I know this has been discussed before in this section, I thought I'd toss this out there for consideration.
I own 5 different torque wrenches, and I like to know how close they are. I was talking this over with one of the guys at work the other day, he was about to invest in a couple of wrenches but wondered how to check them for accuracy. He found this little doohickey at Amazon so he picked on up:
Amazon.com: Alltrade 940759 Powerbuilt Digital Torque Adaptor for 1/2-Inch Driver: Home Improvement
We spent some time in the shop today messing around with the thing. As best we can tell, the thing seems pretty accurate and should work well as a tester/calibration tool. He has a nice new Snap-On digital wrench, and it was amazing right dead on, they agreed almost every setting we tried it. I brought in all my wrenches just for fun:
Craftsman 1/2" 20-150 ft-lb
Craftsman 3/8" 25-250 in-lb
Snap-On 3/8" 5-100 ft-lb
Mac Tools 1/2" 50-250 ft-lbs
What was interesting was the Craftsmans were pretty much dead-on, so close that I doubt I could get them any closer The 1/2" in particular, my oldest wrench, was remarkably close almost the full range. The Snap-On was also good, not quite as the Craftsmans. The Mac was off as much as 10% at the extreme ends of the scale, but decent in the middle of the scale (~140 ft-lbs). It was waaay off under 100 ft-lbs, but fortunately I never use it that low.
It would seem that for $50 you could have a device for checking/calibrating your own wrenches.
I own 5 different torque wrenches, and I like to know how close they are. I was talking this over with one of the guys at work the other day, he was about to invest in a couple of wrenches but wondered how to check them for accuracy. He found this little doohickey at Amazon so he picked on up:
Amazon.com: Alltrade 940759 Powerbuilt Digital Torque Adaptor for 1/2-Inch Driver: Home Improvement
We spent some time in the shop today messing around with the thing. As best we can tell, the thing seems pretty accurate and should work well as a tester/calibration tool. He has a nice new Snap-On digital wrench, and it was amazing right dead on, they agreed almost every setting we tried it. I brought in all my wrenches just for fun:
Craftsman 1/2" 20-150 ft-lb
Craftsman 3/8" 25-250 in-lb
Snap-On 3/8" 5-100 ft-lb
Mac Tools 1/2" 50-250 ft-lbs
What was interesting was the Craftsmans were pretty much dead-on, so close that I doubt I could get them any closer The 1/2" in particular, my oldest wrench, was remarkably close almost the full range. The Snap-On was also good, not quite as the Craftsmans. The Mac was off as much as 10% at the extreme ends of the scale, but decent in the middle of the scale (~140 ft-lbs). It was waaay off under 100 ft-lbs, but fortunately I never use it that low.
It would seem that for $50 you could have a device for checking/calibrating your own wrenches.
