Servicing a socket wrench will only accept a few minutes, and the difference in experience afterwards is very noticeable. Y'all can exercise this service on an older ratchet or a brand new one. The idea is to disassemble everything and pack the internals with grease, since these ratchets are dry out from the manufactory. The process to take apart a wrench will be the aforementioned for the vast bulk of Craftsmans.

So let'due south begin. Locate the retaining clip…

…and remove the clip:

Now you can grab the ratchet gear and pull it directly upwards and out. The silvery retaining washer underneath will come up off with it.

Next, remove the mesh gear that still remains. This part is what makes the ratchet click, and the switch handle on the opposite volition pop off besides.

Looking inside, you should only run into a small ball bearing that was under the mesh gear. Remove this brawl bearing. In that location's a spring underneath it, but I just left that in.

And so now you should take the ratchet gear, retaining washer, c-clip, mesh gear, switch handle, and ball bearing removed. Use some contact cleaner similar WD-40 or brake cleaner, and requite everything a scrub.

Fourth dimension to reassemble. First, take hold of your choice of grease and line the inside of the ratchet head with information technology. I personally used Mobil 1 Synthetic grease.

Place the ball bearing dorsum on pinnacle of the bound, and then position in the mesh gear. The splined teeth side of the mesh gear faces upwardly, towards the ratchet gear. On the lesser side, there are two grooves, and then make sure the ball bearing is properly seated nether ane of those grooves.

In the moving-picture show below, you can see that the mesh gear is seated only the switch handle is notwithstanding off to the side… Don't wait, I found information technology easiest to reinstall the handle while you are putting in the mesh gear, rather than at the end.

Put a little more grease on pinnacle of the mesh gear, then slide in the ratchet gear. Merely line up the splines with the ones on the mesh gear. Add more than grease for good mensurate (okay, this is a bit excessive, but information technology gets the point across).

Now, push back on the retaining washer slice to seal everything up. Popular on the c-clip, make clean off the excess grease, and y'all are washed.

Try it out! Non only is the mechanism much smoother, just it should help the gears last longer. I'k guessing the reason why these socket wrenches aren't greased from the manufactory is because of cost-cutting.

Either mode, information technology'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to do this yourself, so do it today!