How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by lt.luke » Mon Jan 29, 2018 6:22 pm

I’ll take a stab at the first photo. The lighter colored wrench is 1940.


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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by henry501 » Mon Jan 29, 2018 9:00 pm

Luke,

Well... if my research is right the answer is NONE of them are 1940. That's the problem. I bought each of these thinking surely they were wartime manufactured but now I'm not so sure based upon comparing them to the 1940 and 1954 patent drawings. The trouble is... outwardly they appear identical to the 1940 patent drawings. But they also outwardly appear identical to the 1954 drawing. The problem arises when you compare the "spring guide members" and the internal forgings of the handle to retain the "spring guide members" of the 1940 model and the 1954 models that you see the inner differences that make each model unique.

I did go back and look one more time at all of the drawings: 1929, 1932, 1933, 1940 and 1945. And may have found another anomaly with the "spring guide members" that will refute what I've said so far. I'll post those findings tomorrow since I want to triple check my observations, see if I can take a look at the "spring guide member" of a brand new Ridgid pipe wrench and also utilize close-ups of certain elements of the patent drawings to show what I'm observing.

More to come.

Thank you,
Henry

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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Tue Jan 30, 2018 5:00 am

I'm in a rush to find and quote myself, but if you look back, you'll see that I stated upthread that most of the patents were related to stabilizing the action on the dynamic jaw and were, with the exception of adding early on the little externally forged stabilizer behind the worm nut, therefore related to design improvements mechanically internal to the housing.

You'll also that we all recognized that there was an implicit wartime/postwar gray area for the external tells.

Other collectors can approach that according to their own prerogative.

For me, if a RIDGID pipe wrench doesn't have the obvious rounded off end on the dynamic jaw and the split knurled worm nut, it's wartime because it presents itself as wartime from the perspective of a historical display.

If you have to take them apart to distinguish them, it goes into the 'overly picayune' category for my own sense of standards, which I have talked about in other tool cases before. For me, and speaking only for myself, as I have said in similar cases, that goes too harshly beyond the spirit of trying to be historically correct/representative as feasibly as possible and into that area of sapping the joy out of the hobby. Others may feel differently. My perspective has no effect on them or their kits. By the same token, their perspective has no effect on my kits with wartime feature compliant pipe wrenches whose exact date of production shall remain blissfully undetermined.
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by d42jeep » Tue Jan 30, 2018 7:38 am

I’m firmly in Wingnutts’s camp in this discussion. I used to have Ridgid pipe wrenches in my keeper sets but even if, as Henry states, they can be dated between 1940 and 1954, it’s still impossible to definitively state that they are actually wartime. There will always be a gray area. That is why I converted all of my pipe wrenches in my keeper GMTK and MVMTS to Walco which not only can be determined to be wartime, but can be accurately dated by month and year. They appear in RA PD images as well.
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Wartime Walco pipe wrenches from 6" to 24"
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Tue Jan 30, 2018 9:03 am

I got a PM asking me to explain the gray area I was referring to better.

Best way to do that is direct readers to this post, here.

If that's not clear, here is a summary:

- Wartime features were unchanged in 1948.
- In 1950, the knurling in the worm nut starts to appear with recesses in it. Still a squared off floating jaw end.

So, it's true that RIDGID pipe wrenches with wartime features may actually be as late as 1949.

Again, I can live with a 4 year long gray area. Others may disagree.

Or you can go with Walco, as Don aptly points out. (My current kit has matching 1942 Walcos in it.)

I do like me some RIDGID's with removable jaw inserts, too. :)
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Tue Jan 30, 2018 5:34 pm

Clarifying the gray area for the PM question I got brings up a good point. Since catalogs and ads with RIDGID pipe wrenches are showing postwar features by 1948 (split knurling on the worm nut) and 1952 (rounded end on floating jaw), the 1954 patent is irrelevant. We shouldn't be seeing pipe wrenches with wartime features (all knurled worm nut, square end) in 1954.
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by henry501 » Tue Jan 30, 2018 7:33 pm

Greg,

Bingo! Your last post gets to the final point I alluded to in my reply to Luke up thread but had not yet gathered my evidence to prove. That point is... after reconsidering the patent drawings and looking at the Ridgid pipe wrenches I have collected I think Ridgid may have played loosey goosey with the actual production and manufacture of certain patented design elements versus what was shown in the patent drawings. You have certainly proved that regarding the external "tells" with your examples of the incorporation dates of the split knurled nut and the round bottom floating jaw (as seen in catalogs) versus what is illustrated in the patent drawings.

Not to seem like I'm waffling on my previous post about the certainty of the "Spring guide member" being a definitive determinant of wartime manufacture I now think that issue is muddied too because... The same thing that you explained above about the external tells may have happened with the "spring guide members". As we know, Ridge patented several variations of them over the years but perhaps in practice they used only one version of it regardless of what they patented over the years. I'll follow up on this with photos of the internals of my wrenches as well as close ups of the "spring guide member" drawing from the 1929 patent versus the "spring guide member" drawing from the 1954 patent to further illustrate this theory.

In the mean time, I'm honestly not doing this to force folks to adhere to my way of collecting but was merely trying to advance the collective knowledge for anyone who wants to know.

Also for what it's worth, I have a set of Walcos for the same reason you and Don mention.

Finally, I too love the Ridgid pipe wrenches, that's why I want to do this nit picky deep dive to get as much info on them as possible. For me it's a labor of love for those wrenches.

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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Wed Jan 31, 2018 4:10 am

henry501 wrote:
Tue Jan 30, 2018 7:33 pm
The same thing that you explained above about the external tells may have happened with the "spring guide members".
Not sure what you mean. Just so there's no misunderstandings, what I am saying is this...

RIDGID pipe wrenches did not have all-knurled worm adjusting thumbnuts after 1948, and did not have dynamic jaws with square ends after 1951. No ads or catalogs show that. All the RIDGID pipe wrenches with all-knurled thumbnuts and squared-off dynamic jaw ends were made before 1948. Including your examples. Whatever you are seeing in those pipe wrenches relative to your reading of the 1954 patent is mistaken. Which is not surprising. These design improvements are often in the minutiae and sometimes difficult to distinguish. If I were really that curious, it would be for academic reasons, since it has no impact on the wartime wrenches, but what I would do is find a late 1950's RIDGID pipe wrench (split knurling on the nut, rounded off end on the dynamic jaw, and very likely painted red) and compare the innards to an early (pre-1940 or wartime) RIDGID pipe wrench.
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Silly's MB » Wed Jan 31, 2018 1:10 pm

Wingnutt wrote:
Mon Nov 03, 2014 9:59 am

I’m convinced the address is a red herring.

- The address is listed as North Ridgeville, OH on their 1940 patent. The address is listed as Elyria, OH, on their 1954 patent.
- That might suggest they moved, and support several on-line references, to include Harry Epstein and Wikipedia, to them moving to Elyria in 1943.
- The address is listed as North Ridgeville, OH in the CPA War Supply Contracts books, even for contracts let in 1944, but they could’ve moved in 1943 and the agencies never updated their records.


Bottom line for me on address is that it’s irrelevant. It can’t be used to identify vintage. Has anyone ever seen a RIDGID tool marked “North Ridgeville, OH”? If they’re all marked Elyria, regardless of vintage, it doesn’t help.

My hunch is that they may have had an adminstrative office in North Ridgeville where the company brass and the engineers worked, and a manufacturing plant in Elyria. But it doesn't really matter.

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Interesting to note that on the February 1943 CPA contracts information it shows both addresses supplying tools.
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:53 pm

I'll check the '45 edition when I get home, Rog, to see if that continued after '43. It was astonishing to me to discover the number of contracts several of the major mfgrs had that were aligned with alternate addresses/facilities. Snap-On, just to name one example off the top of my head, made alot of tools out of Mt. Carmel, Illinois.
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by retro-roco » Wed Jan 31, 2018 6:49 pm

...
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by henry501 » Wed Jan 31, 2018 9:49 pm

Greg,

What I meant but guess I did not articulate clearly is that after looking at the patent drawings again and then comparing the internal details of my presumably "wartime" wrenches with what is shown on the drawings it leads me to believe that the drawings may not be a definitive guide to what was actually manufactured. For example, none of my "wartime" wrenches have the internal features or "spring guide member" illustrated in the 1940 patent yet they do have the same external features or "tells". Further, the "spring guide member" in those same wrenches seems to be very similar to the "spring guide member" illustrated in the 1954 patent (which is what originally gave me concern because I figured that my "wartime" wrenches were actually 1954 or later wrenches but not so late as to have the rounded floating jaw end or the split knurled nut). But upon even closer inspection, the "spring guide member" in my "wartime" wrenches is actually a "dead on" version of the "spring guide member" illustrated in the 1929 patent. In fact EVERY one of my Ridgid pipe wrenches, even those that are older than the "wartime" wrenches has the 1929 style "spring guide member". So until further evidence contradicts me I'm now convinced that the patent drawings are not the "whole story" when it comes to dating these wrenches by which "spring guide member" they show because it seems that even though Ridge patented various styles of "spring guide members" they only used the 1929 version. Either that or coincidentally ALL of my wrenches lost their original and unique '30's and '40's style spring guide members" (as shown in the various patent drawings), the previous owners then re machined the interiors of the wrenches to accommodate the 1929 style "spring guide member" and then inserted a replacement 1929 style "spring guide member".

I tie this thematically to your research about the knurled nut and rounded bottom of the floating jaw because as you pointed out, the 1954 patent drawing shows a fully knurled nut yet in reality (as illustrated in the catalog references you cite) Ridge was already manufacturing wrenches with the split knurled nut design on wrenches prior to the 1954 patent date. Thus the common theme with my "spring guide members" and your knurled nuts and floating jaw bottoms research is that what the patent drawing shows may not be exactly what was currently being produced during that era and vice versa.

The end result of all of this is... At first I looked at these patent drawings as absolutely definitive in every detail as to what was actually being manufactured as of the date of the patent and thereafter (until superseded by a subsequent patent). Now I'm inclined to view them as more "representative" of designs and features that Ridge sought to patent, but not necessarily produce or, more precisely stated, not produce on the date of the patent and thereafter.

So I'm still going to fixate my further research and observations on the specific features of these Ridgid wrenches to: 1.) see if I can find something to date these wrenches to a particular year and 2.) see if I can gather any more useful information to figure out if any of the various patent designs were actually incorporated into these wrenches. However, I'll hold back on further speculation until I have something definitive to report. And... yes I was planning on looking at the internal features and "spring guide member" of a 1950's era wrench as part of that further research. :D

For now though, based upon my current observations, I'm speculating that trying to date a wrench based upon the idea that unique "spring guide members" (as shown in he various patent drawings) were actually produced during the different eras may be a red herring because in actuality it may be that only the 1929 style was produced regardless of what was patented.

Thank you,
Henry

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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Thu Feb 01, 2018 3:32 am

Henry,

I see what you mean about the 1954 patent drawing, but the ads and catalogs that were posted clearly showed those cosmetic actual production changes. The patent drawing chart was never proposed to be used exclusively of the other research (catalogs and ads). Its primary benefit was illustrating the obvious differences between the earliest pipe wrenches (no external stabilizer) and the prewar pipe wrenches (no distinctive angled swash plate) from the wartime pipe wrenches (distinctive angled swash plate). Because all of those pipe wrenches can be found in the wild with the square end and fully knurled nut, the collector has to use the other features.

I worry that this entire conversation is now veering into making this seem much more difficult than it is.

To all new collectors,

Identifying the reasonably correct RIDGID pipe wrench is fairly easy. Look at the end on the dynamic jaw and the worm nut. If those are round and have knurling split in two or three rings by recesses, they are definitely post-war. Put them down. If those features are square and fully knurled, respectively, you need to check two other features. If there is no distinctive, raised, polished plate in the shape of a lazy L, with a pin, on the housing, and no external stabilizer forged on the handle for the end of the dynamic jaw, put it down. It's too early. If those are present, you have a pipe wrench made between 1937 and ~1948, which is as close as we can get, and which most of us consider wartime.
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:43 am

I should've done this a long time ago...

RIDGID Tells.jpg
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Note 1: RIDGID pipe wrenches made before 1929 do not have this stabilizer on the shank behind the adjusting nut. The patent number found on vintage RIDGID pipe wrenches (1,727,623) is actually for this stabilizer, not the wrench itself. The patent for the wrench, granted in 1925, was 1,552,091, and it was never put on the wrench. Wrenches made between 1925 and 1929 have “PAT PEND’G” on the shank.

Note 2: RIDGID pipe wrenches made before mid-1937 either have a plain rather bulbous housing with either no plate or this trapezoidal shaped plate.

Note 3: RIDGID pipe wrenches made after mid-1937 have this narrow angle-shaped plate on the housing. Thanks to Roger Milam's research, we know that Ridge actually trademarked the shape of this plate, believe it or not, on March 1, 1938. Their USPTO application described it as an "angular bar extending across the head of the wrench," and they cited July 10, 1937 as date of first use. His post, with a link to the trademark information, can be seen here back on page 2 of this thread. Patent 2,192,702 (1940), which purports to improve upon the internals to further stabilize the dynamic jaw, holds the key to getting us a little closer to wartime, but it's not an obvious distinction and requires removing the pin in the tongue in the static jaw to scrutinize the internals.

Note 4: C.1948 (based on ads), RIDGID pipe wrenches start showing up with an adjusting nut that is not completely knurled. Some have one recess, some have two, some even have an interlocking D and G. We're not sure of the sequence to those features, which is irrelevant to the salient point - that up until 1948 the adjusting nut was fully knurled.

Note 5: In 1952 (based on ads), RIDGID pipe wrenches start showing up with a rounded end on the threaded dynamic jaw.

And, again, if you find a RIDGID pipe wrench with the correct features from the production era (1937-1948) inclusive of "wartime" and it also has a set of codes on the dynamic jaw that looks something like this (B-6-4, B-12-5, etc), we think it may be month-year codes, as in June 1944, December 1945, etc, and you're really doing well for yourself.
Last edited by Wingnutt on Fri Feb 02, 2018 3:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do you date a Ridgid pipe wrench.

Post by Wingnutt » Thu Feb 01, 2018 1:51 pm

Silly's MB wrote:
Wed Jan 31, 2018 1:10 pm
Interesting to note that on the February 1943 CPA contracts information it shows both addresses supplying tools.
Roger,
In the 1945 edition of the CPA MWSC, all the Ridge Tool Co contracts are listed under one single address: "N Ridgeville Ohio". Even though the 1943 edition doesn't include contract numbers, I was able to find them in the 1945 edition by their values, start dates, and end dates. It looks like the only one that got dropped in the 1945 update was that first one, for "Rental Services."
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