GEARWRENCH 6 Pc. Flex Flare Nut Wrench – 81911D

the ability to flex this flare wrench was worth the money of $96.25. great product, seems to be very well made.

Great item and great seller

I just as used them today and they work very well. I highly recommend them.

I have other cheaper sets of flare nut wrenches/line wrenches but I was really unhappy with them. Most cheap sets have thin handles and heads which causes nuts to be way more likely to strip and on the handle side half of them dig deep into your knuckles and hurt to use by the time you’re finishing a brake line job. First time I used these I managed to pretty easily swap out a brake soft line that I was almost positive would turn into also doing a hard line job due to the amount of rust on the hardware. The flex feature I wasn’t really sold on, but it actually works pretty well. I haven’t busted a knuckle yet due to it flexing instead of going the direction I want it to.

It’s a good thing these came out to only $12 per wrench..

First the good:
These are great looking wrenches and they sure fit the bill for when you’ve got a tight angled fastener to get to. The plating on them is great and they are quite beefy. I didn’t encounter any issues with the sizes, they all seem to fit appropriately on the correct size fasteners. Gearwrench seems to have learned a thing or two with these; the narrow edges of the wrenches have a nice radius and don’t beat up your hands like the ratcheting Gearwrench set I have with hard edges.
And then the bad:
There is no consistency on how the heads of these wrenches flex. Some are loose and floppy, and some bind up and require two hands to bend the head. It looks as though there’s an Allen-head adjustment screw on one side of each head, but when I tried turning the screw with a good quality Allen wrench, the screw head just stripped. You would think Gearwrench knew how to give the heads detents to click through.
The molded case these come in is a big, useless hunk of plastic I threw in the recycle bin. It’s too tall to put in a short toolbox drawer, and there’s no lid on it either.

Maybe they are closeout pricing them to make way for a better product? The set I bought came to only $12 per wrench, so it’s not a bad price even with the problems; I just expected more from a Gearwrench product.

These wrenches are an absolute time saver. After using non flex line wrenches, and crows foot line wrenches for years, struggling with those hard to reach power steering lines on racks, transmission cooler lines, etc, I finally decided to get these. I couldn’t justify Snap On prices, but I’ve used enough Gearwrench wrenches, I figured these would be good enough.

And they are good enough. They definitely have a sloppier fit than more expensive wrenches like Snapon, but not as bad as really cheap wrenches. The flex action is nice and smooth and allows extreme angles that will save your butt countless times. For example I did a rack on a Cadillac Northstar before I bought these, and then a few weeks later, did the power steering lines on another Northstar. Removing the lines from the rack without the flex wrenches was such a pain, and wasted more of my time than I’d like to admit, having to remove more things than I’d like to loosen the lines. With this flex wrench I didn’t have to remove anything around the rack, and released the line from the rack in a few seconds. Money well spent!

So the quality seems what you would expect from a nice tool made overseas. It’s not stellar, but it’s adequate. The finish on the wrenches is very nice, smoothly polished. The flex joints are not consistent between wrenches, some loose, some tight. I suspect these, like other similar flex wrenches, will fail eventually at the flex joint. But luckily most people, myself included, do not use these on a daily basis, more like every couple weeks. So I suspect they will last for a long time at that level of use.

They are a little long when compared to your average flare nut wrench. This is good for leverage, but even with the flex joints can sometimes be a little to long for the space you have. Keep that in mind before you going throwing away your old Craftsman line wrenches. The wrenches are comfortable, easy to use, look great, and save tons of time and aggravation.