Torque talk
Not wishing to further inflame the M4 surfer, thought I'd start a new thread.
Some interesting points were raised in that earlier thread, regarding the need for, and use of, torque wrenches.
I am a very amateur mechanic, but I've been fiddling with things mechanical for many years. My first torque wrench was a Norbar, bought jointly with a friend, when we involved in tuning up our respective BL Minis, refitting skim and gasflowed cylinder heads.
I'd agree with some of the observations in that thread, that with experience you can tell whether certain parts are correctly tightened. For example, I never felt the need to torque the wheel nuts on my Mini while it was still fitted with (4.5J) steel wheels.
When a mix of aluminium and steel parts is involved, I'd certainly advocate use of torque wrench. For example, alloy head on iron block, or alloy wheel onto iron brake drum. The torque figures quoted for recent caravan wheels are too high to be accurately
guessed at, in my opinion.
On the other hand, there are some fixings that I feel are positively dangerous to set about with a torque wrench. For example, some lads on a motorcycle news group I subscribe to, reckon to use a torque wrench on their sump plugs. True, the workshop manual
quotes a torque setting, for clean dry threads, not slathered with slippery fully synthetic bike oil. To keep on tightening until the wrench clicks is a reciped for stripped threads in those circumstances.
I speak from bitter experience. My bike had its first service at the dealer, and came back with copper slip on the caliper bolts. Thinking this was the way to do things, when I serviced the bike myself I applied copper grease to the caliper bolts, and laid
to with torgue wrench. Result - wrench would not click, bolts just stretched.
Then again, setting the valve clearances on my 600 Honda engine involves removing the cams,weasuring and changing shims. A very slight variation in the torque of the bolts holding the cam carriers is sufficient to produce a measurable change in the carefully
calculated valve clearance.
I currently have three torque wrenches. A big 'un, for the caravan wheel nuts, also back axle nut on my 600, a little 'un, for jobs such as the cam job described above, and a Draper moving beam type wrench. I bought this when changing and tensioning a cam
belt on my old 1.6 Montego, but find it useful now for getting a rough estimation of how tight a fixing is.
I suppose if I was sensible I'd just pay someone to do all this for me.
But where's the fun in that ..