I grew up my first socket sets were Craftsman and had those Tri-Wing ratchets in them and they were what I became accustomed to using. I loved the thumbwheel on the back and used it all the time and it was hard for me to get very used to using any other kind of ratchet.
That said, they were/are pretty well hated on here at GJ and elsewhere because they were made for Craftsman by Stanley in Taiwan at a time when almost everything Craftsman was still 'made in USA'. IIRC there were claims that some of them were even incorrectly stamped USA though none I've ever seen have had that. I still like the design, except AFAIK there never were rebuild kits made available for them like there were for almost every other craftsman ratchet.
Anywho, I still have a handful of them hanging around my toolboxes. They still are WAAAAAY better ratchets than those Craftsman industrial tri-wings (w/o the thumbwheel) hiding in the back of the drawer there. Those are easily the worst ratchets I ever used of any brand. Pure Junk IMHO.
MUCH more popular (and pretty sought after, sometimes fetching ridiculous prices on ebay and such) are the Craftsman RHFTs that also had a thumbwheel but on the drive side where it was much less useful. What makes them great ratchets is they were very dependable with very little backdrag (when properly lubed) and had an asynchronous double pawl design that effectively doubled the # of clicks, or range of travel between the # of teeth, so the 1/2"dr had 45 teeth = 90 clicks, so ~4° of travel between teeth engagement, the 3/8"dr had 41 teeth = 82 clicks / ~4.4° arc swing, and the 1/4"dr had 35 teeth = 70 clicks / ~5.1° of arc swing, which for a ratchet that they were making as far back as 1970 still rivals that of some of the best ratchets made today.
I still have a bunch of those too. Most all of these were handed down to me from my grandfather, with the exception of the 1/4" & 1/2" dr RHFT digitorque wrenches. I paid too much for those just to have them added to this collection I already had.
Craftsman wasn't the only ones using this design back then, some others I believe were SK and Easco, but they didn't have a quick-release IIRC, and they don't seem to have as many people wanting to pay crazy prices for them, so those can probably be found for a lot cheaper these days,
