MTFCA Forum

A Model A friend of mine gave me a T-1917 wrench to add to the many already in my tool box. I pulled them all out of the box to examine the design differences from the many suppliers of this wrench. It was then that I noticed one of them had two different Ford scripts, one on top of the other. At first I thought someone had etched the larger script on the wrench. But it’s not etched. It’s larger and appears to resemble an early style logo. I hope you can see it in the photo. Any ideas?

Better hang onto it. When that happens to coins they're worth big bucks.

Probably what happened there was a design change and there were wrenches that weren’t stamped very well and yours was used when the new different script logo was used. It wouldn’t be surprising that there are wrench’s that had defects and yours was one of them and was finally used. But of course it’s just a guess! But if it was a double stamp US coin that’s a whole other story! And that’s not a guess!

Pretty common I'd say. That is the style that came after the 1913 type.

Henry Ford was known to be good at recycling things, even wooden crates.

In Fords thinking if the part worked that was OK. Never mind a blemish. I have a few T blocks and one has a slightly blurred Ford script on it. Sometimes the O in the Ford script isn’t real clear and others are. I’m sure others have noticed this over the years also. Probably when the casting was taken out of the mold blurs occurred.

Ditto that, I have a head that the script is blurry and not well defined (like the core got jostled, the sand wasn't moist enough, or who knows) but I'm sure that never stopped it from going on a car, as long as the part functioned and was within design parameters...

Lots of variations in script on band wrenches.

Three to the far right are approx. 1915 to 1920.

Rest are approx. 1921 to the end of production - large and small script.

Put in the For What It Is worth column...

I have long held that Ford never had control over their own tool supply for the T. They put out an order for tools where the Purchase Order reigned, they then made drawings of what they received from a supplier for archive purposes and eventually assigning a T-number, and so it went. We have collective evidence that just as many tools didn't follow the drawing as those that did.

The supplier on the other hand was already a commercial tool supplier of the items in question. The supplier then had two choices once the logo requirement came in a couple of years later. They could make production runs with Ford in the die, or...they could run a re-strike of their own commercial product to satisfy Ford needs as to monthly volume. Part of the rationalization here is there are just as many identical monkey wrenches today without the script as there are with?

This one appears to have been almost a mis-strike that was tossed back into material supply and struck again but on a different line the second time around.

I came to this conclusion a while back about strikes and re-strikes because I was having trouble accepting that an order for 50,000 tools such as a wrench spread out over 9 months that ramps up to 1 million + per year that that were used near monthly, especially when Ford was buying on the open market. Would you increase your factory 20 fold as a windfall when you didn't control the one source policy? I sorta doubt it, and there is apparently no evidence that Ford offered single source contracts.

Just my thoughts, your own opinions may vary

I think these wrenches are cast steel and a supplier used an existing wrench as a pattern which has left what is called a ghost mark in the sand mold. The supplier probably was required to use the current approved logo.
You find this in cast iron skillets from time to time when a new foundry would take a quality Griswold skillet as a mold and put their own logo in the mold but sometimes you can still see the faint Griswold cross logo in the background .
Just a thought.