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Battle of the adjustables...

Chris152

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Well, not really. We've been helping a friend's dad clear his garage of old tools, buying some for ourselves. I just cleaned these up this morning, after some electrolysis yesterday - left to right, Crescent (USA), Bahco (Sweden) and Elora (Germany). They look beautiful and clearly decent quality, but any thoughts on which, by reputation, would be the best of the three? Completely idle question and of no real importance, but we just got to wondering.
 

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I have some old bahco which are my favourites, they get used all the time and the medium one comes everywhere in my tool kit. Elora became or was taken over by Gedore, I picked up a set of imperial open/ring spanners from the Bundeswehr surplus. They are amazing quality and well worth the €18 euros the set cost me. I bought a new Gedore red range adjustable and sent it straight back - sloppy, loose made in china tat, was quite disappointed.
 
If that Bahco is as good as the one I bought new in 1977 and still use, I'd choose it. :)
 
I have two adjustable spanner’s in the van both have had a tremendous amount of use over the years one is a Bahco & the other Rothenberger, if I could only have one it would be the Rothenberger so for me Germany wins but fortunately I don’t have to choose 🤗
 
I should have added that I bought my Bahco as advised by a helpful man in a long brown coat, in a proper old fashioned tool shop, Stubbs of York.
 
Deffo not the Bahco so post it to me I'll PM you my address! 🤣🤣🤣
 
Elora used to be a big name in tools , I had some of there socket sets but these days Bahco adjustables are really good and for plumbing / pipe fittings / brassware look at "Todays Tools" who do wide, ultra wide and thin jawed wrenches in steel and ali . They have shorter handles so you can get into thoise really awkward places like behind baths and hot water cylinders.
 
A couple of years ago the chap who sold the tools at the market sold out and closed. I regret not buying a set of six clean used Bahcos from 18" down ....................................................... for £90. I have a 6", a 10" and a 15" iirc already, but it still grates.
 
Fiddling with them this morning, the Bahco has least backlash, the Elora most - tho I have no idea how much use they've had over the years, so it tells us nothing about how they were when new. I'd really like to be able to date them but they don't seem to have marking to help with that.
I found this summary of the adjustable, including reference to Bahco and Crescent, on Wikipedia:

"One of the most widely known forms of adjustable wrench in the 21st century is an improved version of the Clyburn type; it was developed in 1891–1892. The Swedish company Bahco attributes its invention to Johan Petter Johansson,[9][10] who in 1892 received a Swedish patent for it.[11][12] In Canada and the United States, this type is often known as a Crescent wrench owing to widespread genericization of the brand name[13] of the company that held the original 1915 U.S. patent for this type (U.S. patent 1133236A), the Crescent Tool Company. (The Crescent brand is now owned by the Apex Tool Group). As Geesin 2015 documents,[4] the worm-on-rack type (regardless of which terminology is used to name it) was invented in Britain,[4] and later popularized in Scandinavia via the Bahco/Johansson improvement, before its manufacture in the United States was patented."

And this odd little film has more on Crescent (you get used to the voice-over after a while!):
 
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