Container Lid Cracking Spanner

[Canobi]

Hi folks

I've just finished the first week in my new position as Production Support Technician at work. Lots of tinkering and getting my hands dirty maintaining and fixing our machines, it's been great fun so far.

However, one small niggle rose it's head quite early on and that is that some of the containers for the various fluids we use have had the lids screwed on too tight and my hands just aren't what they used to be in my younger days.

There is only so many times that I can ask they guys at work to help, so instead, I spent some of my weekend fabricating a lid cracking spanner.

I took one of the lids home to get dimensions from and just using a cool little slotted angle plate I picked up from ebay, whipped out the head of the spanner from a slice of 3" mild round stock.

I first drilled and bored it to a slide fit on the lid body and then used the lid to roughly mark the positions of the protruding fins surround it.

I then cleaned up the markings to be more accurate and carefully lined each one up prior to milling.


The slots were milled to be wider than the fins to account for any human errors in the setup I was using, a dividing head would have been laborious and it's just a tool for work, not a prototype production item, so aesthetics come in second to functionality here.

With all the milling complete, I turned the angle plate 90° and set up the spanner head for drilling a hole in its side for a handle using the rule and square method to get it centred vertically and eye balled it to centre horizontally.

One end of my chosen handle had been turned down a little already, so I simply chose a matching drill for the diameter and drill it deep enough to accept the turned length.

With the handle practically finished, all that was left was to clean up the other end, this time opting for a rounded one.

To make it quicker, I used a chamfer tool to take the bulk of the meat off, then used my lathe file to bring it to shape and finished it with 240 grit and a lick of cutting oil.

Once the handle was completed, I used my new MIG welder to place a tack on either side to securely hold it in place and as a garnish, I stamped my name on the side of the spanner head to have a go at using my letter stamp set for the first timeand it came out totally caddywampus as I had expected lol.

Despite all the imperfections, the spanner is a great fit on the lids with no play, which is kinda cool considering I would have happily settled for all kinds of sloppy given how I went about making it, so I'm rather pleased with the results and I am genuinely relieved at how much easier it will make opening those damn containers at work.