Calibrating Torque Wrench.

As I'm wiping it with the honourably oily cloth wot it lives in.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@AOL.com saying something like:

Anybody with half an ounce of sense.

Anyone with a whole ounce of sense would check the calibration occasionally and find that leaving it wound up doesn't do any harm.

Using it to undo tight nuts as it's the longest handle in the toolbox is a different matter. :-)

The message from Grimly Curmudgeon contains these words:

How did I manage to read that as half an ounce of cheese?

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Eiron saying something like:

I'd rather not take the chance, though. Spring do lose their tension over time.

That comes under the heading of abuse, that does.

Missed a meal?

The message from "Dave Emerson" contains these words:

Me? Never.

So every time you move house then?

What about using it to undo very tight nuts, *and* whacking the end with a lump hammer at the same time?

Not that it was exactly good to start with, being a 15 quid Argos thing (new out the box it did a no clicky on a couple of big end caps causing them to be overtorqued to the point the engine wouldn't turn!)...

That's simply not possible. You can't compress the two halves of a bearing housing to that extent. The torque given is to stretch the bolt *slightly* to give maximum clamping effort without it coming lose. Too much would only result in a sheared bolt, etc. If a big end won't turn after assembly either the journal or shells are the wrong size.

You'd think. But I was doing the big ends with the engine in situ, and I like to work front to back so was having to turn the engine after each one. It simply wouldn't turn, I slackened the cap and re-torqued and all was well again. Think it was number three, and the bearings were definately the right ones. The engine's still holding pressure and working OK (well was, has been transplanted into a resto project now), and as I didn't reseat the shells I can't come up with any other reason than the damned wrench didn't click when it should, and I wellied the bolts up too tight.