Thursday, December 19, 2013

Square sockets for drain plugs

I have noticed that people frequently ask if there is a tool that works to remove drain or plugs on the 65/66 Mustangs, like in the gas tank, rear axle housing, or manual transmissions. And, I just realized that I have never gotten around to mentioning that I have finally found them. I used to use a short 3/8 drive extension on the gas tanks. You put the extension on backwards, as if the tank was the wrench, and turn it with a 12 pt. 11mm socket, but, obviously, this only works on 3/8 plugs. SK makes square sockets, both male and female, which are called pipe plug sockets, and they work great. These are also made by Sears and a few others. The problem that I always ran into looking for these things was sales personnel that would look at me like I was the one that was obviously quite confused since they had never heard of the thing that I was describing, and I didn't know what they were called. Once I found myself a sufficiently old person that remembered back when those were fairly common and knew what they were called, I started checking around and found myself a set very quickly. These things are truly, as the aforementioned old guy said, "Handier than a two-pocket shirt." It would be an awfully good idea for a person to pick up a couple of these in the appropriate sizes for the plugs on their car. I picked up the complete sets, both male and female, for 'just in case', but, that is probably (certainly) overkill, since I don't work on these cars for a living any more.

No comments:

Post a Comment