well hello everybody i'm adam savage and i am here in my cave uh and i've got a tool tip today uh
the first time i had to delineate between one kind of wrench and another was long
before i was making things it was when i was a kid and there was a scavenger hunt
and they said find an allen wrench and one could easily look at the two phrases allen
wrench and crescent ranch and think that they might have something to do with each other
but then you go and you look at them and you see that this is an
allen wrench and this is a crescent wrench and well it turns out that
wrenches go all over the place so in the interest of uh continuing wrench education
uh i'd like to talk about a wrench that most of you became familiar with in bugs
bunny cartoons oh you now know the one that i mean yes the monkey wrench this wrench which
admittedly looks somewhat primitive because
well like a lot of things that look primitive like coelacanths and chickens um that's because their
their their origins date back to antiquity and uh similar to sharks uh they haven't changed much
in the intervening hundred years or so that we've been using them um i have many monkey
wrenches in my shop i have five five okay that's many um i have a couple from husky which i really
like this is a kind of a basic model this is one of their more advanced models i can't speak to
they all operate in similar ways but let's talk about how they operate so how does a
pipe wrench work well obviously any glance at a pipe wrench makes it clear that by activating
this nut you change the distance between the jaws similarly to the way a crescent wrench works you
change the nut here and it moves the jaws closer and farther apart but they're in
the similarity ends because there are ways in which a pipe wrench is far better at its job
than a crescent wrench a crescent wrench should almost always be considered a
kind of emergency tool like you should always be using box and wrenches and
sockets rather than crescent wrenches don't get me wrong i use crescent wrenches all the time but
they're effectively professional corner rounders yeah they can make life a lot harder
pipe wrenches do what they do better than almost anything else you can think of um and it starts
with the jaws you'll notice the jaws of the crescent wrench are parallel the jaws of the pipe
wrench not parallel no no they are narrower at the back end than at the front and that is how their
functionality actually operates so i've got a pipe here that i've mounted into the vise uh there's a
t and this length here is really tight in this tee this actually used to be my clothing rack in an
old apartment i had um so the way a pipe wrench works if you went and did this with a crescent
wrench and this is for the fully uninitiated into ranch land you don't have anything to
grab onto with a crescent wrench i mean i guess with a crescent wrench you can grab the outside
of the tee and i have definitely done this if i had to but it's not it's far from optimal oh my
god it's so far from optimal but with a crescent wrench what you do is you adjust this nut not
until it's at the bottom and not until it's at the outer front you want it to be about halfway down
there you go this is a pipe wrench at its kind of an optimal distance and what you'll notice is
there are serrations on the jaws and these serrations here are actually ratcheted back
this way and that's because all of the activity of the pipe wrench is about the relationship between
these jaws and your lever action on this nice long handle so when i set this onto the round pipe
um the harder metal of the jaws bites a little bit into the metal of the pipe that's by design
now when it bites it's biting into a ratchet so it doesn't want to go anywhere in fact
because that ratchet's pointed up in that direction it wants to dig deeper
so when i pull on this lever and i am actually doing this for real now start to move the pipe
yeah and it takes way less effort now it does mark your pipe that's part of using a pipe wrench
but then watch this with just like one hand i reactivate and so this is the best thing about a
pipe wrench is it grabs really hard but let's go really easily and you should never do this with
plumbing that you haven't turned the water off etc etc etc all the caveats for home repair this is
only an introduction to pipe wrenches not pipes or piping or plumbing of any kind uh yeah and if you
are going if you are going to add a pipe wrench to your shop collection i recommend you buy two uh
again like i said husky makes a bunch of different kinds i have three or four uh i have
i don't even know what this one who makes this one what is this pittsburgh um
you always want two pipe wrenches you don't ever want to be in a situation where you need to and
you don't have them and they're fairly inexpensive and hell you can pick them up on ebay for like
probably 10 bucks an old rusted one i have never found a pipe wrench that didn't work for me
the tolerances on these are all really really loose and while this
looks like a primitive tool i'm seeing here i'm i'm i'm here to report that the only reason it
looks primitive is because it's unchanged and the reason it's unchanged is because this puppy works
yeah that sounds really good all right thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip today
i will see you next time good luck with your plumbing you