Cone Wrench

Walk through any working bike shop and look at the cone wrenches hanging on the pegboard. They get used every day, they're thin enough by design that the metal is doing real work on every torque cycle, and after a year or two of bench life the open ends have visible rounding. Cone wrenches with rounded jaws don't grip the cone flats cleanly anymore; they slip under load and start mangling the cone faces themselves. The 1617/2DP-US is the heat-treated tool-steel cone wrench built to outlast the soft-steel wrenches that wear out first.

How it works

The 1617/2DP-US engages on the parallel flats of a hub cone (or a threaded-headset cone, or a brake-caliper lockring, or any of the other workshop fasteners that share the cone-and-locknut geometry). The body is thin enough to slide into the tight gap between cone and locknut where a standard combination wrench won't fit. Two wrenches are used together: one holds the cone steady while the second torques the locknut against it.

Heat-treated tool steel is the spec that matters here. A cone wrench's jaws are unsupported on the open side, so the metal is in flex on every loaded turn. Soft-steel wrenches lose their working geometry to that flex; tool steel holds the geometry across the wrench's full bench life.

Spec

• Material: heat-treated tool steel
• Body geometry: thin profile for cone-to-locknut clearance
• Handle: double-dipped grip (sealed against grease and brake fluid; comfortable under torque load)
• Size range: 13 mm through 40 mm available across the family

Where the wrench fits in the workflow

A cup-and-cone hub takes a pair of these wrenches per service. Threaded headsets take a pair where the locknut is even closer to the cone than on a hub; for that close-quarters geometry, the Offset Cone Wrench 1618/2DP-US gives the wrench an offset bend that opens up finger room. The 1617/2DP-US is the everyday cone wrench; the 1618 is the specialist for cases the everyday wrench can't reach.

Compatibility

The 13 – 40 mm size range covers the workshop-common hub cone flats on Shimano's current cup-and-cone hub line, every threaded-headset cone and locknut from 1" through current 1-1/4" sizes, and many of the locknut sizes used on legacy bottom-bracket and freewheel applications. For just the four hub cone sizes a home mechanic uses most often, the entry-grade Hub Cone Wrench 1612/2 is the budget alternative; the 1617 is the shop-bench upgrade.

Built in Zreče, Slovenia

Unior has been forging hand tools in Zreče since 1919, and is the official technical partner of multiple World Tour and downhill teams. The 1617 line is built for a wrench that gets daily use over decades. Heat-treated tool steel and the double-dipped handle are the differences you feel on the third year, not on day one.

Pro tip from our mechanics

Buy the sizes you'll actually use rather than the full range. Most shops cover Shimano's hub-cone flats with a 13 and a 15, threaded headsets with a 30 and a 32, and the rest gets used rarely enough that a single 36 or 40 covers the edge cases. A focused four-wrench cone set lives on the pegboard and gets reached for; a 12-wrench full-range set ends up in a drawer where nobody can find the one they want. For where this sits in a full hub service: Bearing and headset service: a workshop guide →