Davefr said:
I'm quite fond of the old Thorsen exposed gear ratchets.
Another member here several years ago referred to the Thorsen open-gear ratchet (model 77) as "the AK-47 of ratchets".
There was a reason the United States Armed Forces went to Wright Tool Company in the early 1990s and had them put back into production an "open-gear" type ratchet for use on vehicles in desert environments: they don't fail in service. The old Thorsen 77 was "the original" (subsequently copied by Indestro and Proto and Western Forge - branded as "Companion".)
Who did I send all the Thorsen stuff to at Christmas? Was that
@Chrome Vanadium Cody or
@BlakeTheCarGuy ?? It was a very deliberate move on my part; they are both young men and I wanted to impress upon them they didn't need to climb aboard that big white truck to get tools that would simply
do the job.
Never got any feedback from them on the tools... although I cannot remember who got what.
Did you guys try them out? Get them dirty?
We sold Thorsen beginning at some point in the mid-1980s (when Indestro was no longer able to fill more than 30% of purchase orders.)
It was a decent line until they began replacing all the traditional "Thorsen" with "TAT" (Thorsen Allied Tool) **** from Spain and Hong Kong and Taiwan and Japan (we really weren't buying from mainland China back then.)
There's a great deal of confusion and misinformation about the company. The product was almost 100% U.S. made up into the early 1980s and the product quality was at least on a par level with the Craftsman product of that era,
if not better.
When the product went to hell was after the "TAT" (Thorsen Allied Tool) imported stuff started coming in, and then "Thorsen" got the same sort of treatment as all of the other victims of the 1980s-1990s corporate merger-takeover-acquisition ****. For that matter, it may as well have been Bain Capital that was handling it - they screwed it up that badly. It should be clearly evident from the examples I've posted below that "Thorsen" got passed around like a $3-dollar *****.
The last and final iterations of "Thorsen" are laughable offerings from Taiwan and mainland China, most of which will get no more than a snide chuckle from the older members here.
It is worth noting this thread is 14 years old.
