I have finally found the holy grail of Craftsman tap and die sets. That’s right, The Craftsman Whitworth Set. Unfortunately, the person selling it also knew it was the holy grail and I paid dearly for it. In my defense, it is complete, all original and in excellent condition.
In 1959, Craftsman introduced the “Kromedge” type of taps and dies with the 5209 SAE set, 5500 Metric set and the 5501 Whitworth set in the now familiar plastic case with the two red trays to safely cradle them. There were also some sets with cuts up to 3/4inch that came in wooden boxes like the 5210 and 5211C. The SAE set was in a grey case, the Metric was in a black case and the Whitworth was in green. I believe the wrench sets sold at that time used the same color scheme. The silk-screened labels on the Whitworth and Metric sets pictured some taps and dies arranged to look like a little car. I guess they were suggesting that only a foreign auto mechanic would be interested in purchasing these sets. Both the Whitworth and Metric sets share identical plastic trays and share the same thread pitch gauge that has metric and inch pitch in the same gauge. All of the taps and dies in the Whitworth set are marked “WHIT” even though half them are the same diameter and pitch as SAE taps and dies. For a moment I wondered why they didn’t just throw in some SAE pieces then remembered that SAE uses a 60 degree thread profile and Whitworth uses 55 degrees. So a 1/4-20 SAE and a 1/4-20 WHIT are not created equal.
While the 5209 SAE set lived on until 1984 in various configurations, the 5501 Whitworth and 5500 Metric sets disappeared from the Craftsman catalog in 1963. There were no metric tap and die sets listed in the Craftsman catalog for ten years and the Whitworth set never returned at all.
Thanks for reading
Todd F.
