The Nine Keys You Stop Losing

Hex keys are the most-lost tool in the American house. They arrive free in a flat-pack box, do one job, and vanish — and then the bike seat slips, or the door handle works loose, or the guitar needs a truss-rod turn, and you are on the floor of the garage sorting a coffee can of little black L’s by eye. Bondhus’ answer to this is not a better key. It is a hinge: nine of them bolted into one handle, so that from now on you lose all nine at once or none of them. That is a modest idea, and it is why a fold-up set is in almost every toolbox in the country. The reason this particular one is on this site is that Bondhus still makes the steel in Monticello, Minnesota, and says so in plain words on its own front page.

We verify manufacturing against primary sources, read what actual owners report, and never accept payment for rankings.

Bondhus sells seven hex fold-ups that look, in a photograph, essentially identical: same handle, same color-coding, same molded case. They differ only in which sizes are inside, and the difference is not cosmetic — buy the wrong one and every fastener you own is a quarter-turn too big for it. So before anything else, this review is about one part number, and the part number is the only thing on the package that tells you the truth.

Which one is this, exactly?

Straight from Bondhus’ own hex-end fold-up page, which lists the whole family in a single table:

• Part number 12591, model number HF9S. Nine tools. Inch sizes: .050, 1/16, 5/64, 3/32, 7/64, 1/8, 9/64, 5/32 and 3/16″. The S is the important letter — it means the small end of the inch range.
• Its near-twin is 12589 (model HF9), also nine tools, also inch, but shifted up: 5/64 through 1/4″. If your work is furniture, machine guards and shop fixtures rather than bicycles and electronics, 12589 is probably the set you actually want. 12585 (HF5) goes further up still, 3/16 to 3/8″, in five tools.
• The metric equivalents are separate part numbers, not a second row of tools in the same handle: 12592 (HF7MS, 1.5–6mm), 12587 (HF7M, 2–8mm), 12595 (HF6M, 3–10mm). There is one combined inch-and-metric fold-up, 12550 (HF12), with six of each in the small sizes.
• This is a hex end, not a ball end. Bondhus invented the ball-end hex tip and is rightly famous for it, but the ball-end fold-ups are only made in the larger sizes — 12894 in 3/16 to 3/8″ and 12897 in 5 to 10mm. In the small inch sizes this set covers, there is no ball-end fold-up option at all. If entering a screw at an angle matters to your work, you need a different format entirely, not a different fold-up.
• The finish is Bondhus’ ProGuard™, the dark protective coating the company applies across this line. The maker’s claim for it, as written on the product listing, is that it is “5 times more effective than the next leading brand in preventing rust.” The steel is Bondhus’ proprietary Protanium®, which the same listing claims is “up to 20% stronger than competitor tools.”

Both of those strength figures are manufacturer test claims with no published methodology behind them, and we report them as claims rather than facts. What is not a claim is the warranty, and it is unusually plain: “All Bondhus® products are guaranteed for life. If you are not happy with a Bondhus® tool — for any reason — simply contact customer service. A replacement will be shipped right out at no cost — no hassles, no questions asked!” Bondhus adds a line that is worth reading twice, because it is essentially an invitation to check its competitors’ fine print: “Not all warranties are created equal, and the tool industry is no exception.”

What it’s like to use

The handle is the product. Bondhus calls it GorillaGrip® and describes it as the “world’s strongest handle”; the listing puts a number on it, “40% stronger than steel handles.” In the hand it is a wide, flat, slightly grippy body about the size of a folding knife, and four of its design details matter in ordinary use:

• Tools open from both the top and the bottom. This sounds trivial and is not. It means you can reach the 3/16 from one end without fanning out the eight keys in front of it, which is the single most annoying thing about cheap fold-ups.
• There is a molded-in 90° stop. Fold a key out square to the handle and it locks there, turning the body into a short lever — that is where the torque comes from. Fold it straight out in line with the handle and you get Bondhus’ “Speed-Wrench” feature: spin the body like a screwdriver to run a long fastener down fast, then square it up to finish tight. Learning to switch between those two positions is most of the skill this tool requires.
• Individual spacers sit between the tools, which is what keeps the stack from binding into one solid block as the pivot bolt is tightened.
• The tips are chamfered, which Bondhus says “eliminate[s] burrs and help[s] tools seat in screws.” In practice a chamfered tip finds the socket without the little scrape-and-hunt you get from a sheared-off key.

What it is not is a long-arm L-wrench, and that is the honest limitation at the center of this review. The key protrudes an inch and a half or so from a handle that is itself the size of your palm. On an exposed fastener — a bike stem, a chair leg, a bracket on a wall — the handle is a gift, because it is comfortable and it gives leverage a bare key never does. On a fastener down a counterbore, behind a panel, inside a narrow bracket or under an overhang, the handle is simply in the way, and no amount of quality steel fixes geometry. There is a reason people who own this set also own a set of loose L-wrenches, and it is not indecision.

What owners actually say

The 12591 sits at 4.6 out of 5 across 2,158 owner ratings — 77 percent at five stars, 15 percent at four, 6 percent at three, and 1 percent each at two and one. That means roughly two owners in a hundred are actively unhappy. We say this plainly rather than manufacturing balance: the criticism of this tool is thin. There is no failure pattern in the record. Nobody reports snapped tips, rounded hexes, rust, a handle that split, or a tool that arrived broken. On a fastener-driving tool sold by the hundred thousand, that silence is the most substantive thing the review pool says.

What negative reviews there are sort into four piles, and only one of them is a defect.

The dominant complaint is reach, and it is the limitation described above meeting a real fastener. One three-star owner set out the case better than we could: he bought the set precisely because his loose keys live in the barn and the small ones keep disappearing, liked that it was bright and stayed together, and then — his words — the first time he needed it, in the rain, in the middle of the night, on a wall-mounted paper holder, the tool “couldn’t both fit into the narrow space AND turn.” Another put it as “not efficient to have all keys attached to one tool… It’s hard to grip and can’t use it in small places.” Both are correct. Neither describes a fault in the tool; they describe buying a fold-up for a job that needs a loose key. If most of your hex fasteners are recessed, this is the wrong format at any price and from any manufacturer.

The second pile is play at the pivot, and it is a category quirk rather than a defect — with one line you should not cross. “Semi frustrating that the individual keys wobble and move while you use it,” wrote a three-star owner. Another: “each one has lots of play, which makes me nervous. I will not be using this on a hard project, but for a bike, it will do.” A third reported that after opening, “the smaller ones won’t fold completely closed.” A folding tool has to be loose enough to fold; a stack of nine keys on one bolt with spacers between them will always have some side-to-side float, and a well-used set develops more. That is normal and it is not what the warranty is for. What is a defect is a key that will not seat squarely in a fastener, or that twists, or a tip that rounds a screw that a bare key turns fine. Bondhus’ lifetime replacement is unconditional and does not require you to argue — if a tool behaves that way, send it back rather than living with it.

The third pile is expectation of size. “I was surprised how small this thing is. I was expecting something a little sturdier,” one owner wrote. Another simply “didn’t have the size that I needed” and returned it. Both are the S in HF9S doing its work. This is the small end of the inch range, topping out at 3/16″, and it is physically a compact object. Anyone who wants 1/4″ needs part 12589; anyone who wants 3/8″ needs 12585. The part number tells you before you buy, and almost nobody reads it.

The fourth is packaging, which is a genuine and slightly comic annoyance. A two-star owner spent his entire review on it: the Bondhus products he has owned “were always good,” but this one is “ruined by terrible packaging” — a heat-flattened plastic hanger that resists a normal pair of scissors. It has nothing to do with the tool inside and everything to do with the twenty seconds before you meet it.

One warning about reading the reviews on this listing at all. Among the critical reviews is a careful, thoughtful complaint about a badly machined 3mm key that would not hold tight in a fastener. There is no 3mm key in this set. Part 12591 is inch-only, .050 to 3/16″; that owner bought a metric fold-up, 12592 or 12587, and his review has been pooled onto this page along with them. It is a good illustration of a problem that affects every product in this family: because the sets share a listing family, a complaint you read may be about a set with entirely different tools in it. Check that the sizes an unhappy owner names actually exist in the part number you are buying.

Made in USA Verification

Specifications

How it compares

The competition for a fold-up is not another brand. It is the other two ways Bondhus sells the same steel.

Read down that table and the buying decision falls out of it. The fold-up wins on never being lost and on going in a pocket; it loses on reach; it is competitive on everything else. If you are choosing one hex tool for a house, this is a defensible answer. If you are equipping a bench where fasteners hide, buy the L-wrenches and keep the fold-up in the car.

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Pros & Cons

Pros: An unqualified Made-in-the-U.S.A. claim from the manufacturer, on its own front page, naming the town and the building — and specifically covering hex tools, which is what this is; sixty-plus years at the same Minnesota address under the family whose founder invented the ball-end hex tip; an unconditional lifetime warranty with free replacement and, in Bondhus’ own words, “no hassles, no questions asked”; nine keys that cannot be lost individually, which solves the actual problem most people have with hex keys; a handle that opens from both ends so you are not fanning the whole stack to reach one size; a molded-in 90° stop that turns the body into a real lever, plus a Speed-Wrench position for running fasteners down fast; chamfered tips that seat cleanly; color coding that makes size selection a glance rather than a trial; a rust-resisting ProGuard finish on proprietary Protanium steel; and 2,158 owner ratings at 4.6 out of 5 with no failure pattern whatsoever — no snapped tips, no rounded hexes, no split handles.

Cons: The format has a hard geometric limit — a palm-sized handle cannot follow a key into a counterbore, behind a panel or under an overhang, and reach is by a wide margin the most common owner complaint; play at the pivot is inherent to a folding stack and owners consistently describe the keys as wobbling in use, which is normal but does not feel reassuring on a high-torque fastener; the smaller keys on some sets will not fold fully flush after opening; this is the small inch set and stops at 3/16″, so a meaningful share of disappointed buyers simply bought the wrong part number out of a family of seven near-identical ones; no ball end exists in this size range, so angled entry is off the table; the two headline strength claims are unsupported by any published test; the origin statement covers the tools and not explicitly the molded handle or hardware; and the packaging is genuinely difficult to open, which is a silly thing to be true of a tool company this good.