Adjustable Wrenches for Dummies

A bunch of wrenches for Jaron's benefit

In the days when a freelancer could just about barf on the screen and still pick up a few bucks for publishing the results, there were two sorts of sites: places like Helium and eHow had lists of "assignments," while other sites let writers publish any damned thing they wanted to. The second model led to some extreme "publishing" by people who, frankly, didn't know jack about what they were saying. A search of their online profiles could often find as many as twenty, thirty, even fifty posts a day at one site, and some were spinning the same content at multiple sites. Small wonder Google Panda-ed those sites into the ash can of history. For today, let's look at the output of one of those floggers, Jaron (WriterGuy) at InfoBarrel.com, whose ignorance is out there for all to see in "Best Cheap Adjustable Wrenches."

The day he published this crap was a slow day for Jaron: he only published two articles at InfoBarrel that day (November 9, 2011), much better than August 29 of the same year, when he vomited out a dozen articles, 10 of them titled "Black Friday _____." But we digress. Let's have a look at what proves that Jaron's a hack, starting with his first paragraph:

"Adjustable wrenches are among the most durable and versatile wrenches you can find. They are more times than not used on jobs where regular wrenches just wont [sic] get the job done. And the fact that there is more than just one type tells you that there are many specialty type jobs that call for tools such as these."

Where to begin... first, adjustable wrenches, especially cheap ones, aren't particularly durable. Second, they're less likely instead of more likely to be "used on jobs where regular wrenches just wont [sic] get the job done." And last, there's only one kind of adjustable wrench...

Moving on: Jaron informs us that "The most common and widely used adjustable wrench there is, is known as a Crescent wrench." Bzzzzt: wrong! Crescent is a brand of wrench, not a type of wrench. Jaron also misinforms about the design of the adjustable wrench when he claims that "And the fact that the jaws on these are angled at 15 degrees, helps make hard to reach [sic] fasteners not so hard to reach." Not really, Jaron: the 15-degree tilt allows a user to turn the wrench over and change the "angle of attack" by 30 degrees. But the very large head of an adjustable wrench means it doesn't fit in hard-to-reach places particularly well – for that, you need a socket or box wrench. The idiot then goes on to tell his readers about the "...monkey wrench... gas grips... Stillson wrench." Jaron helpfully informs us that

"Whoever works on a regular basis with utility pipes will have one of these. Because of the pressure that needs to be maintained with a lot of the piping that this wrench was made for, a lot of strength and torque are typically needed to remove them. That's why out of all of the adjustable wrenches out there, this 'pipe wrench' as it's also called, is the perfect wrench for this job."

Jaron's just plain stupid if he thinks that the design of pipe wrenches has to do with "the pressure... [in]... the piping" – does this fool not know that a pipe wrench is specifically designed to turn round pipes instead of faceted nuts and bolts? What a dumbass.

Besides not knowing anything about tools or home improvement, WriterGuy also can't count: according to his introduction, "we'll focus on the three main types" of wrenches. We counted two – when will you tell everyone about that mythic third type, Jaron? Or was this only a method for padding your Amazon referrals...

For what it's worth, if you want information about wrenches from someone who knows a wrench from a hole in the ground, we found one here. But if you want to be misinformed by someone we're awarding the Antisocial Network Dumbass of the Day, stick with Jaron. We know which one we choose. ¹ InfoBarrel has deleted all user-generated content and become a "green" website, but this post can still be reead by using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   infobarrel.com/Best_Cheap_Adjustable_Wrenches

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