Hot take: torque wrenches get way too much blind trust on the line

I used to think as long as it clicked I was good. Then I had a job at a Delta hangar in Atlanta last spring, torquing flap track bolts on a 737. My click-type wrench felt fine in the morning but by the afternoon I was snapping bolts left and right. Turned out the wrench was way out of calibration, probably from getting dropped one too many times. Now I check the calibration sticker every single time and I keep a second beam-style wrench in my box for comparison. Nobody else on my shift does this and they look at me like I'm crazy. Has anyone here actually had a click wrench fail on them mid-job?

3 comments

3 Comments

drew_patel571mo ago

Buddy of mine at a regional carrier had his clicker fail on flap carriage bolts and turned a routine job into a whole swath of replaced hardware. He checks everything with a beam wrench now and won't touch a click-type for anything critical.

ninabutler1mo ago

Ah man, gotta push back a tiny bit on the beam wrench thing though. They can drift out of calibration too if you drop em or they get banged around in a toolbox. A properly maintained clicker that gets checked yearly is still totally fine for most jobs, just gotta trust but verify with a test before you use it.

oliver71927d ago

Yeah, I feel that. I had a clicker let go on me once years ago on a suspension job and it was such a pain tracking down which bolts were actually torqued right. I still use clickers but I keep a beam wrench in the box as a cross check, especially for anything that's gonna see a lot of stress. It's not that one is perfect and the other is garbage, it's just knowing when to trust which tool.