Myford Super 7 spanner sizes

Thanks for all your help - I have the info I needed now.

Stephen S.

SillyOldDuffer,

You promulgate this idea of poor British manufacture so often - and at great length - at every possible occasion.

I frankly find your assessment as insulting to the quality of the products made in Britain around the 1950-70 period.

Yes, home manufacturing has greatly declined, but not because of low quality generally. Too good was more like it. Too many cheap imports ‘just’ about coped with light work and not much more. I have ‘spiralled’ 1/2” drive extensions on more than one occasion, destroyed many sockets over the years and even bent breaker bars (without a scaffold pipe extension).

People bought cheap, not high quality. I bought my Britool socket set second-hand from a farm auction some 30 years ago and they have not suffered any of the faults reported above. 25 years ago I would not dream of buying another tool by rolson, as experience had told me they were ‘use once’ jobbies for light duty users only. They were rubbish. Likely improved greatly now, but there is still a lot of ‘cheap tat’ on the market.

Much imported steel was used for making cars which rotted away. Bought for cheapness. The engines used to fall out of alfa romeos, did they not? Fiats rusted away quite quickly? The british car industry needed to follow the trends (because they were using out-dated methods of car building and not investing in a future).

My father had a smaller set of sockets than my much larger (but incomplete) set. I still use some of those for filling the spaces in my set. Made in GB, as well. My later 3/4” socket set, made in Japan, has stood the test of time, but I don’t stress those as much as the 1/2” sets.

I’m like, and agree with, Hopper - better to source sockets and spanners at car boot sales where one can be selective on the make. I only select britool sockets from the collections. And I do know that Britool is no longer made in Britain.

I still have the set of ring spanners I bought in the 1960s for maintaining my Honda motorcycles - even though they are spread around my toolboxes these days. A lot of my tools have been used to their usual limit (and likely a bit in excess) in the past and all the good ones have proven their worth. Mostly those made in the UK a long time ago.

I am sorry but in my personal opinion, while once the brand guaranteed the quality, nowadays with famous names being applied to cheap foreign produced tools, genuine brands producing cheaper tools just to remain competitive and outright fakes, this may not always be true.

Tomorrow is my birthday and yesterday I received my first Bus Pass. So I don't need to pay for tools that would need to last through a career in engineering from apprentice onwards - I need to buy tools and equipment that will do the job for an amateur engineer working in his garage for as long as I want them to do. Provided they are accurate for my needs and last long enough I am happy buying imported tools.

Nick,

Exactly!! The old good named tools are often much more than just adequate - they will last a lifetime. Mine, and Hopper’s, point is that those good reliable items are now quite readily available at flea markets and boot sales - at knock-down prices.

A good tin box devoid of most sockets might fetch a pound or two at one auction site I attend occasionally. Good quality sockets might be 20-40p each at flea markets and car boot sales. Sometimes less.

It does not take so long to collect together a good socket set for little more than a poor quality set in a flimsy plastic case.

I have been drawing my OAP for some years now, but I started collecting together tools a long time ago and, at times, have depended on them to work in tough conditions. I rarely need a new hand tool these days.

Also, ‘cheap-make’ used sockets and spanners are cheaper than chips. That includes some imported tools as not all imports are cheap trash. Second use or recycling is a perfectly legitimate way of sourcing tools.

Edited to add: Have a good birthday tomorrow.

Edited By not done it yet on 10/04/2021 15:54:27

I wasn't speaking as a Model Engineer but as a time-served tradesman who used handtools day in day out for decades to make a living.

The Chinese make excellent steel today. But they choose not to use it to make their cheap spanners as a matter of cost saving.

Edited By Hopper on 10/04/2021 16:00:42

In 1977 I was looking for a 3/8 drive socket set and called in to Sarjents tools in Reading, the Britool set that took my fancy was £130 so I left empty handed, an inflation calculator tells me that would be £813 today. At the other end of the scale a chap in the welders shack on the Morris Marina production floor had a sideline selling cheap tools, a Kamasa set of 1/4 and 3/8 drive sockets became mine for £27 while I considered what to do about a decent set. The Kamasa set did a hell of a lot of work without wearing or breaking and it was many years before I upgraded, Snap-On would not lose any sleep over the ratchet quality, the ratchets didn’t fail but the feel is crap. I think I spent the £103 saved on records beer and gigs and keeping a T150V Trident on the road, thinking about it the Trident consumed a hell of a lot more than £103, the path to Norman Hyde’s spares emporium was a well worn one and the bike still wears a Hyde 3-1, 850cc big bore kit, sintered iron clutch, high strength con rods and lots of other bits. Norman assured me the 3-1 was not noisy but that seems to be at odds with everyone else’s opinion, my mates would not follow me due to the noise and my sister said she could hear my bike howling down the Oxford ring road and all the way through the village. Unfortunately it also attracted the attention of the plod which led to me losing my licence twice for totting up, The Honda VF750F was much faster and very quiet with stock pipes and I never got stopped once, so much as I love the howl of noisy exhaust I concluded long ago that noise is more of a threat to your licence than speed. That’s a bit of a digression from spanners.

Mike

Just reading the continuing debate of British Engineering in the 50's and 60's. Just an observation that often the excellence or lack of it can be laid at the way companies were managed. Engineers in the UK have rarely had too much control over how a company was run. Take BMC as an example of th emerger of two very succesfull motor manufacturors and the upshot was that BMC largely continued the lines of Morris and Austin motors successfully competing with themselves by producing largely similar models in each class of car entailing much higher overheads. This was money that could usefully have be spent in development and retooling. Not bad engineering just bad organisation.

regards Martin