dink
Well-known member
Can someone explain British Standard for me in terms of wrenches
kartracer55 said:you mean whitworth?
dink said:Hahahaah I wouldnt buy these....unless I was restoring an old E-Type (yummy)
kartracer55 said:Now Ed, you complain about the Corvette tax? HAH!

eschoendorff said:Yes, yes I do. But then I don't ride around with a bonnet full of spare parts, either.
both my pre-war Brit cars are 1934's and 100% Whitworth, if it was not for my new cars 1953 and 1967, I would not even need metric or SAE stuffSteve_S said:To stay on topic a tiny bit, I do have some Whitworth tools but even on my old (probably not as old as mikeyr's) brit cars I rarely encounter them.
mikeyr said:OFF-Topic and kind of ON-Topic
A tid-bit of history, England before the war (WWII) was almost exclusivley BSF/Whitworth and Germany wanted to conquer England. Hitler knew that most of the machinery that he would acquire would be damaged by the Brits and he would need to repair that machinery in order to use the factories to feed his war machine. He had sets of tools made up in BSF/Whitworth so that when the invasion of Great Britain finally came, his German soldiers would have all the tools they needed to rebuild/repair the machinery and get the factories running before the U.S./Allies mounted a attack.
How do I know this ? NO and I take great care to repeat this, NO I am NOT a NAZI sympathizer but I have a full set of open-end and closed-end BSF wrenches with the NAZI ******** cast into the handles and those tools are some of the best made tools I have even owned, 60 years old and 60 years of trashing around tool boxes and they still look good, hammer on them (I have) and they take a beating without breaking. I originally got them at a car show in Europe just because they were so cheap I figured I could throw them in the car as emergency tools, they have now made it to my workbench tool drawers. The vendor at the show had hundreds of these sets that he could not give away because no one wanted that swaztika on their tools
Ok, back to the topic...
I have a 12-piece King ****![]()
Charles (in GA) said:Since we are all bragging about strange and unusual tools (aka English stuff) here is my collection of Whitworth wrenches and sockets.
The combination wrenches are Dowidat made in Germany and the remainder are Craftsman, except for one Emglish made Shelly wrench. The combination wrenches are mostly twos and threes of the same sizes. One of my co-workers said his father had used them to work on English Norton motorcycles and he had inherited them. He didn't want them and so I bought them from him. Some of what you see is rust on the tools, some of the gold look is caused by the flash. Got to get busy and clean and oil them.
I doubt I'll have to work on anything automotive that has Whitworth sizing, but I'm an aircraft mechanic and have in the past had the opprotunity to work on a P-51D Mustang, whose Packard engine is a licensed copy of the Rolls Royce Merlin, which is entirely Whitworth hardward standard.
Charles

hholmberg said:Steve S What brand of sockets are those in your picture? They look to be quality tools?
eschoendorff said:Wow!![]()
The tools, actually. I gotta admit that I haven't seen that many BSF tools in one place. I'm sure my FIL has them, I just haven't seen them in one place.Charles (in GA) said:WOW... The tools or the P-51?
The P-51 is not really fun to work on. Everything is tight and packed in a too small of a space. The engine is terrible, its an all day job to set the timing on the two magnetos, and that has to be done every 25 hours of operation, as it drifts with point wear.
Charles
