Hey. It’s been a while. Got a little side tracked building a house. (more room for tools).
There is one more Craftsman, Professional, full-Polish Wrench we need to cover. It’s the 5-piece Flare Nut Wrench Set; comes in Standard (#42012) or metric (#42013). I'm sure anyone reading this knows what a flare nut wrench is used for. But just in case...... Flare fittings are use primarily for tubing connections, usually hydraulic. Brake lines in your car use flare fittings. The nuts used to attach the flared tubing to the brake cylinder or master cylinder, the flare nuts, are usually made from a soft material like aluminum. If you try to loosen one that has been there for a while you can run into problems. You can’t use a socket or box end wrench because of the tube sticking out of it. So you grab an open end wrench that contacts only two flats on the nut. If you’re lucky, it breaks loose. If you’re like the rest of us you end up rounding off the points of the nut and reach for the Vise-Grips. A flare nut wrench is like a box end wrench with a section removed so it slips past the tube and over the nut. It grips five of the six points on the nut; greatly increasing your chance of successfully removing the nut without rounding it.
Craftsman had been selling flare nut wrenches with the raised panel design for years. In 1999 the introduced the “Professional” full-polish, flare nut wrenches. Now the Professional combination wrenches had been out for five years and were on the second generation already. Like the Gen 1 and Gen 2, the flare nut wrenches were forged by SK with the sideways “K” mark on them. The next year, in the 2000 – 2001 catalog, the Gen 3 combination wrench was introduced (not made by SK) but the flare nut wrenches were still forged by SK. In 2005 through 2006, Craftsman sold a few SK branded tools in their catalog including flare nut wrenches. Right alongside them were the Craftsman branded flare nut wrenches forged by SK. In fact, in the 2006 – 2007 catalog they’re on the same page. In 2008 they started offering an 11-piece set Part number 42104. It is both the Standard and metric sets together plus the large 19 x 21mm thrown in.
It’s hard to tell when the Professional Flare Nut Wrench ended. From 2007 to 2013, they list a 5-piece full-polish flare nut set, but it’s not on the “Professional” wrench page, it’s not listed as “Professional” and not in the plastic case, but it still has the same part number. Craftsman (and Amazon, Lowes, Walmart….) still sell the 42012 and 42013 sets but they are made in China. I don’t know when the switch happened. As far as I can tell, the full-polish flare nut wrench never made it to the “Industrial” line.
That’s all I’ve got. I started out to cover just the Gen 1, 2 and 3. Guess I got carried away.
Thanks for reading.
Todd F.
