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Saw a guy at a Portland tire shop use a torque wrench as a breaker bar, and I'm still thinking about it
I was at a tire shop off 82nd in Portland getting a patch last Tuesday and watched a tech hop on a 1/2 inch torque wrench to bust a lug nut loose. He had a 24 inch breaker bar sitting right on his cart six feet away and just didn't grab it. I asked him about it after and he said the click type wrenches are built for it and he does it every day. The shop owner walked by and didn't say a word, so maybe it's normal there now. It made me think about how many guys are quietly killing their calibration and then wondering why wheel studs snap on the next rotation. Am I out of line for thinking this is a real problem, or do you all see this kind of thing too?
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dakotab2721d ago
A 24 inch breaker bar sitting six feet away and the guy still hops on the torque wrench? That part bugs me more than the calibration thing. But here's where I push back, a click type torque wrench is basically a ratchet with a spring in the handle. The gear teeth don't know if you're pulling 80 ft lbs to tighten or 250 to break a rusty lug loose. What actually kills them is dropping them or leaving them set high for years, not one hard pull here and there. Half the shops I've been in do this daily and their wrenches still pass a check at the tool truck once a year. Now if he's doing it on every single lug all day, yeah, eventually something gives. One guy popping a stubborn nut loose after the impact already zipped the rest off? Probably not the catastrophe people make it out to be.
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