….Er… spanners are?
With the lettering for Snap On, I want to say mid '60's for some reason.
I have a few Whitworth wrenches in the box, collecting dust. I have no clue how they got there. Something Dad must have needed back in the stone age of auto repair.
Those date back to the early '60s. I believe my father in law bought them while working as a wrench monkey at Peter Satori Imports in Pasadena, CA.
must be the same sizes as my china cheapo spanners, after three times use you only know which to use by trying to fit them.
Brings tears of Morris Minor love-hate to my eyes.
There's why I restricted myself to oil-in-frame Bonnies and BSAs.
Never use a ring spanner (or similar) on one jaw of an open ended spanner as a makeshift 'extender'. It is very likely to slip (leading to injury or damage) and can also damage the open jaw, leading to more problems and expense later on.
I have certainly broken this rule. Sometimes you just don't have room for a pipe or the angle is just right to use another wrench as an extender.
That's about as bad as American cars from the mid-1970s to the 1990s. Usually a mix of standard and metric with no rhyme or reason. I remember back from my days with Rayloc/NAPA that GM had one brake caliper with two different part numbers. The only difference was that one had a standard bleeder screw, the other was metric.
It can sound that anyone is into this specific stuff lately. Don’t really fully grasp it though, but yet thanks for looking to explain it.