Myford Super 7 spanner sizes

[HopperParticipant @hopper]

Posted by SillyOldDuffer on 10/04/2021 10:56:48:

Posted by Hopper on 10/04/2021 03:11:13:

Posted by Robert Butler on 09/04/2021 23:08:47:

PS the ex Myford fitter who serviced my lathe advised Myford used the cheapest spanner sets available

 

Yes but in those days the cheapest spanners were still made in Britain and still quite reasonable quality for home use. They must have churned out millions of Snail brand and King Dick, Vincent etc spanners over the years so costs were low. But they used good steel and good dies to make them. Different story with today's cheapest cheese-metal spanners.

I round up handfuls of good old BS spanners for peanuts whenever I am at garage sales and flea markets etc. The supply will run out one day so I figure I might as well keep them out of the hands of the hoarders. So I have a full set for each Brit motorbike and lathe in the shed.

Isn't it odd Model Engineers are the only people in the world who believe steel made 60 years ago is better than anything produced today?

I wasn't speaking as a Model Engineer but as a time-served tradesman who used handtools day in day out for decades to make a living.

The Chinese make excellent steel today. But they choose not to use it to make their cheap spanners as a matter of cost saving.

 

Edited By Hopper on 10/04/2021 16:00:42

[Mike PooleParticipant @mikepoole82104]

In 1977 I was looking for a 3/8 drive socket set and called in to Sarjents tools in Reading, the Britool set that took my fancy was £130 so I left empty handed, an inflation calculator tells me that would be £813 today. At the other end of the scale a chap in the welders shack on the Morris Marina production floor had a sideline selling cheap tools, a Kamasa set of 1/4 and 3/8 drive sockets became mine for £27 while I considered what to do about a decent set. The Kamasa set did a hell of a lot of work without wearing or breaking and it was many years before I upgraded, Snap-On would not lose any sleep over the ratchet quality, the ratchets didn’t fail but the feel is crap. I think I spent the £103 saved on records beer and gigs and keeping a T150V Trident on the road, thinking about it the Trident consumed a hell of a lot more than £103, the path to Norman Hyde’s spares emporium was a well worn one and the bike still wears a Hyde 3-1, 850cc big bore kit, sintered iron clutch, high strength con rods and lots of other bits. Norman assured me the 3-1 was not noisy but that seems to be at odds with everyone else’s opinion, my mates would not follow me due to the noise and my sister said she could hear my bike howling down the Oxford ring road and all the way through the village. Unfortunately it also attracted the attention of the plod which led to me losing my licence twice for totting up, The Honda VF750F was much faster and very quiet with stock pipes and I never got stopped once, so much as I love the howl of noisy exhaust I concluded long ago that noise is more of a threat to your licence than speed. That’s a bit of a digression from spanners.

Mike

[Martin KyteParticipant @martinkyte99762]

Just reading the continuing debate of British Engineering in the 50's and 60's. Just an observation that often the excellence or lack of it can be laid at the way companies were managed. Engineers in the UK have rarely had too much control over how a company was run. Take BMC as an example of th emerger of two very succesfull motor manufacturors and the upshot was that BMC largely continued the lines of Morris and Austin motors successfully competing with themselves by producing largely similar models in each class of car entailing much higher overheads. This was money that could usefully have be spent in development and retooling. Not bad engineering just bad organisation.

regards Martin

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