Yes but what does it matter if you are replacing it? In the distant past I have on occasions stabbed a screwdriver through my car’s oil filter to get it off, it is not like you save them for anything.
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The aim is not to replace it but clean the inside after the magnet has been removed from its pocket. There is nothing to replace, only clean annually.
Ah, I thought it would be a replacement filter. i have only come across water filters in Adelaide and Malaysia and you throw them away.
Nah. Our modern condensing gas boilers have small waterways and the high-head circulating pumps are vulnerable too, so an in-line filter system is essential to prevent failure, especially if a new boiler is coupled up to an old system where iron oxides exist.
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£40 is a mad price, especially when you can buy a whole replacement filter for £90ish from toolstation or screwfix.
Having said that, you could go and buy one, take the spanner out of it and return the rest of it for a refund. Highly unlikely anyone would check and even if they did, you could say that’s how you found it.
You could even mutter something about how your plumber brought one himself, so you didn’t need one … yadda yadda yadda.
I couldn’t be that devious in our local Screwfix … I’m known in there and they are all a friendly and very helpful bunch. Besides, that would inconvenience the next buyer and I’m not that kinda bloke.
No, I’ll make one as a Sunday project. I’ll cut the main hole with an immersion heater boss hole saw and the rest will be easy 
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You’re an honest man LD.
You could of course have pointed out that the spanner was missing when you returned the item to screwfix, so it would have been sorted with the manufacturers anyway and everyone’s a winner.
Anyway, you and I both know that as soon as you’ve made a replacement which, by sod’s law, will probably end up costing more than getting the one off eBay, the original one will miraculously turn up!