Miles Turner

This tool would’ve saved me hundreds☝️

I paid a man $360 to turn one bolt. Took him 5 minutes. He was pulling out of the lot before I finished my coffee. I wish I had the tool before I needed it! I need to tell this story because it's been 3 months and it still eats at me. My name is Walt. I'm 61. June and I have been full-timing in a 2015 Winnebago Adventurer 35P for a little over 2 years now. Sold our place in Kenosha, Wisconsin, right after I retired from 28 years at the Chrysler engine plant in Kenosha. I'm not a mechanic by trade but I've been under a hood since I was 14. My old man taught me on a 1974 Ford F-100 in the backyard and I've fixed every vehicle I've ever owned. Oil changes, brakes, alternators, starters, water pumps, you name it. I don't pay people to do things I can do myself. That's how I was raised and that's how I've lived. Which is why what happened in Quartzsite sits with me the way it does. We were set up on BLM land outside Quartzsite, Arizona, in early December. Snowbirds everywhere. Good weather. June and I had planned to stay through January. The first morning I went to level the coach and the rear driver-side leveling jack wouldn't retract. Extended fine the day before but now the motor hummed and the jack wouldn't budge. Got underneath and saw it immediately. The mounting bolt on the jack's upper bracket had backed out about 3 turns. Bracket shifted, jack cocked in its housing, bound up. One 15mm bolt. Tighten it, realign the bracket, jack retracts clean. I could see the bolt. I could reach in and touch it with my fingertip. But the bolt head was recessed behind the frame cross-member, tucked between the cross-member and a section of the brake line routing bracket. The space was maybe 3 inches deep and 4 inches wide, with steel on 3 sides and the brake line bracket on the fourth. Nothing straight was getting in there at the right angle to seat on that bolt head square. I spent the next 5 hours trying. 3/8" ratchet with a standard extension. Couldn't clear the cross-member. Extension hit the frame before the socket got close. Tried from the side. Hit the brake line bracket. Tried from below at an angle. Socket wouldn't seat square because the extension was cocked. Stubby ratchet. Got the socket close enough to touch the bolt head but couldn't swing the handle. Cross-member blocked the arc. About 5 degrees of swing. The bolt was snugged down with thread lock and road vibration and 5 degrees wasn't breaking anything loose. Flex-head ratchet. This one hurt because I thought it was going to work. The flex joint let me angle the handle away from the cross-member and I got the socket seated. Pulled hard. Flex head deflected under torque and the socket popped off. Tried again. Same thing. 9 times I got the socket on that bolt and 9 times the flex head folded when I needed it to hold. The 10th time the socket popped off and my hand slammed into the cross-member hard enough to split the skin across 3 knuckles. Universal joint adapter. It fit into the space. Socket went on the bolt. Started pulling and the universal joint did what it always does — converted my torque into side load. Socket walked off the bolt head and I felt the hex starting to round. I stopped. Crow foot wrench. Couldn't orient it. Space too narrow. The crow foot needed room to sit flat and there wasn't room. There was room for the bolt head and about a quarter inch of air on each side. I crawled out from under the coach and dropped into my camp chair. Right hand bleeding through a shop rag. Back seized up from 5 hours on the ground. It was 3 in the afternoon and I hadn't eaten since breakfast. June came out with a plate and a bottle of water and sat next to me and didn't say a word. She knew. 34 years married. She knows what it looks like when I'm beaten. I called a mobile RV mechanic. A guy named Carlos Vega out of Yuma. Said he could come the next morning. $175 service call plus $185/hr. I said fine. Carlos showed up at 8:30 the next morning in a white Ram 3500 service truck with toolboxes down both sides. I showed him the bolt. Showed him the space. He looked at it for maybe 10 seconds, went to his truck, and came back with a tool I'd never seen before. Short. Maybe 15 inches long. Looked like an extension bar but it had a fixed offset angle built into the body. Not a flex joint. Not a universal. A solid angle with a chain drive inside that transfers torque through the offset without deflection. He called it an offset extension wrench. He slid under the coach, put a 15mm socket on the end, and the offset angled the bar past the cross-member into that recessed pocket where nothing I owned could reach. Ratchet on the other end, up above the cross-member where there was room to swing. One pull. The bolt cracked loose. He snugged it back down, checked the bracket alignment, and slid out. He was standing and wiping his hands before I fully understood what had happened. 5 minutes. One tool. $360. Carlos was decent about it. He could see my face. Said, "It's not about knowing how to wrench. It's about having the right geometry for the space." I appreciated that. But I stood there watching him drive away and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. I'd paid $360 for 5 minutes of a man's time because I didn't own a $79 tool. That night I asked June to look up what Carlos had used. She found it. The Offset Extension Wrench from WildBear. I ordered one the next morning. Since then I've used it on the water heater bracket bolt behind the exterior panel where the anode rod access plate mounts. Used it on the generator mounting bolt underneath the chassis where it tucks behind the exhaust crossover pipe. Used it on the AC compressor bracket bolt on my brother-in-law's Sierra where it buries itself behind the serpentine belt tensioner. Every time, it does exactly what Carlos's did. Slides past the obstruction, seats on the bolt, transfers real torque through the angle, and the bolt moves. You can't get it at Camping World or Home Depot or Lowe's. The company sells direct from their website, wildbeartools.com. I'll drop the link in the comments. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench It's $79. I think about that number a lot. I paid $360 because I didn't have a $79 tool. And it's not the money that gets me. It's sitting there watching a man do in 5 minutes what I couldn't do in 5 hours. That's a feeling I don't need to have twice. Better to have one in the box before I need it. I'm 61 years old. I've been fixing things my whole life. I don't plan on stopping and I don't plan on calling Carlos again. Drop 360 below if you've ever paid a mechanic to do something that should have taken 5 minutes. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench