Heart wrenching.

When my dad died, my mom sent me a heavy box with a selection of his tools. He'd had quite the workbench. At the time I was living in an apartment and I neither needed a lot of tools nor had the place to store them, so I begged her to sell the bunch and not send them all to me. Well, within a few years I became a homeowner and regretted the timing that robbed me of most of my father's collection. 

My dad had some great stuff. 

All his hand tools had been used a lot, and it showed. He could do any kind of work within reason (he did not go too deeply into electrical work because he did not want to die before his time). The tools Mom sent me are more solid and better made (in the God Blessed United States of America!) than many of the tools I've bought since.  

While I was dealing with the sink trauma a couple of weeks ago—still unresolved, because I got busy, and sick—I had a closer look at this wrench. Exhibit A from my dad's collection, if you will. 

This is a pipe wrench, not a monkey wrench, the monkey wrench having a flat top and no teeth, meant to turn lug nuts. Nor is this a Crescent wrench, which has the C shape, its jaws in a direct line from the arm. 

The origin of the term monkey wrench is obscure, although it may have come from a supposed resemblance to a monkey's face. As you can see, this pipe wrench does not look all that monkeyish and is intended for use on small pipes. 

It has a number 8 on the head, signifying that it is an eight-inch wrench (at full head extension) for 1/8- to 3/4-inch pipes. The handle has a loop, indicating that it probably hung on a wall with a line of other pipe wrenches in numerical and size order. I don't recall Dad having the whole set, though, and I certainly have no order to my own tool bench. It's a disaster. 

I have no indication of how old it is, but a closer look shows me where it originated: 

Crescent Tool! So despite not being a Crescent wrench, this is a Crescent company wrench, you see.

The Crescent Tool Company was established in Jamestown in 1907. Jamestown is in Western New York, near the Pennsylvania border, about as far from Rochester as it is from Cleveland or Pittsburgh. Jamestown was the home of a large number of furniture factories, in part because of access to great amounts of furniture-quality wood, and indeed called itself the furniture capital of the world until 1945. It was not well-situated for heavy manufacturing in that era, though. But a thriving tool company? Why not? 

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the wrench factory was still going after 117 years?

Ha! Ha! Silly human. New York hates things that cause prosperity like icky manufacturing. Western New York is as rust-belty as any Rust Belt state.

Crescent now part of Apex Tool Group, along with SATA, Campbell, Weller, and other tool outfits, and Apex is owned by Bain Capital. You may recall that Bain was the Worst Company in the Universe™ in 2012 when co-founder Mitt "the vulture capitalist” Romney was auditioning for another a job. 

Bain bought Apex in 2013, but the Jamestown Crescent factory shut down before that, in 1984. How do I know the date? Because if you worked there, you might be entitled to compensation! If you put in four weeks on a summer job 40+ years ago and have cancer now, you may be able to help a law firm get money!

Asbestos is not a joking matter -- and yet maybe it's a shame those old Jamestown furniture factories hadn't been built with it. The Jamestown Royal Factory burned in 2021, and the Crawford Furniture Factory burned in 2022. 

So where do they make Crescent products now? Apex uses lots of factories in several countries for its tool lines. I read online that Crescent wrenches have been made in China since 2011, but that report is unconfirmed. Could be Mexico, or Canada, even somewhere else in America—or so Bain hints. Are they just throwing us a sop? 

Oh, who knows. No one ever tells us anything unless they think we'll like it, so hardly any company tells us anything anymore. 

But my dad’s little pipe wrench was made in Jamestown, New York, in the good old USA. I miss my dad, and I miss a lot of things about that America, a place that made things that worked, that made things that lasted.