On 1/17/2018 10:11 PM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Well, you could also make your own wrenches.
The technique would be similar to making your
own knife. Buy a bar of heat treatable steel
that's the correct thickness:
http://www.onlinemetals.com Trim to shape
with either a band saw or angle grinder.
Refine the shape with an angle grinder, belt
sander or hand file. Make a fancy wooden
handle in the same manner as a custom knife.
Harden and anneal the wrench. Clean up the
slag, oil the wooden handle, make YouTube
video, and you're done.

But with mechanical tools, I don't think
I could ever make a tool that is superior to
one which I can get cheaply from Crooks"R"Us.
And if it would be, the difference wouldn't be
one I would notice or one that would motivate
all the time spent on it.

It depends. I've certainly made tools. Not to duplicate something I
could buy at a store; instead, to get a tool that wasn't available - or
at least, not available in a reasonable time.

I don't recall having to do this for working on a bicycle, but I've done
it several times for other projects. Example: a car I once owned needed
a repair to part of the ventilation and air conditioning system. The
manual said to pull out the entire dashboard to access the bad part. But
an online discussion said a person with small hands could get it out by
pulling only the radio.

My hands are not small, but I was able to make a simple miniature wrench
that could reach the most inaccessible screw. That saved me much trouble
and expense.

Hmm: A bike-related example! It was very easy to make a super-long
screwdriver that allowed me to cannibalize the head from an old Zefal pump.

--
- Frank Krygowski