Ruminations upon The Persuader. And a tool related question for Dopers

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was talking to someone today and she’d mentioned that someone at her work had persuaded some of the people she had to deal with to support her. And I got to thinking about the tool I’d known, back in my Navy days, as The Persuader.

The Persuader was a bit of a mystery.

In the Navy, we were trained, specifically to avoid using a crescent wrench for any purpose. Most DIYers will have had the experience of trying to deal with a nut that had been stripped or deformed by someone using a crescent wrench or a locking grip set of pliers. Which is bad enough, but often such things could affect how well the nut would hold on the fastener, too - by deforming it.

While it’s possible to strip a nut with a box wrench, it’s much harder to do. And so we were trained, as I said, to avoid using crescent wrenches whenever possible. And to aid in that, there was only one crescent wrench in the whole of the engineroom.

The Persuader.

It was a four foot long, six to eight inch wide (at it’s maximum aperture) crescent wrench. It had no grooving on it, like a monkey wrench might. It was simply a huge crescent wrench looking just like this image, except for being about 10 times larger.

So, during slack times during watches we’d get it out, again, to marvel at The Persuader. Not only was it a tool that specifically we weren’t supposed to be using on any of the engineroom equipment, but it was a tool that no one knew where we’d find a crew-serviceable nuts to use it ON. Most of the nuts that we knew of that were of a size to make The Persuader a reasonable tool were, according to the maintenance specifications we had, torqued down to several thousand ft-lbs torque. Specifically because the components weren’t meant to be serviced in the normal course of affairs.

So, the conclusion we invariably came to, no matter how we argued it out was that The Persuader was not meant to be used on any of the equipment in the plant.

Which meant it was obviously meant to be used to help the LPO of M-Div keep his grease apes in line.

Many an argument ended when I heard the LPO, or the senior watchstander on duty, ask an obnoxious sailor, “Do I need to get out The Persuader?”
Have other Dopers had the experience of working with, or around, a tool that served no rational purpose, and if so, did that tool have an odd name?

2

VC03 isn’t that odd a name.

Nothing personal: I just needed a commonly pitted doper for the joke to work.

3

Ditto on The Persuader name, and in the same work environment. But it was a six-foot length of pipe that we would use to un-torque bolts that had decided to never be undone.

4

In my lab in grad school we had a Sledgehammer with a label on it: Fine Adjustment Tool.

5

In my family, a sledgehammer of any size is referred to as The Persuader.

6

A motorcycle mechanic told me the largest screwdriver and hammer in the Snap-On® catalog had the designations BFS and BFH. It might even be true. :wink:

7

That’s the Beauty of the Persuader - it doesn’t DO anything…

8

The BFS is sometimes called the Ford tool. As you are trying to line something up, and it becomes necessary to use a 3 foot long screwdriver pry it into place.
The BFH is used not only in automotive, but in construction.
Scene: Two workers are trying to line up a 30 foot long wall form that is suspended from a crane.
Worker #1 Where are we?
Worker #2 Almost there, bring it to me a cunt hair
Worker #! ::: Picks up BFH* WHAM!::: How’s that?
Worker #2 Give me another cunt hair
Worker #1 (not sure of how hard to hit it) What color?
Worker #2 blonde**
Worker #2 wham
Worker #1 Right on!

  • In construction a small hand held sledge (3 lbs) called a single jack, or the true BFH a full sized sledge with the handle cut off half way for one handed use called a double jack. Who jack is I have no idea.
    ** In decreasing order of size Big black curly one, black, red, blonde. One advantage of this measurement is that is it the same in metric or feet/inches.