ultred ragnusen explained on 18/02/2018 :
I can imagine, when building them that they simply check the calibration on a pass / fail basis. The only way I can think to adjust them is via shims under the spring, to increase the tension.
ultred ragnusen wrote on 18/02/2018 :
I place a hand on the head of the wrench to support it, whilst pressing down for the click, so the extension should make little difference.
And Trump apparently has conned many into voting for him by saying he'll get those jobs back. In exactly the same way as Brexiteers have conned the poor in the UK into thinking the EU is the cause of their woes.
However, comparing car production in the heyday of Detroit and now is a nonsense. Globilasation has changed the way components are sourced.
But then I do realise most Brexiteers base their hopes on when Britain ruled the waves. Rather than the world today.
Or was it the population just got fed up with the corrupt political class and wanted something different, good or bad?
You have no idea why most people who voted to leave did so.
I predict that staying in the EU or leaving will have exactly the same result with regards car assembly - it will migrate towards the poorer Eastern European countries in much the same way as many other industries have disappeared from the UK during the 40 years of EEC/EU membership.
Ask French and German car workers why their jobs are at risk, and both these countries are not leaving the EU.
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Who wrote? Who are you talking to? Learn basic computer skills.
There is more to making cars - especially above budget level - than just finding the cheapest place to do it.
From what I saw on YouTube, there's an SAE standard for calibration of torque wrenches, which, as I remember from the video of a day or two ago, comprises three sets of five tests, summarized (from memory) as:
Average it all out and you get your percentage error.
If the error is worse than what you desire, you adjust the calibration of the torque wrench (where some have hex adjustments of spring tension, others have twist adjustments, others have bend adjustments, etc.).
The nice thing about standards is that their are so many of them.
Most of the world appears to use the ISO 6789 standard.
A key step is that the calibration device has to be within plus or minus 1 percent, which is really the difficulty for home calibrations, I think.
It's interesting to note that the calibration has to be done such that the weight of the wrench is negated, which means you can't have the wrench set horizontally and then push down on it, as gravity affects your measurements.
Also it's interesting you always calibrate "up", in that you test the smaller torques before the larger torques.
I've never calibrated my torque wrenches, where I have a few 1/2-inch drive ones (beam and click), 3/8-inch drive (click) and 1/4-inch drive (click) where all the click types are from Harbor Freight, so I'm unsure of accuracy.
The problem is to find a calibration standard that is easier to use than a bucket of water or dumbbells.
I doubt if the manufactures calibrated them. The aim would be to get it right by manufacture to what ever tolerance level is acceptable and then perhaps test each one at a single setting (without performing any adjustments) and perhaps test one in a thousand at different settings to make sure that the manufacturing process is still correct.
Proper calibration costs money and unlikely to be performed on anything other than something used for mass production where expensive calibration costs are amortised over tens or hundred of thousands of production items or individual use where safety is paramount.
Something you can buy at the local hardware store for less than £100 or $100 is unlikely to have been individually calibrated or finely adjusted. It is more likely to have had a go/no test after production.
I think you need to rethink your underlying belief system, because what you fear is not at all what you should be fearing (IMHO).
But time isn't why you do any work at home anyway, as time (or money) isn't the reason you do work at home - you do it at home because you enjoy it, or, because you want it done right.
Speaking only of time though, I admit the first time you mount and balance a tire at home, it takes forever though, particularly because you have to learn the hard way how critically important a "drop center" is, to the tire mounting process.
Once you figure out that the bead doesn't "stretch", you'll remember your lesson about that critically important "drop center" offset from center in the wheel rim.
After you figure out the concept of a drop center, you also have to learn the hard way, on the first and second tires, that the Harbor Freight tools have some limitations, which you work around.
The only tools you need to change tires efficiently at home, in about the same amount of time it takes the shop to do it, are these: A. A decent compressor & fittings (which you already have most likely) B. A shrader-valve removal screwdriver C. A six-inch vise grip, one 2 or 3 foot tire iron, & dish detergent D. HF bead breaker tool (plus a two-foot board to extend its base) E. HF tire mounting tool (temporarily or permanently bolted to the ground) F. HF static balance tool & weights (sitting on a flat spot on the ground) G. About ten minutes per tire (depending on your experience level)
You fundamentally don't seem to understand that mounting tires at home is even more gentle than it is at the tire shop!
In fact, I have stock BBS rims on my bimmer, where the worst that happens is that a bit of the red paint from the tire iron transfers to the edge of the rim.
If you actually think that mounting a tire at home is in any way more damaging to a wheel than what they do at the shop, you really (really really really) need to rethink the entire underpinning of your fundamental belief system.
If you talk about money in any other manner other than the amount saved to offset the cost of the tools, then you're thinking about DIY differently than I do.
To me, DIY is about the satisfaction of learning & doing the job right.
If all you care about is money, then you'd pay someone else to clean your toilet, do your dishes, bake your bread, mow your lawn, sharpen your chainsaw, sweep the driveway, pick up litter on the sidewalk, tend to the roses, trim the trees, clean the gutters, change your oil, etc.
Saving money isn't why you do DIY, in that almost all DIY jobs are free in the end in terms of tool cost and material cost, in that it would almost always cost more to have someone else do (all those things above) than it would for you do to them.
You decide WHAT you do based on what you LIKE to do, where if you like baking bread, then you bake bread making it exactly the way you want it made, using exactly the ingredients you want to use. If you don't like baking bread, then you buy whatever you can get at the store, even if it's filled with ingredients you might not want to know you're ingesting.
I happen to like three things about changing & balancing tires: a. I like LEARNING all about what it takes, and, b. I like DOING the job any time I want to, and, c. I like the CONVENIENCE of changing tires in my pajamas.
You don't DIY to save money - you DIY to have the satisfaction of doing the job yourself and knowing that the job is done right.
If saving money was actually your goal, you'd DIY everything, since almost nothing is worth paying someone else to do at the current shop rates where I live (Silicon Valley, ~$100/hour minimum, ~$200/hour dealer, $150/hour is a reasonable average).
Saving money isn't why you DIY.
Almost all DIY jobs are free in the end anyway, as you must be aware, where the tools pay for themselves over time, where changing tires at home is no different.
The only thing that changes the break-even period is your calculation of how many tires you change, and the amount of tools you already have (e.g., most of us have a compressor already).
Out here, the average for a tire to be mounted and dynamically balanced is as high as $50 per tire but it's often around $20 per tire, so let's use that round number (but use whatever number you want because the tools will always end up being free in the end anyway).
The three HF tools you need cost about $150, so to have even numbers, let's add another $50 for incidentals like the tire iron & the weights and the schrader valve screwdriver.
How many tires do you have to change to break even at those numbers?
$200 divided by 20 bucks per tire is 10 tires, right?
You can use any numbers you like, but they all will end up being around a dozen tires for the tools to break even and be free, and to start paying for themselves.
Say you're 40 years old, and you have a wife and two teens, all of whom have a car in the driveway (in the USA anyway). How many tires is that?
4 cars times 4 tires per car (let's ignore the spare) is 16 tires in the driveway.If you change them just once, the tools are already well into the zone of paying for themselves.
Even if you have only two cars (mom & pop), the tool expense will break even in a couple of years.
There are storage costs. of course, but luckily no maintenance costs to the tools. As for storage, since I'm in the Silicon Valley where there is no snow, I just leave the tools outside with all my shovels and rakes and chocks and jack stands and ramps, etc., but if you store them inside, then you need to have a shed or an area in the garage to fit tools.
But these tools are no bigger than any of your other tools (e.g., drill press, table saw, belt sander, etc.) which you store all the time also.
In summary, you DIY because you ENJOY doing the job right, not because you want to save money, where you'd be hard pressed to find any repair on a vehicle that you don't save money if you do it yourself.
Can you even name a /single/ common maintenance task on a vehicle that a DIY doesn't save you money on over the cost for the tools?
In 1988 I found the OEM jack was barely adequate to change the tire on the F150 and stopped at Moab, UT to buy a bottle jack. I made a disparaging comment about the Chinese manufacture and the guy behind the counter said he had a made in the USA one for twice the price that wouldn't jack the truck up any higher. I still have the Chinese jack and it still works.
I use the HF sockets and wrenches in my bike toolkits. If the kit gets ripped off I can replace it for about $50 and they get the job done. Other HF purchases haven't worked as well. When it comes to HF, the fewer moving parts the better.
Thanks the Gods I don't live in the UK. I have many knives and I'm sure they are all illegal in the UK.
BTW, I've heard every argument from every naysayer already, almost all of whom have never done the job themselves (except Clare, who seems to hate the DIY job, so that changes his perspective completely - and that's understandable because DIY is about ENJOYING what you're doing - it's not about saving money - because ALL DIY jobs save money).
The one and only thing you can't do at home easily is dynamically balance the tires ... but ... what you can (easily) do is the dynamic balance test.
The test is simple. You simply drive at speed.
In all my tire changing at home, I have had only one tire that I balanced that had a dynamic imbalance, and that turned out to be because the weight I put on fell off.
I'm /sure/ there are dynamic imbalance issues in many cars - and, in fact, if it's only 1 out of 100, that's enough reason for a shop to dynamically balance /all/ tires, because they can't afford a customer a day complaining about the vibration.
Bear in mind that vehicles were statically balanced for decades, and that when you statically balance at home, you do a fantastically good job, and especially if you've mounted the carcass by the dots, you've used as small a weight as is possible already.
There are some who argue that you can have a dynamic imbalance and not know it, but that's just their utter fear of the unknown kicking in.
If you remove all this fear of the unknown (like the idiotic concept that mounting your tires at home is somehow less gentle than it is to mount them at a shop), then what you end up with is a job that is about as complex as is changing your oil or climbing on a ladder to clean out the gutters.
Like all DIY jobs, you do it because you ENJOY doing it yourself, but, like all DIY jobs, the tools pay for themselves, and like all DIY jobs, you do them at your convenience.
For example, I buy tires by the specs from Simple Tires, generally with free shipping (which is critical because Tire Rack UPS shipping is something like $15 to $20 per tire alone!) and I have the UPS guy deliver them right to the side of my house (he's used to it by now).
Then, whenever I feel like it, I spend an hour to mount and balance the tires, in my pajamas if that's how I feel at that moment.
Anyone who says otherwise, either hates the task (like Clare seems to), or has never done it.
Just look at the youtube videos, for example, where it's pretty darn easy, but my recommendation is to use the half-dozen tricks I already mentioned, such as bolting the mounter to the ground (I've done it on a pallet but it's just not worth the trouble).
Pot, kettle, black.
Pot, kettle, black.
There's good news and bad news in these numbers.
Bearing in mind that, for home use, a few percent error is ok, all you're really looking for is a gross error.
How much is an acceptable gross error? I don't know.
Maybe 10% for a head bolt or valve cover bolt? Maybe even 20% for a lug nut?
Let's assume it's 5%. All we need is a calibration standard that is plus or minus 5% then.
That's the trick. Where do we get a calibration standard that will pay for itself?
A lot of people seem to use this $30 HF #68283 digital torque wrench adapter:
I agree with you that the HF quality isn't always the best, but, it's "good enough" for some jobs, where, I can tell you that the tire-changing tools are OK for the number of tires we will be doing in our lifetimes.
I would gladly buy a wrench set for the emergency kit of my car from HF, but I wouldn't use it as my primary set of wrenches (almost all of which are Craftsman, which is middle-of-the-line stuff, IMHO).
The thing I have to stress about the HF tire mounter is that you can only use the bead breaker attachment on easy tires such as a Japanese import economy car, where it works ok on my European sport sedan, but it fails miserably (it literally bends) on the SUV tires.
The other thing I stress about the HF mounter is that you must bolt it down. You can get away with not bolting it down, but it's just not worth the trouble that causes, compared to the slight issue of drilling four bolt holes and popping in the inserts. I just leave mine in but you can unbolt it in a couple of minutes if you want to store it collapsed.
As for the bed breaking tool, it too has a slight problem with SUV tires, but all tires smaller are no contest. The SUV tires are too big for the base, so they flip up, which in one of the videos you see a guy not realizing that. The solution is simple, which is to put a board on the base, which prevents the wheel from popping up on the side opposite where you're trying to break the bead. With that simple addition, it works fine for SUV tires.
I have no complaints with the static balance tool. I think it's a bit pricey for what it is (it's just a cone-shaped bubble balance) but it's all aluminum and it stores easily and certainly is easy to use so it does the job.
Indeed. Why bother doing such a thing yourself when you need specialised equipment to get it done properly? And when the garage only charges a tenner?
Depends where you drive, residential streets are the worst where f****it= builders lave nails lying about.
-- =
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