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Wrenches are hard to mess up, but Stanley still knows how to do them well. And while Snap-On is still #1 (or thereabouts) for serious gearheads, for weekend handymen like me, Stanley delivers, and at a good price. These are chrome vanadium with no deformities.
Stanley 92-716 SAE and MM Combination Wrench Set, 22-PieceI just took delivery of this combination wrench set. Very upsetting to get your package from Amazon only to find your new item that you have been waiting for is busted. Everything looks fine.except that the handle on the CHEAP carrying case was broken off. I am not going to take the time to return it since I will not be doing a lot of walking around with these wrenches.but still.
The only thing I would change about this set would be the case. It's not built very well at all.
The set I bought one month ago was made in China. In that respect I was glad to have found the flawed wrench right off the bat, rather than getting into the middle of a hard repair job and having one of them snap or slip or whatever. Ouch, what the heck was it.On the outside edge of an open-ended wrench -- which is supposed to be a smooth, rounded curve -- a bit of shiny chrome plating had flaked off. I looked at Craftsman of course, but they seemed so expensive (especially since I had not priced them for a long time). I had not even gotten as far as detaching the wrenches from the storage tray, when I felt a twinge of pain, and saw blood on my thumb -- along with a speck of shiny metal.
I've never seen such a thing in a brand new wrench (or used one, for that matter).This was not a crack created by the stress of turning a rusted bolt or anything like that. I don't know. I mostly needed a range of smaller sizes to fill in, in both SAE and metric. The price seemed unusually low, but I figured it was just some kind of crazy Amazon bargain.When the set arrived I took it out of the box and looked it over. But there's no way a company can maintain quality control with that much variation in sources and materials, in such a short time. I probably would have put up with that, as much as I really wanted this set to fill the missing gap in my workshop.
So I got no use from the product, and found it to be inferior to any reasonable expectation (not to mention the brand name reputation). But that's not my complaint. A wrench should be totally dependable from day one, forever. But there is no way that I would trust any of them, given my doubts about what lay beneath the shiny surface. No, this crack came from poor casting of cheap metal.That wrench was flawed when the metal cooled and it came out of the mold; it was still flawed when it went to another part of the factory, where they machined the edges onto it; it was still flawed when they put it through the plating process; and it was still flawed when they slapped it into that plastic case, boxed it up, and shipped it to the U.S.Just think about how many steps of quality assurance failed to catch that wrench before it ended up in my home, cutting my thumb. I had to return the whole set to Amazon, which was a time-consuming pain in the neck, leaving me with a sore thumb and still no wrench set.I hope this information is useful to other potential shoppers.
Perhaps people have gotten bad ones before and not noticed, or said nothing. A reviewer five months ago bought these and said they were made in India. I think my experience proves that point.This selection would have been great to replace some missing sizes in an old set of classic Craftsman wrenches, many of which I've lost after too many moves over the years. It's official: the Stanley brand is now meaningless.
This set would have fit the bill, and I had faith in the brand and in the lifetime warranty. I was not about to put any trust the other 21 wrenches, once I saw how bad the quality control was. In my experience, the set did not even make it through day one.I thought about the rating, and I simply can't give it more than one star. But I'm flabbergasted to see a wrench where the metal is so bad that chrome plating won't even stick to it, and where the casting is so bad that they literally made it with a built-in crack.VISUALLY, the rest of the set looked okay, although the "teeth" inside the box wrench ends were much more rounded than my old Craftsmans.
I don't mind foreign sourcing if it's done right. The flake had come from the sharpest end of an underlying crack in the metal, at least an inch long, parallel to the flat sides. They put the chrome plating on there, and American shoppers like them because they're real shiny. Perhaps most disturbing, think about the fact that the problem was not in the machining or plating, or from bad design, or from misuse.No, it's a problem with whatever cheap metal they're putting into the furnace and pouring out to make these things.
Just what I was looking for. Would recommend. Stanley tools equals quality toolsand at a great price.
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