Laser Cut Wrench

[NedMan (Ned Hill)]

So earlier I posted about making a hatch dog to secure the doors on a metal cabinet.

Hatch Dog for Cabinet

So I recently salvaged a 5’x2’ metal cabinet to serve as a home solvent cabinet. Same one that I recently made a NFPA tag to go on. The cabinet has a simple spring catch in the middle of the doors that’s not especially strong. Decided I wanted a more positive catch. Made a pivoting hatch dog to go at the top in the middle were the doors meet. Made from black walnut with simple lathe turned knobs and a wipe on poly finish. Cut a couple of PTFE washers to sandwich the dog to ensure a smoot…

I stacked 2 nuts on the inside to lock them in place so the nut would not work loose as the dog was turned.

When double stacking nuts you typically place a wrench on the bottom nut and one on the top nut to tighten them against each other. In my case the bottom nut was flush against the washer inside the cabinet and it was a tight space. The nuts were only 1/8" thick and none of the appropriate sized crescent wrenches I had were thin enough to just grab the bottom nut. The tight space also meant that I couldn’t try and grab it with the tip of some needle nose pliers.

Then I realized that I had 1/8" plywood and could just quickly laser cut an opened ended wrench. There wasn’t going to be a super amount of torque so the plywood would be fine. Worked great.

[NedMan (Ned Hill)]

Ok, last night I was closing out the hatch dog design file and I decided I could not leave it alone with that quick and dirty “wrench”.

Cut a more traditional crescent wrench design with a curved nut slot bottom to distribute the strain over a wider area.

Also cut a box wrench which, when press fit onto the nut, makes a great lever knob for any nuts that need to be tighten and loosen frequently.

[HalfNormal (0.45 NACL)]

That was wenching reading!