Tight spots are a fact of life for mechanics. You get a nut and bolt somewhere deep inside the car body and you can barely get in to see it, let alone work with it. You don’t have a thin wrench, so you try to bend your body just so and slide the wrench in, but there’s just not enough clearance.
You can pace your garage and grumble until you’re blue in the face, but you still need to reach that bolt. You might convince yourself that you can access the bolt using sheer force of will, but that won’t last long — metal is notoriously unforgiving.
Why It Happens
Cars are designed to pack all the machinery you need into the smallest possible space. That’s great from the driver’s end of things, but it can create serious problems for the mechanic. Just ask anyone who’s tried to navigate the body of a car to tighten a hard-to-reach bolt or change an idler pulley.
You know where you have to put the wrench, but there’s another piece of metal in the way, and you don’t want to have to take the car apart to make space. There’s got to be a better way.
What Next? Creative Solutions
People have come up with some pretty creative ideas for fixing problems like these. Some take old tools and rework them to make them fit.
Shaving and Filing Your Tools
You can take a regular wrench and file or grind it down until it fits into the tight spot. It can be better than nothing, but this method weakens the wrench’s structural integrity.
Bending Metal
When the problem is the angle of access, filing won’t work, so people heat the wrench instead. They heat it until it’s red hot and bend the middle so it can get to that hard-to-reach spot.
Bending can work if you get the angle exactly right, but it will only work for that one particular job. Also, when you heat a wrench enough to bend it, there’s always a risk that it could break.
Using Paper
Sometimes when you have a tight space, the main problem is getting the wrench in at a clear enough angel to get a good grip on the nut. In that case, you can get some leverage by wrapping the nut in a paper towel or slipping the paper towel into the box end of the wrench. You can get enough traction that way to fit the nut on the bolt — assuming you can turn the wrench enough to catch the thread.
Thin Wrenches: A Better Option
Clever solutions are fun when they work, but it’s always a better idea to have the right tool for the right job. At Capri Tools, we make super-thin flat wrenches that are specifically designed to reach your car’s most hard-to-reach spaces.
We forge each of our wrenches from solid pieces of vanadium steel for maximum strength, then we polish them to perfection. The next time you have a tight spot to reach, try one of our box end wrenches and get the job done right.