In 2006 my father-in-law gave me a small bag of miscellaneous wrenches he was clearing out. In the bag was a 1/4"x5/16” wrench that looked very interesting to me. It had some style to its design unlike most wrenches I had seen. I thought it would be nice to put together a set of wrenches in that style and didn’t think it would be very difficult. After all, how many wrenches could be in a set? Usually a set would be anywhere from 5 to 8 wrenches. A big set may have as many as 12. After researching the manufacturer, I found a catalog from the mid-1950’s showing this particular wrench. I was very surprised to discover the set actually had 46 unique wrenches in it. They also made metric and Whitworth sets but I only focused on SAE sizes.
With that one little wrench I began an 8 year search to assemble a complete set of Williams Superrench double open end wrenches. I scoured ebay, Craigslist, antique stores, farm auctions, car shows, garage sales, flea markets, web sites and pawn shops. Early on this search lead me here to Tool Talk too! I found some of the wrenches locally but most came from all corners of the US via ebay. Finally on April 9th, 2014 I bought the last wrench. Since then I’ve spent the last 4 years trying to figure out what to do with 46 wrenches. A couple weeks ago I finally came up with a solution for a wooden display board. The logo across the top and the wrench numbers are vinyl cut-outs. Weeding the numbers after cutting was a bit of a challenge! The set will eventually end up in my next workshop or perhaps a man-cave down the road.
The board is made of 3/4" maple plywood with a maple frame. It will mount to the wall with a wooden cleat type mount to support the weight. I think all together it weighs over 125 pounds.