This was patented in 1841 and the tools were advertised and sold in the United States as monkey wrenches, a term which was already in use for the English handle-set coach wrenches. ![]() In 1840, Worcester, Massachusetts knife manufacturer Loring Coes invented a screw-based coach wrench design in which the jaw width was set with a spinning ring fixed under the sliding lower jaw, above the handle. They were set either by sliding a wedge, or later by twisting the handle, which turned a screw, narrowing or widening the jaws. The World English Dictionary gives a nautical definition for monkey, as a modifier "denoting a small light structure or piece of equipment contrived to suit an immediate purpose: a monkey foresail a monkey bridge." Īdjustable coach wrenches for the odd-sized nuts of wagon wheels were manufactured in England and exported to North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are still used by aircraft technicians, mainly when large but low torque fasteners are involved.įor other uses, see Monkey wrench (disambiguation). These are also known as a Ford wrench owing to this type of wrench being included in the tool kit supplied with every Ford Model A. A wrench with smooth jaws (no teeth) is not used for turning threaded pipe. The term monkey wrench is also sometimes used loosely, usually by non-tradespeople, to refer to the pipe wrench (owing to their broadly similar shapes), but tradespeople (plumbers, pipefitters) usually speak more precisely than that. It is still of interest as an antique among tool collectors and is still occasionally used in maintenance and repair when it happens to be convenient. It was widely used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but is now seldom used in the mechanical trades, having been mostly replaced by the newer style of shifting (adjustable) spanner/wrench. The monkey wrench is a type of adjustable wrench, a later American development of eighteenth-century English coach wrenches.
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