Jinx,

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 22:26:40 +1200, Jinx wrote:

>...
> > Wheel brace, please :-)
> 
> Of course, brace. Dad's old Ford Popular had a real brace-
> type nut taker-off (ie made like a brace drill, like a crank)
> but I've not seen one of those for a long time. They've been
> the cross type for ages

I remember the brace-type, but the last one I remember was supplied with my father's 1967 A60 Austin Cambridge.  The central offset was the right 
size to use the jack as a lever, with the foot of the jack across the open end, giving about two feet (600mm) of leverage so you could loosen the 
nuts half a turn before jacking the car up.

Since then the ones that come with the car have usually been L-shaped, with the nut-driver at one end and a thick wedge at the other, to get the 
hubcaps off.  They're useless for undoing a well-jammed wheelnut, so many years ago I bought myself one of the cross-types and always carry that 
- you can get both hands across it and rarely need any more leverage.

The six-way "spider" version that used to be seen in garage workshops was the worst thing in the world to trip over - if you did it forwards it would 
wallop you hard on the shin - sometimes twice, as it turned over, and if you backed into it it produced panic because you felt something fall over and 
imagined whatever it was was going to break... which of course it doesn't!

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist