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I was torquing lug nuts by feel for my entire 8-year career until a customer in Akron brought in a wheel with three cracked studs.
My mentor, who retired last month, finally told me he's been using a calibrated torque wrench on every single wheel for the last twenty years, and asked me point-blank, 'You think your elbow is more accurate than a $150 tool?'
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williams906mo ago
Your mentor has a point about safety, but there's a real skill to doing it by feel after enough years. A torque wrench can't tell you if a thread is starting to gall or if a rim is sitting funny. That cracked wheel sounds more like someone way overdid it, not just skipping the tool. Sometimes you need both the tool and the experience to know when something's off.
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nina1476mo ago
Oof, that's a rough wake-up call. Honestly, I feel for you, that's years of muscle memory just getting called out. Your mentor hiding that torque wrench for twenty years is wild, but he's not wrong about the safety thing. Tbh, I'd be second-guessing my elbow for a month after hearing that.
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jamesward6mo ago
Come on, it's not like skipping the torque wrench once is gonna make a wheel fly off. People have been tightening lugs by feel forever. That cracked wheel was probably a bad part or someone using an impact gun like an animal. The mentor's story feels like a scare tactic more than a real lesson.
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