DIY Adjustable Wrench? Nuts!

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?

12 thoughts on “DIY Adjustable Wrench? Nuts!

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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