Three flats on a punch. I will have to try that.
My habit has always been to ‘“prick punch” the center THEN center punch to widen it then if it is important even use a third larger punch with the more obtuse angle see the three angles of punches out of the four in the photo. The short fat punch was one of my Dad’s and falls some where in between I suppose.
There’s your hemaphrodites and Starrett punches (see my photo). I have no idea where I came across those dividers. It may have been a machine shop supply in Denver, CO. That would have been over thirty years ago. An older women we all called “Mother” owned it. She was a machinist during the war (WWII).
And finally at the top of the photo is one of the things I was working on in the shop today. I need to tweak / bend stuff all the time at work and in the long past I worked in a shop that had a small “monkey wrench” I used it all the time to bend / tweak stuff. I didn’t realize until just recently how much I missed that wrench. I always try to make due by putting a crescent wrench in the what ever and sticking a screw driver or socket extension through the hole in the handle and either abusing the heck out of the crescent wrench or wishing that it worked.
Often the jaws of the crescent or channel locks (which never have the right kind of angle to it to use as a sideways bending thing but that doesn’t stop me from trying on a daily basis. Anyway the crescent wrench and channel lock arc joint pliers have jaws that are way too fat to get in where I need to work.
I warned you I am a slow learner.
Since the stock monkey wrench jaws can not get into every situation, especially the main application I have in mind for these things, and since I bought these monkey wrenches just for tweaking (never wrenching); today I pulled out the magic marker and the hacksaw and did a little surgery.
AAAAaaaahhhh
THERE that’s better. See the 90° areas I cut out. I tend to use these in pairs. One to stabilize and one to do the moving.
I think I will call them my tweakers when they are roaming in pairs and Dinosaur wrench when found solitarily. I wonder that the archeologists will make of them say, a thousand years from now.
Now at home I have all kinds of simple fork like benders that I have welded up on the spot to do certain repetitive jobs. I don’t want to take them to work though so until now I suffered in silence.
No more !
Say have any of you looked at the price of a new monkey wrench ? Asssssstounding !
I mean . . . I mmmmmeeeeeeeaaaaaan !
You would think they were made by Snap-On and came with a jewelry polish.
During the search I came across this Facom tool company. Apparently they are the Snap-On of Europe or something. To get them into the USA some how they hook the words Stanley and Proto to their name to make it Stanley-Proto-Facom
The Facom monkey wrenches seemed to nearly always be associated with air craft tools. I am still trying to picture that one. Air craft . . . monkey wrench . . . air craft . . . monkey wrench . . . hmmmmmm
YES SIR ! You said it !they made the country and helped immeasurably . . . Their main reward for working for little pay,in dark shops full of dangerous belting and open gears,and harmful chemicals,was the pride they took in their work. In welds that held when ships rammed other ships,and in engines that kept working while crossing oceans. The aircraft that brought their crews and passengers home safely over millions of collectively flown miles.
anyway there’s my post. Sorry I got all on that monkey.
PS: now that I have looked at the wrench from the perspective of a postage stamp size photo I now see that the flat horn sticking off the end serves absolutely no purpose and should be cut off.