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Tried a different torque wrench on a Cessna 172's nose gear and it didn't go as planned
I was doing a 100-hour check on a 172 last week and grabbed a new digital torque wrench from the shop (a Snap-on TechAngle) for the nose gear bolts. I set it for 150 inch-pounds like the manual says, but the click felt way too soft, almost like it slipped. Turns out, the adapter I used between the wrench and the socket added just enough length to throw the reading off by nearly 20 inch-pounds on the final check with my old beam wrench. Learned that even a little extra leverage can mess things up. Anyone else run into problems with adapters on digital torque wrenches?
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rose_perry127mo ago
Check the manual for that specific wrench, did it have a warning about using extensions? My old clicker wrench has a whole chart for calculating torque loss with adapters, but I've never seen one for a digital model.
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max_patel17mo ago
Yeah, that adapter thing is a real trap... read a forum post once where a guy had the same issue with a digital wrench on cylinder base nuts. Like @rose_perry12 said, the old clicker charts don't always apply because the digital ones measure strain differently at the head. Some brands actually say not to use any extensions at all, or you have to do the math on the added length yourself.
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diana_wright7mo ago
Exactly, the math gets weird with digital wrenches because they're measuring at the sensor. You can't just use the old length formulas from mechanical tools. It's basically a whole new set of rules for a different kind of tool.
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jana5096mo ago
Same thing happened to me with my first digital wrench on a 172, the manual said nothing about adapters and I ended up overtorquing a main gear bolt. For real though, that added length tricked the sensor into reading lower than it actually was, so I put way more torque than I thought. Switched back to my old beam wrench for anything with adapters after that, way less guesswork.
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