The Best Combination Wrench Set For A Home Mechanic

Whether you are working under a car in the garage or on the side of the road, realizing you have the wrong wrench can be just about the worst feeling in the world. If you work on cars, there is no excuse to not have a set of combination wrenches.

Available in metric and standard sets, a good combination wrench set is an absolute necessity and, along with a good socket set and ratchet, is the foundation for building a tool collection. Many nuts and bolts can only be accessed with a combination wrench due to extremely tight clearances under the hood of cars today.

The quality of the wrench is as important as the size. Poor quality wrenches are made with low quality metals and loose tolerances and can actually be dangerous. If the wrench bends or twists, it will most likely lose grip on the nut or bolt, and when that happens, knuckles tend to get bloody. Another common problem caused by poor quality wrenches is the rounding of bolt heads due to poor clearance/casting properties of the tool. If the head of the wrench doesn’t fit snugly on the bolt, do yourself a favor and get rid of that wrench.

The Best Combination Wrench Set

There are a lot of things to consider when you’re trying to find the best combination wrench set. Examine quality of metal, how tight the wrench head fits to appropriately sized bolts, strength, quantity, and price before you make your purchase. For us, a wrench set needs to contain metric and standard wrenches, and they need to cover the most used sizes for our projects. Clearances must be spot on, too, because we don’t particularly like busting our knuckles on account of slipped wrenches. Most wrench sets these days come with some sort of organizer/carrier to keep the wrenches in order and all together. We’ve found this helps to keep us from losing wrenches, since it is easy to see when one is missing from the holder. Last, we considered the price of the wrench set. We’ve never felt like we needed to spend a fortune to obtain high quality tools, and you don’t need to either.

For the best combination wrench set, we have picked the Tekton 90186 Combination Wrench Set with Store and Go Keeper. The wrench set contains both metric and standard wrenches in all the sizes most mechanics will use most often. Yes, there will be times when you will need an extremely small 5mm or 1 ½” wrench, but for the most part, the sizes in this set will be all you’ll need. The Tekton wrench set contains 8mm, 10mm, 11mm, 12mm, 13mm, 14mm, 15mm, 16mm, 17mm, 18mm, and 19mm metric sizes and ¼” – 7/8” sizes in standard.

The wrenches are made with a generous handle length, which makes it easier to bust a rusty bolt loose. The 15 degree offset of the handle provides a good amount of room for finger clearance when you’re working up against a flat surface and need space to turn the wrench.

Another great feature is the 15 degree angle of the open end of the wrench. This enables you to flip the wrench over after every turn and allows you to grab the bolt from a variety of different angles, inlike a straight headed wrench.

The box end of each wrench features a 12 point design that allows bolt engagement from almost any angle. The box end is also set at a 15 degree offset for finger clearance.

The Tekton combination wrench set comes with separate carriers for the metric and standard wrenches. The carriers have built in handles and each wrench locks securely in its place. We’ve found these wrenches to be perfect for just about any mechanic. As far as where to buy, Amazon typically has the best prices that we encounter. Overall we think you’ll be highly satisfied with the Tekton combination wrenches and give them a strong recommendation! Happy wrenching!

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