In the 1950s the MG TD was a relatively inexpensive British sports car many of us enjoyed riding in or driving. This 8 7/8" King Dick DOE wrench was part of the TD's tool kit. It's British jaw sizes are 1/2W and 7/16W. "W" probably stands for Whitworth.

The W almost certainly stands for Whitworth.  The big problem with the '54 Sunbeam-Talbot that was my first car was that everything was Whitworth, at a time when metric was too foreign for a lot of mechanics.  Whitworth was from Mars.

Cutting my mechanic teeth on Triumph motorcycles helped a lot when I had an MGA. I still have a can full of Whitworth fasteners of various types and sizes just in case.

Noel:

Tiger Cub 250? 500? Bonneville 650? (I knew a guy who towed his Cooper Climax on its trailer with his Bonneville 650).

Daytona 500. Bought new in 1970 in Houston when I was teaching near New Orleans.
Just before the warranty ran out it holed a piston. Dealer in NO didn't want to honor the warranty because I didn't buy it from him! I was able to call Triumph, and he did fix it, just took a month to do do. It holed another piston on the way home that day, and he refused to cover it because factory warranty had run out while he had it in his shop.

I left it at a guys house on the River Road, hooked it back to NO, bought a manual and some tools at another dealer and returned to fix it myself!
Like most Brit bikes, that one gave me fits, but taught me a lot about mechanics. I went on to quit teaching and go into motorcycle repair and sales for nearly twenty years afterwards.

Quote from: Papaw on December 23, 2011, 04:59:16 PMLike most Brit bikes, that one gave me fits, but taught me a lot about mechanics.

That can be said of so, so many of the vehicles from the 50s and 60s that are now remembered fondly - British anything, Italian anything, air-cooled* VWs...I guess having to spend lots of time paying attention to the vehicle leads to romance.  Or something.

*Actually air-and-oil-cooled.  The lubricating oil sheds a lot of the engine heat as it passes through the oil cooler.  For a long time, that heated air then blew over the engine, until some smart engineer realized that diverting it out of the shrouding through which the air blew would help with engine cooling.

I have always suspected that the Brits liked air cooled engines
because the  ignition systems have a fatal aversion to water....

A single water molecule can short out a lucas ignition system for days...P

Yep, "Lucas, Prince of Darkness! "