Crazy People and Whitworth Tools

You have to be a fairly sick citizen to have Whitworth tools in your toolbox.

Whitworth is not a brand. It's a measurement. Seems that back during the Industrial Revolution, a Brit named Whitworth decided that life would be much easier if things like weights and measures were standardized. So he came up with a system to do just that.

He decided, for instance, how far apart rails for railroads should be. (In this country that was a mish-mash until during the war, when President Abraham Lincoln [drum roll, please] settled on the gauge that's used today so that the rails of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific would match as they built the transcontinental railroad. In case you're wondering, standard gauge is 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches.)

Another thing Whitworth did was decide on standard sizes for nuts and bolts. Nuts and bolts, of course, need wrenches and sockets. These graduated sizes, now superceded by better ideas, were known as Whitworth tools.

Using Whitworth tools is, today, as obsolete as using whale oil for lighting. Unless of course you're one of the poor, sick bastards who happens to have an old Triumph, AJS, Norton, BSA or other British motorcycle, or an old British car - and if it's happens to be a Jaguar, ancient or otherwise, I'm so sorry for your agony, but you brought it on yourself.

Anyway, Whitworth tools. Different from the standard SAE tools common here in the U.S., different from metric tools used almost everywhere else.

So here I am grappling with the time-rich reality of, uh, retirement. Out in my garage there hunkers an elaborate tool box that contains all sorts of really cool stuff. But it was a jumble. My stuff, my dad's stuff and stuff given me by old Hartmut Bruet, a German lad and, as I remember, a former member of the Hitler Youth who got dragooned into combat during the final days of the war, who came to work on Rancho Cascabel, where I grew up, as a millwright.

Anyway. A jumble. So I cleaned the whole mess out today. And what I found included two sets of Whitworth wrenches and a set of Whitworth sockets. They've been untouched - indeed, unseen  - by humans for many years. They've been subjected only to the caresses of the black widows that live in the garage.

So I found 'em. They're either highly collectable or totally worthless, I'm not sure which. But they exist in my tool box because of the '67 BSA Lightening I restored in the mid-'80s. Well, they were stored away for a reason, that reason being that since I sold the BSA years ago, I've not owned anything that required Whitworth fettling. Metric and SAE, sure. But not Whitworth.

So I imagine that some day, some archaeologist will uncover the runs of my garage, find the rust heap that my tool box has then become and find those Whitworth tools. He'll take one look and say, "Huh. Crazy people." And he'll be right.

Still, I kind of wish I still had that old BSA. Except Laura has informed me that I don't want a motorcycle. But I am going to have to come up with some sort of ongoing project. Newspaper gigs being few and far between, I may actually be retired. I only need to clean our my tool box once every decade or so. So I'm going to need something to do with my abundant time. And no, that something won't involve a Jaguar, MG or Morris. We'll let those Whitworth tools rust in peace.

- JFT

Comments

[Jonathan Williams]

If you don't really want your old whitworth tools and you really plan on letting them just sit there, you should send them to me (I'd gladly pay shipping). I'm a broke 24 year old college student with a 63 BSA Thunderbolt in peices in my spare bedroom. I'd definately put them to good use.