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Father’s Day Find: The Nash Wrench
My grandfather died in early 1984. He had been a mechanic most of his life, from the time he dropped out of school at age 14, right up until he retired at the age of 70. After his death his tools sat idle in my grandmother’s basement, until her own death in 1995. My father cleared out the old workroom, with its boxes of taps, punches, wrenches, reamers, sockets, hand drills, wrenches, and specialty tools acquired or made over the 50+ working years of his father’s life. Some of the tools he took for himself, some he compiled to make a starter tool set for me, but so very many more were stored in plastic totes and shoved to the back of his garage, there to sit idle for the next 22 years.
When I undertook my own interest in old cars (3 years ago now) I started to ask after the old tools. They were buried underneath a mountain of clutter, but I did eventually unearth them, and I have periodically rummaged through them mostly as an exercise in identification. At first I hardly knew what they were, but as I have gained experience and knowledge I have been able to identify more and more of them. My father could usually fill in the blanks when I came across the more mysterious or obscure tools, like the palm ratchet or the threaded-stud remover. My father is 70 himself now and keen to remove the clutter, so he was quite happy for me to go through them in more detail this past weekend, and especially for me to take whatever I might be able to use. So while he and the my daughters visited I rummaged and poked around, and it was at the bottom of one tote that I unearthed this wrench.
At first I thought I had found a tangible link back to my grandfather’s time as a mechanic at his wife’s uncle’s Nash dealership, what with the wrench emblazoned with the word “Nash”. The forging marks, according to the internet forums specializing in old tools, indicate that this wrench was cast sometime between 1923 and 1925 by the Bonney Forge, and that seemed to fit with what I half remembered of family lore. It turns out this wrench was, while as old as it appears, of a different purpose. I had thought only of Nash, the car maker, but I suspect that this really was for a different Nash, the pump maker.
You see, from the late 1950s until his retirement, my grandfather worked for Seagrave Fire Apparatus as a field service mechanic. They sent him all over the country to repair fire engines, and one of his typical repair jobs was to tear apart and rebuild the water pumps, and I’m guessing that this was the wrench’s real purpose – removing and replacing the gland packing nut on pump shafts. (see here for what that means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuffing_box)
I’m curious what other tools I might unearth.
Published in General
Didn’t know they had such a thing. I’ve always used adjustable spanners.
According to The Real Meaning of Haynes Manuals: http://mez.co.uk/haynes.html
In my experience, you must have gone through several adjustable spanners, as that adjustable lug and the pins holding the adjustment screw wheel are not fond of this technique.
I’ve had both kinds, and probably still do. I like the flat ones, but it’s been a few years since I last checked the gap on a spark plug (for a lawn mower, probably). Nowadays they usually come with the right gap, it seems. Working on engines large or small is not one of my favorite activities, and I’m not very handy about it, either.
So you’ve broken off a spark plug, too…