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That moment I realized I'd been using my pipe wrench backward for 12 years

After mangling three brass fittings in a row on a kitchen sink replacement last Tuesday, I finally looked up a YouTube video and saw that the self-tightening jaw faces the direction of force, not away from it - has anyone else missed such an obvious detail on a tool they thought they knew?

2 comments

2 Comments

riverknight22d ago

Yeah I gotta call this one out. "That moment I realized" makes it sound like some life changing epiphany but you just had the wrench backwards. It happens, you watched a video, you fixed it. Not exactly a crisis. I've seen guys in the shop use crescent wrenches completely wrong for Years and they still get the job done just fine. You probably could have kept going another 12 years and nobody would have noticed. Sometimes people make a bigger deal out of this stuff than it really is.

the_wesley22d ago

Learned this one the hard way myself loading a truck once. Had a guy who'd been cranking on a stubborn bolt for ten minutes with the wrench backwards, kept slipping off and cussing up a storm. Handed him a proper box-end and he had it loose in two seconds. Sometimes it's not about raw strength, it's about having the right tool and knowing which end to point where. If it works it works, but a little know-how saves a lot of knuckles.