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Kid at the dock in San Diego asked why we still hand tight bolts, made me think about my first tender job in 2004
Back then we torqued everything by feel and a guy named Ray would check it with a wrench and a nod. Now everything's a digital log and a torque value on a tablet, so is the feel part still worth teaching or has it just become nostalgia?
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mark_thomas21d ago
Ray sounds like a guy I knew in Norfolk named Pete who carried the same beat up wrench for 20 years and swore he could feel a bad thread through it. We were doing flange work on a carrier in 2007 and he made me redo a whole row because the torque "sounded wrong" when he tapped it. Turns out he was right, two of them were cross threaded and the digital readout never would have caught it. The tablet tells you the number, but it does not tell you when something feels off before it hits the number. That feel thing is a warning system, not nostalgia, and once it is gone you only find out when something fails.
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