What do you do if you want a tiny little adjustable wrench? If you’re [my mechanics] you build your own. Where do you get the stock metal? Well, he started with an M20 nut. A few milling operations, a torch, some pliers, and work with a vice resulted in a nice metal blank just the right size to make each part of the wrench, including a new nut for the adjustment.
Want to do this yourself? If you do, we hope you have a well-equipped machine shop. You should also be comfortable working with red-hot metal. Overall, it is an amazing piece of work, and you can watch the whole process in the video below.
Honestly, precision metalworking is a little out of our comfort zone. Like the recent wood bending we’ve seen, we always think, “Yeah, I could so do that!” Then we realize that we really couldn’t. But still fun to watch and maybe a few ideas we might be able to apply next time we have to bend a little metal.
The wrench is a scale model of a larger one, and it looks great. We would have liked to see it in use with a tiny nut, but we imagine it would work just fine. If you get excited about making things from a single piece of metal, may we suggest a nutcracker?
A lot of “I built an X out of Y” stuff is pathetic, but this guy is amazing.
Most of his videos are restoration, heavily relying on scratch building parts on a lathe and mill, but he also does some neat fabrication like this.
Definately recommend looking over his channels.
“We would have liked to see it in use with a tiny nut, but we imagine it would work just fine.”
Perhaps you should have watched the video all the way through, then.
I would have started with billet material, but kudos for repurposing a scrap nut.
Just needs a small hole in the base of the handle to go on my key ring :) – beautiful build.
No offense to this guy, but Hand Tool Rescue did this much better
Hand Tool Rescue milled his out of solid stock, and it was based on a 1879 patent. They ARE better in that they’re larger and actually useful as wrenches. The mini one he sells is actually an EDC item for me.
>Want to do this yourself? If you do, we hope you have a well-equipped machine shop
You almost tempt me to make one “on the knee”.
This is nuts, or it was a nut :)
Nicely made.
A small tip: If you want t file something from square to round, (@05:17) then first file it into a regular octagon. This gives a reference to filing. After that, file of the corners to make it a 16 corner. Then it only needs a few touches to get round. If you start with rounding off things from the beginning it’s very easy to end up with something oval or egg shaped or otherwise irregular.
I agree with Ken too, this needs to fit on a keyring.
I am a bit puzzled though why he starts with a nut. A2 is quite soft and gummy. I would have started by sourcing a piece of (possibly stainless) tool steel and harden it at the end. But then again, he has over 3 million subscribers, and I don’t have a youtube channel at all.
Definitely interesting. I still keep a miniature set of open/box wrenches.
Thank you for your fingerprints
muhahaha
seriously think about the information you are leaking.
As much as I like such content this especially feels like it is only done to create a Youtube video. Using a nut is so stupid and gimmicky – as is the whole project. This being in the uncanny valley between some cool make video and some Youtube BS makes it even more uncomfortable to watch for me somehow.
Next level is doing this with a random piece of steel, a dremel, bench grinder and few other tools.