I laughed/grimaced too, cotterpinkid, at that ad (Draper?). Pathetic really, but Bonny's probably got it in one. Can't expect the spotty youth that works in marketing to know the difference, any more than we can expect a bank manager to know how to, er, manage a bank.
My best BSF/W spanners and sockets are Gedore and Elora, with some King Dicks and Gordon Tools and 'Superslims' thrown in, and then there are loads of things that are so old the names would mean nothing. UK and US war departments figure large, stamped in many cases '1942', must have been a good year.
Re cheapo options, I'd say that in some cases it doesn't matter much - the bigger the weapon, the less important the quality, provided the sizing is right. Takes a hell of a lot of arm-power to bust a socket which is more than an inch, say, AF. When I bought most of my 3/4 drive kit (ratchet, breaker bar, extensions etc), I really didn't care about getting the best of the best (even if I could have afforded it) as I knew I'd have needed to go on a body-building course to destroy any of it in normal use. (The sockets themselves I paid a bit more for, and got decent brands made in the good ol' US of A where good things are generally more affordable - and do what they say on the tin.)
I was amused to read lately somewhere about someone complaining that they'd bust a 1/4 drive ratchet trying to undo a seized M8 setscrew . . .
Maybe he was trying to get exhaust headers off a a japanese bike, where there's never any room to get proper tools on the job, the bolt heads are often undersize for the shank and the manufacturers haven't heard of brass, that invaluable material for making nuts that might one day want to come undone. I wouldn't say this had I not struggled a few days back to replace the pipes on my only modern machine, and ended up rounding the rusty nuts (no relation) or busting all the studs on inaccessible parts of my b****y Yamaha. All Cubes and Flatulence.
