100 years of automotive tools

Motor,  Nov 2003  by Eckstein, Paul M

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Some tools used to fix today's vehicles haven't changed much from those of a century ago, others have and a few have disappeared completely. Here's a brief look at how some common shop tools have developed these past hundred years.

Arguably, man's two most important inventions or discoveries are fire and the wheel. Man's use of fire has progressed to the point that we can now travel to the moon and even explore other planets. The wheel has given us the freedom to go virtually anywhere we want, in great comfort or at great speed-and sometimes both at the same time. A select few have even driven on the moon!

Exactly when the first "motor car" was invented may be open to question, but the need to tell people how these contraptions worked-and how to fix them when they didn't-is not. Not too long after MOTOR's inaugural issue in July 1903, information on the care and repair of motor vehicles became MOTOR's stock in trade.

The automobiles of a hundred years ago, mechanical marvels of their day, evolved into the sophisticated technological vehicles that now cruise our nation's superhighways. Naturally, the tools needed to get them and keep them running would have to evolve, too.

This article looks at a few of the most common tools and pieces of equipment found in the repair shop and briefly chronicles their development. Some have undergone major transformations, others merely refinements (though useful ones). And we'll mention a couple of tools that became obsolete and disappeared from the shop altogether.

The Lowly, Majestic Wrench

Consider one of the simplest and most useful tools in a mechanics arsenal-the wrench. It began life as a piece of forged steel open at one or both ends to accommodate a nut. Then someone decided it would be great if one wrench could be made to handle different-size nuts. Enter the adjustable wrench. One early improved model was the Cochran "Speednut" wrench. "No slow thumb screw adjustment, but a lightning grip on any square nut from ¼ in. to ¾ in., and any hexagon nut from 7/16; in. to ¾ in.," proclaimed the sell line in a 1915 ad in MOTOR.

As mechanical devices on automobiles got more sophisticated, the wrench did, too. By the late '30s, mechanics were using wrenches that blinked at them (Blackhawks "Torkflash" tension wrench) or beeped (Williams' S-57 "Measurrench") to tell them when they had reached the specified torque.

Some tools simply improved on the design of the open-end wrench. New Britain's "Nutmaster" was touted in a September 1959 ad as "the greatest open-end wrench design improvement of all time." The scalloped opening was designed to bear on four faces of a hex nut and three faces of a square nut, without burring the corners. It was also designed to exert a firm grip on badly worn nuts.

The advent of compressed air in the shop could be considered the final step in the wrench's evolutionary process. Where speed is important (and in a shop, time literally is money), nothing beats an air wrench, whether it's a mundane job like removing a wheel's lugnuts or ratcheting in the deep recesses of an engine bay. Today, impact wrenches of all types are available from some of the largest tool manufacturers in the country.

An Uplifting Experience

Roads being what they were back at the turn of the previous century, the things that broke most often on the earliest automobiles undoubtedly were underneath. Getting under there to fix them might have been near impossible in some cases, supremely inconvenient in others. It couldn't have been too long before someone figured out that if the car were up in the air, a mechanic could make those difficult fixes much more easily. So the automotive lift was invented.

The first lifts ran on electricity. They got the car up in the air, and not all that high, either. By the 1920s, companies like Weaver and Manley produced electric lifts that offered a number of new features. For example, the lifts could be placed either outside or inside the shop; they lifted cars by the axle, leaving the wheels to turn free; and they could be stopped at any convenient working height. Many of those lifts raised a car to 4 feet. In the early '30s, Walker Mfg. developed a lift with a top elevation of 5 ½ feet.

Rotary Lift is credited with building the first hydraulic lift (inspired, the story goes, by a session in a barber's chair). In that one, a car was supported the way it drove on, with the wheels resting on the ramps. Later single-post "frame contact" lifts supported the vehicle at strategic points, leaving all four wheels accessible for service. This design sacrificed some undercar accessibility, however.

When twin-post lifts then came on the scene, they offered unobstructed access to the entire under-chassis area. In 1979, Benwil Industries became the first lift-maker to offer a "clear-floor" above-ground lift to shop owners. It provided better use of space while allowing a technician and his equipment to move freely underneath the vehicle.

The newest lifts incorporate electronics to control lift functions and to afford technicians the ability to perform a host of service items. They also incorporate a number of sophisticated safety features. While the earliest lifts had a 6000-pound capacity, some of todays lifts can hoist upwards of 18,000 pounds, which allows shops to take on fleet service.