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The big debate on torque wrenches - click type vs beam style
I always used click type torque wrenches. Easy to hear the click. But last week I had to torque some engine mount bolts on a Cessna 172. The click type felt off. So I grabbed my old beam style wrench from the bottom of my box. Got a perfect reading. The beam never lies, no internal mechanism to go out of whack. But click types are faster on repetitive jobs. Which do you trust more for critical hardware?
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harperg7613d ago
Honestly that Cessna 172 story hits close to home. I had a similar thing happen two years ago on a Subaru EJ25 head bolt job. My click type wrench clicked at 58 foot pounds but something just felt wrong. I grabbed my old beam style from the bottom of my box and sure enough it was reading 63 pounds. That's a big difference on head bolts. The beam style has saved my bacon more times than I can count especially on anything where I have to lay upside down under a dash or inside an engine bay. I get why people trust the click types for speed but for me beam style is the only thing I use when the customer is waiting and the part is expensive.
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pat_fisher2414d ago
Beam style all day for anything critical. Click types are convenient but I've had two fail on me and just can't fully trust them anymore.
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ryantorres14d ago
My old man had a beam style Snap-on from the 70s that he used on EVERYTHING. One time he was torquing head bolts on a Ford 460 and the needle was bouncing all over the place. Turns out his reading glasses were in the way and he was looking at the 0-20 scale instead of the 0-100 scale. He snapped a bolt clean off. That beam wrench was still dead on though. I keep one in my box just for those moments when I don't trust anything else.
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