Talked to a 30-year Delta vet about torque wrenches and now I feel dumb

I was at a hangar in Atlanta last week shooting the breeze with this old mechanic named Ray who's been turning wrenches since the 90s. He watched me use my digital torque wrench for like 30 seconds and just shook his head. Said I was relying on the beep too much and not feeling the click with my hands. He told me he's seen three guys snap bolts on engine mounts because they trusted the digital readout over their own feel. I rechecked my last 10 jobs with his method and found two bolts that were under-torqued by like 15 foot-pounds. Now I'm paranoid about every fastener I've done in the last month. Anyone else get humbled by an old-timer like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

blake32216d ago

Yeah, Ray's not wrong. I had a Snap-On digital clicker from the 2010s that had a mis-calibration drift of like 8 percent after two years of shop use. I caught it on a test rig by pure luck. Now I always do a quick hand feel check on every bolt after the beep, especially on aluminum heads or carbon stuff. The old guys call it "waking up the thread" and it's saved me from snapping stuff more times than I can count.

dakota_nelson4316d ago

The hand feel thing is real. I do the same even with my beam style wrenches, just run it down snug then give it that final quarter turn by feel. That "waking up the thread" trick works because you can literally feel the difference between a bolt that's torqued right versus one that bottomed out on a burr or some crud in the threads. My old mentor showed me that after I snapped a header bolt on a Ford 5.0, he just shook his head and said "you gotta listen to the tool, not just the click." Now I always back the bolt off half a turn after the beep and run it back down, it catches any binding or thread issues before they become a problem.

lucaslee16d agoTop Commenter

That bit about "waking up the thread" is something I've done for years but I never heard it called that before. What gets me is nobody ever talks about bolt stretch on used bolts versus new ones. If you torque a bolt that's been stretched before, the click comes at a different spot than a fresh bolt because the metal's already deformed from the last time. I always swap out bolts on aluminum heads every other time, and on steel stuff I at least mark the old ones so I know which ones have been torqued multiple times. The hand feel trick catches that too because a stretched bolt feels spongy right before the click. It's one of those things that's obvious once you think about it but nobody tells you when you're starting out.

iris57416d ago

Snapped one myself and spent a week calling my torque wrench a liar.