The Allen key turns 115 this year. It’s strange to believe that in all that time, no one has come up with an adjustable version, but apparently true. Luckily [Chronova Engineering] has taken up the challenge in his latest video.
The video is a fascinating glimpse at the toolmaker’s art–manual machining and careful human judgement. Humans being the fallable creatures we are, the design goes through a few iterations. After the first failure in metal, [Chronova] falls back on 3D printing to rapidly prototype the next six iterations. Given how much work goes into manually machining the designs, we can only imagine the time savings that represents.
The final version is has classic hexagonal rod split in two, so that a chisel-shaped rod can spread the two prongs out to engage the sides of the Allen bolt. Even with that settled, the prongs and wedge had to be redesigned several times to find exact shape and heat-treatment that would work. At this point the range is anything between 4 mm and 6 mm, which is admittedly narrow, but [Chronova Engineering] believes the mechanism has the potential to go wider.
The design is not being patented, but the drawings are available via the [Chronova Engineering] Patreon if you really need an adjustable Allen key and don’t feel like reverse-engineering the mechanism from video. It’s a much larger project than we’ve featured from this channel before– enormous, really, compared to steam engines that fit on pencil erasers or electric motors that squeeze through the eye of a needle.
Our thanks hall-of-fame tipster [Keith Olson] for letting us know about this one. If you want a slice of that fame for yourself, the tips line is always open.
The only thing better than this glorious craftsmanship is getting to see and hear the full end to end thought process to solve this problem.
Impressive but the act of adjusting it takes more time than simply swapping to a new bit.
Yep I got a set of metric and sae long bits with a quarter inch drive for peanuts on Amazon and they fit into deep counter bores easily. Not to poop on the project its a interesting idea and the execution is nice… but I would rarely if ever use it just like my grandfather’s adjustable flat head driver (which looks darn new because its functionality useless in most situations)
While it’s nice. I think he missed a trick here. Just thinking out loud but couldnt you use a drill/lathe chuck design but split it into 6 pieces and each of the pieces is just a corner piece at a 60 degree angle? Obviously a small one wouldn’t have the best grip in the edges as it gets bigger, but you’d get a much better range of device for sure as the angle is always the same no matter the size of the Allen key/wrench, it still has 6 corners that meet at 60 degrees.
Sorry that was supposed to be a new comment not a reply. Hate commenting on a phone, accidentally scrolling always puts a reply to a comment.
This site is so bad about that. It’s like they have ontouchstart set to open the comment dialog. Every dang time I try to scroll, it instead shoves the comments off the bottom of the screen due to opening the comment dialog.
That was his first draft attempt, but the six fingers each lacked the required strength. He also tried a three finger version but it was still not stiff enough so the two finger design won in the end.
And after the end it will break.
Assuming you actually have a bit that will fit right neatly organised by size – between metric, imperial and worn out or low tolerance bolts this could well prove faster than hunting through the metric, only to find none of them are right, going over to the imperial and perhaps then finding none of them really fit right either. Or worse finding that empty spot in your tool organiser where somebody has taken and not returned, or it happens to be the bit you broke and haven’t replaced yet…
Or, here’s an idea, maybe the US does the right thing and finally ditches imperial tooling and hopefully the whole system. As a Canadian, I’ve done it in my own home. Sold all imperial/bilingual tools and fasteners and replaced them with metric ones. It’s liberating. I’ve literally cut the space needed for screws in half. Using a single system also means the tools themselves become more useful, the greatest example being tape measures and rulers, that can now be used on both sides.
Nah, that’s just crazy talk.
(with you all the way on that)
Buying purely metric tools is very difficult in the UK, despite us adopting metric over fifty years agp
Maybe that will happen when political parties can agree, French, or English, Sausage or pepperoni, thank god there’s not a metric USB.
Wasn’t the purpose of this the act of creating in itself? He notably didn’t patent it. It’s an art piece.
This can literally also be said of adjustable wrenches. Much faster to grab the fixed size wrench you need than fumble with the thumb screw. The point of adjustable tools is not to be faster, it’s to have a single tool that can do many things, the primary concerns being space, weight, and money savings.
I swear I remember my father having a tool that was a series of nested spring loaded hexagons that let you attack any allen bolt with just a wiggling press. Like those socket wrenches full of pins, it sorta kinda worked sometimes when the moon and stars aligned just right.
I found this kickstarter for telehex https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2009916855/telehex-the-first-universal-allen-key-for-bicycles but that was about 30 years after the nonfolding tool I remember.
I have one in the basement-but it’s a screwdriver type handle and you can’t get a lot of torque
The one we had also had a screwdriver type handle but if you needed extra torque, they had a neat design feature. As someone who has often resorted to using a crescent wrench for torque I really appreciated that they designed it so the butt end of the handle fit perfectly in ~1-1.5″ socket (I cant remember what size exactly).
He does mention this while building his version.
Also, this was made for another Maker on YouTube. Different makers were asked to make something for another maker.
Inheritance Machining made a puzzle maze for I’m Not an Engineer, and he made a awesome looking mechanical counter for AlecSteele and so on.
I use Allen wrenches every day, this is worthless and not worth the space in my tool bag.
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+5 thumbs up!
Agree.. they take up so little room now.. but might me a good idea for something like carrying it on my motorcycle tool kit when I only need like 4mm thru 6mm. But even then… not really. I did enjoy watching the process of him making it..
Expect to see a cheap Chinese knockoff shortly.
Well, most allen screws are so tight that you have to worry about runing the head. This tool will probably break in most cases.
I tend to think that a perceived lack of practicality led to the decision to release the design into the wild.
Maybe crowdsourcing can find some sort of trick to make it workable.
It’s too bad that this would only really be good for the larger sizes, which tend to fit the best, cam out the least, and are the easiest to tell apart on the allen key rack. The tiny ones are far more irritating.
I can only dream of having the tools and the incredible knowledge/skill to
attempt a project (competition) like this. It is truly inspiring to watch though.
The amount of unadulterated autie criticism on here is wild for such a high quality project. Just because you haven’t realized the use of a tool does not make it useless. Maybe you are just a bit dim.
As someone else in the comments points out, this, when fully fleshed out in terms of range and easy adjustability would absolutely have its place in many work benches, or even more so many field kits. No need to lug 2 whole sets for imperial and metric out to a job site. Just one tool.
The space saving would be the only selling point some would need as well, for those with small workshops where you gotta go and dig out the right set and pack it away again vs just the one tool in your drawer.
I’m sure he thought of this and threw it out for some reason, but it seems like it would be ideal to be able to get 4 or at least 3 separate contact regions. Make some sort of nesting central wedge that allow you to just jiggle it until it spreads to maximum contact. And then watch with sadness as the whole thing bends on the first mildly tight bolt. I dunno I’m not a tool maker.
Hey Alfie, pointing out your lack of machining hygiene isn’t “auntie criticism” it’s your short coming, not mine!
If it were able to achieve a really tight hold it might surpass the grip of correctly fitting hex key and not round out on a very tight bolt, this would obviously have to be quality tool to achieve this !
Dr. Who approved!
Wonderful work and a joy to watch!! And I admire his perseverance at trying over and over until he has the “perfect” design…
…But it is not much smaller or easier to use than an assorted set of normal hex keys. Which is probably why nobody tried this before.
The idea sounds great, but unless they can make it work in a wide variety of sizes, there’s little value to it.
Impressive
Out of the box
Good tool for Home… Bicycle, Bath Kitchen Accessories, Door Locks n Hinges etc.
I stopped watching after I saw you trying to “dail-in a three jaw chuck”! Good luck!
uh, ironically, you want “fallible” not “fallable”.
As someone who sees a lot of errors in published works, I’m curious, why did you choose to not use a spell check?
Id actually like to purchase this
One could have the center Allen solid and push the hollow Allen’s down over it giving you unlimited size increments. Lol.
I think many commenters aren’t getting it… It’s an old joke. Asking someone for an adjustable Allen wrench or muffler bearings. It’s a clever answer to an ancient joke. Sheesh