The day I stopped over-torquing crank bolts because of a $8 torque wrench

Tbh I spent like 6 years just cranking down on crank bolts with a hex key until they felt 'tight enough'. Then I picked up a beam style torque wrench from a pawn shop in Portland for $8 and realized I was way over spec on every single bike I'd touched. How many bottom brackets did I wreck doing that?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamienguyen29d ago

Man, that beam style is all you really need for most stuff. I did the exact same thing for years, just muscling down on chainring bolts and cassette lockrings with a hex key. Probably flattened a few bearing races without even knowing it. That $8 find probably saved you a lot of headaches down the road.

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kelly.daniel29d ago

Bro, @jamienguyen nailed it with the beam style. I actually found out the hard way when my cheapo generic torque adapter started giving different readings every time I used it. Tried it on a crank bolt, snapped the damn thing clean off. Now I just tighten by feel on most stuff and only break out the beam wrench for bottom brackets and cassettes. The simplicity is what makes it work, no batteries or calibration to fail you.

andrew85428d ago

Are you really worried about flattening bearing races with hand tightening though? Most of the time I just snug things up with a normal wrench and never had an issue, and @kelly.daniel that beam wrench sounds like overkill for most bike stuff. I mean, I get it for a bottom bracket or cassette where you really don't want it coming loose, but for chainring bolts and random stuff it's probably fine by feel. A lot of us have been doing it that way for years without snapping anything off. And honestly, if you're snapping a crank bolt, that's way more force than you ever need to apply anyway. Maybe the real lesson is just don't go gorilla tight on everything.