1/2" Hexagon Socket (20mm)

The general point is worth making here because this size illustrates it well. A socket set is priced on piece count, so manufacturers drop the sizes that come up least — and the result is a tray that covers most jobs and stops dead on the occasional one. The sizes that stop a job are worth more than their price, because the alternative is either an adjustable spanner slipping on a tight fastener or a trip across town. Filling the gaps in a set is one of the cheapest improvements you can make to a workshop.

The socket is drop forged from fine chrome vanadium with a matt chrome finish. It is worth understanding what drive size means at the top end of the range, because a half-inch drive has limits. The square drive itself is rated to carry a certain torque, and as fastener sizes climb the torque needed climbs with them. At 20mm you are still comfortably inside what a half-inch drive handles. By 30 and 32mm you are approaching the point where a three-quarter inch drive is the correct tool, and forcing a half-inch drive there is how drive squares get twisted off in the socket.

Chrome vanadium is the standard alloy for hand sockets — chromium for hardness and wear resistance, vanadium for grain refinement and toughness — with the forging flowing the grain around the hexagonal form instead of cutting through it at the corners.

The buyers are commercial vehicle and plant mechanics, agricultural and estate engineering, industrial and factory maintenance, generator and pump servicing, and hardware dealers supplying industry.

Two rules that apply to every socket. Seat it fully on the fastener before applying force, because a socket bearing only on the tips of the hex rounds nuts. And never use a chrome hand socket on an impact wrench — the plating over hardened chrome vanadium is brittle under impact hammering and cracks, throwing fragments. Impact guns need black chrome molybdenum impact sockets. Ask us on WhatsApp for a price, or for a group of the sizes your set is missing.