| Tech4 Gearless Ratcheting Box Wrenches
It's one of the most irritating situations when working on cars, whether the object of your affections is old and poorly designed or new, tightly packaged and made to be assembled once on the production line. You have enough access to a fastener to put a wrench on it and you can turn it--just less than is required to reach the next gripping angle. Sometimes there isn't enough vertical space above the bolt head to fit a socket wrench. At best you have to turn your wrench over for each stroke, working it out in slow, aggravating baby steps. At worst you're "screwed" until you invent a new way to reach the fastener or remove what's preventing you from doing so.
What's wanted is a ratcheting box-end wrench, which exists in several forms. There is the laminated sheet-metal type with an open, reversible mechanism. These work but have always seemed bulky and inelegant, with a coarse ratchet mechanism that probably won't solve the problem. There are more compact wrenches available that resemble a solid box-end wrench and have a much finer pitch to their ratcheting mechanism. I have seen several labels on just two wrenches. One has a box end in line with the handle and is simply turned over to change direction. A car buddy of mine has a set of these and says they consistently jam if force is applied at an angle. The other has an angled head for knuckle clearance and a reversing lever. Both advertise a 5-degree swing. I've played with them both, and it took more like 15 degrees of backward motion to reset the ratchet mechanism, yielding another five degrees of fastener movement. Performance Products sells a wrench that really solves the problem, the Tech4 Gearless Ratcheting Box Wrench. It uses a needle-bearing sprague clutch that moves smoothly, without clicks, and resets itself in just 2 degrees of backward movement. Without a precise fixture for measuring the movement, you'll have trouble distinguishing it from instantaneous. If you can get the wrench on the fastener, you can turn it. It's almost a little eerie at first, when one is programmed to have tools click and vibrate, to simply swing the wrench smoothly and silently. Then you want to use it more, just to feel it. The ends have a six-point box to grip fasteners securely, but, as with any wrench--especially any ratcheting mechanism--one is discouraged from using a hammer or pipe slipped over the end to apply more force. The Tech4 wrenches are made in Taiwan, but so are the non-angled fine-mechanism wrenches I described above, and those are considered good enough to be sold by one of the "tool truck" companies.
The Tech4 wrenches aren't inexpensive, which makes it convenient that just three double-ended sizes--10/11mm, 12/14mm and 17/19mm--are required to fit 90 percent of the fasteners on my car. To be honest, I haven't run into the problem I described at the beginning of this article since the Tech4 wrenches have been in my toolbox, but I did have it two days before I got them. Next time, I'll be ready.