Hmmm. Interestinger and interestinger.
I was ready to tease you for being
too cute with this process of elimination game
, because it's a very well-known ratchet obviously made by New Britain, and it was just going to come down to someone guessing one of the many correct "brand" possibilities - in-house 'New Britain', 'NONE BETTER' or 'Husky' (as Jock, Z, and Cruzer offered), usually stamped on the face around the very top, or 3rd Party 'Craftsman (H)' (as Brandon offered), usually stamped on the face under the drive opening -
first.
Don's WARD's guess was instructive, though. I wasn't aware NB made it for WARD's, too.
A few years ago I ran a very successful survey of these ratchets, results linked
here, and examples appearing before it if you scroll up and page back from there. But those all have an unknown letter-letter code (e.g., J-S, T-S, etc) and a date code (e.g., "9-45", "3-46", etc) forged into the handle on either side of the "FORGED" marking.
When I read your reply to Don I started thinking to myself, 'Self, 3bay is far too sophisticated of a ratchet man to run a simple game of multiple choice. The big reveal has to be something odd, something different, something surprising, something not common knowledge, something he is going to have "fun" showing in the end.'
With that in mind, I came up with....
nothing!
Because I am truly stumped. I don't recall ever seeing this mid-40's ratchet with any other brand than those already offered. The only other way I have seen this ratchet marked is no branding with a "U.S." stamp but that, too, had the aforementioned letter-letter and mid-40's date code forged into the handle.
Backing my way into an answer from NB's list of
later 3rd party ratchet customers, on the rationale that perhaps they made a few of these for them that we didn't know about, I will throw out a completely wildass guess of...
OTC
