The day I found out I was using a torque wrench all wrong for 5 years

I was helping a buddy swap out his brake calipers in his garage last weekend, and he looked at my torque wrench setup and just laughed. Turns out I had been storing it with the spring compressed this whole time, every single time I put it away. He showed me how the calibration drifts if you don't back it off to zero after each use, and I honestly felt like a complete idiot. I've done probably 30 jobs with it, including my own suspension work, and now I'm wondering if any of those bolts were even close to spec. The shop I bought it from never said a word about storage, not even a little note in the manual. Has anyone else had that moment where you realize some basic tool rule everyone else knows just passed you by?

3 comments

3 Comments

calebc401mo ago

Grabbed mine one day and realized I'd been cranking lug nuts way past spec for months because I never zeroed it out. Just started keeping it on the lowest setting when I store it now and it's been fine.

the_leo1mo ago

How long did it take you to realize you'd been over-torquing everything? Because that's the part that gets me - I probably did the same thing for weeks before I caught it. You check your tires one day, they feel okay, and then you find out you've been cranking them down to like 150 lb-ft instead of the spec. So the question is, when you finally checked the torque with the wrench zeroed out, were they all way tighter than you thought? Or was it just a little off and you panicked?

hannah3201mo ago

you check your tires one day, they feel okay" - that's the trap, they always feel fine until you actually check. And yeah @calebc40 is right about keeping it on the lowest setting, but you don't really need to store it that way if you just get in the habit of checking the zero before you use it.