Регулируемый гаечный ключ: тарихы мен қолданысы

Type of adjustable wrench

A monkey wrench is a type of smooth jawed adjustable wrench, a 19th century American refinement of 18th century English coach wrenches. It was widely used in the 19th and early 20th century. It is of interest as an antique among tool collectors and is still occasionally used in practice. More broadly, a monkey wrench may be a pipe wrench or any other kind of adjustable wrench.

Adjustable coach wrenches for the odd sized nuts of wagon wheels were manufactured in England and exported to North America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were set either by sliding a wedge, or later by twisting the handle, which turned a screw, narrowing or widening the jaws. In 1840, Loring Coes, a knife manufacturer in Worcester, Massachusetts, invented a screw based coach wrench design in which the jaw width was set with a spinning ring fixed under the sliding lower jaw, above the handle. This was patented in 1841 and the tools were advertised and sold in the United States as monkey wrenches, a term which was already in use for the English handle set coach wrenches. Published reports from 1834 and 1840 show the term in use (and indicating by the absence of explanatory glosses that the term was not unfamiliar). The origin of the name is not entirely clear, but Geesin (2015) reports that it originated in Britain with a fancied resemblance of the wrench's jaws to that of a monkey's face, and that the many convoluted folk etymologies that later developed were baseless. The Coes wrench designs were acquired by the toolmaker Bemis & Call of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1928. After 1939, its successor companies manufactured monkey wrenches from Coes designs until the mid 1960s, a production run of over 120 years. In German Language the wrench is called "Engländer" which means "Englishman". It is thought to be called so because for the less common imperial ("English") screws and nuts in continental Europe when only metric open end or ring wrenches were available. Monkey wrenches are still manufactured and are used for some heavy tasks, but they have otherwise been mostly replaced by the shifting adjustable wrench/spanner, which is much lighter and has a smaller head, allowing it to fit more easily into tight spaces, and the tooth jawed, torque gripping pipe wrench.

The largely US idiom "to throw a monkey wrench into " means to sabotage something, equivalent to the British English "to throw a spanner in the works". A "left handed monkey wrench" is sometimes used as ironic humor, as monkey wrenches are ambidextrous. Cpl. Adrian Shephard, protagonist of Gearbox Software's and Valve Software's Half Life: Opposing Force, wields a monkey wrench as his primary melee weapon. Similarly, the Engineer class in Team Fortress 2, also published by Valve, uses a monkey wrench as his base melee weapon.