We're now stocking British Standard Whitworth (BSW) from King Dick tools

We're now stocking British Standard Whitworth (BSW) from King Dick tools. 

What are they? Whitworth was the worlds first screw thread standard.  Set in 1841 by Joseph Whitworth.  Prior to this individual manufactures or industries used their own fasteners.  (If this interests you as much as it does me, and you'd like to know more I'd highly recommend reading "Exactly" by Simon Winchester.)

And why are we stocking them?  We already use, rate and sell the imperial and metric spanners from King Dick. Who are still making their spanners in England, in Birmingham.  And King Dick are one of the few manufacturers in the world still making Whitworth.

So do you need a set of Whitworths?  Probably only if you regularly work on pre-WW2 vehicles or machinery.  Anything in that 100 years up to 1940 might well be Whitworth.  But the parts bins at British automotive manufactures were large and so the use of the odd Whitworth fastening was quite long.  At a show recently we learned that E-type Jags up to the early 1960's still used them a lot.

If you work on classic British cars up to the 1970's then there is one place were you are very likely to need a Whitworth spanner.  Have you wondered why the nut on your battery terminals seems to be between 1/2 BSF and 13mm?  That's because it's likely to be 1/4 BSW!

Also - apparently - the standard tripod mount for SLR cameras is still 1/4 BSW as well.

What you need to know when buying your Whitworth spanners:  they are sized by the bolt diameter, not the distance across the hex head sides as with Metric and Imperial.  What that means is a 1/2 BSW is massive when compared with 1/2 BSF.

 - Edd -