Review on 🔧 KD Tool 86229 Wrench: The Ultimate Multi-Purpose Wrench for Every Project by Josh Garber

I have a new toolbox in stock and have decided to stock up on a wide range of wrenches - 12-point combo, ratchet, reversible ratchet and flexible ratchet - to ensure I always have have a tool handy for the job. I took this set as well as the SAE set because they were very cheap and had a universal spline drive. In my experience, when done well, spline drives are amazing, much better than typical 12 point designs. Good examples are Falcon socket wrenches and Proto ratchet wrenches. For the most part, the slots on these keys seem like winners, but I've found 14mm to be very poor. I have attached pictures of 8mm and 14mm respectively and hopefully you can see the difference in tolerances. As you'd expect, the 8mm fits very snugly and the wedges rest on flat surfaces with plenty of corner clearance. However, the 14 has a lot of slop and the splines land closer to the corner. This means this wrench is particularly sensitive to rounding of fasteners, which is not very good. I tested 8-15, 17 and 19 and out of them only 14 were like this. The rest is on par with my set of Proto reversible keys, which are in a completely different price range. I can just throw away the 14mm lens so I never have a situation where I regret using it. Also, I have somewhat mixed feelings. The 120-way mechanism has nice play and engagement with all wrenches, but it's not much better than my 72-tooth ratchet wrenches, which are also a Gearwrench brand. I can definitely say it "overshoots" at times and takes a bigger swing to catch the tooth. It's probably no worse than a typical 72-tooth ratchet box end, but it's a little disappointing. In comparison, I have a set of SK Phillips wrenches, which clearly have an exceptional mechanism that engages with far more precision than traditional ratchet ring lugs. I don't know yet how durable these wrenches are, but I have several Gearwrench wrenches that have grown strong after 5-6 years of daily use. I'm one of those monsters that regularly breaks and twists fasteners with the end of a ratchet box and so far they've never let me down. I hope they can reach that level of reliability, but I guess I'll see. Another thing I have my doubts about is the flexible head in general. A lot of people like flexible heads, but this is my first experience with them. I've used 13s and 16s for brake work and found the flex head wasn't that useful. Properly distributing the force to keep the end of the box from slipping off the clasp seems like more effort than it's worth. There might be times when these wrenches come in handy, but for the money I think a 15 degree set of reversible wrenches might be a better choice. In any case, they have a good finish, the casting/working seems good with no sharp edges, the mechanisms seem solid for the most part, and all tolerances apart from 14 seem as good as my $300 proto short wrench set.