1/2" DR. Deep Hexagon Socket (22mm)

Name: 1/2" DR. Deep Hexagon Socket (22mm)
Brand: Harden
SKU: 535552

Item No. 535552

Price on request

Twenty-two millimetres deep is the largest deep socket in this range and it belongs to heavy work: hub and axle nuts, U-bolts on leaf-sprung suspension, large driveline studs, and heavy machinery and plant fixings.

U-bolts are the job worth describing, because they are the classic case for a deep socket and there is no substitute. A U-bolt clamps a leaf spring to an axle, and by design a long length of thread projects past each nut — often several centimetres of it. A standard socket cannot come anywhere near the flats. Only a deep socket reaches, and on a truck or a light commercial with leaf springs, that is a job that comes round regularly.

U-bolt nuts are also usually in appalling condition, since they sit under the vehicle in the direct path of everything the road throws up. That makes the approach as important as the tool. Penetrating oil left to work properly, heat applied to the nut so it expands away from the thread, and working the nut back and forth in small movements rather than one long pull will free far more of them than raw leverage will. Raw leverage tends to shear the U-bolt, and while a sheared U-bolt is replaceable, it turns a straightforward job into a longer one.

On reassembly, U-bolt nuts have a torque figure and it is worth respecting — they are what hold the axle to the vehicle.

The socket is drop forged from fine chrome vanadium with a matt chrome finish. Forging flows the steel's internal grain around the hexagonal form rather than cutting across it at the six corners where all the stress concentrates, and that matters most on a long, relatively thin-walled barrel carrying heavy loads.

The buyers are commercial vehicle, truck and bus workshops, suspension and spring specialists, plant and heavy equipment mechanics, agricultural and plantation engineering, and hardware dealers supplying the heavy trades.

Two rules. Seat the socket fully and square before applying force, since a deep socket sitting at an angle bears on the tips of the hex and rounds nuts. And never use a chrome hand socket on an impact wrench — plated hardened chrome vanadium is brittle under impact hammering and can crack and throw fragments, and a long barrel is more vulnerable than a short one. Impact work needs black chrome molybdenum impact sockets. Ask us on WhatsApp for a price.