i’ve seen some items listed as torque wrench sets, but they are not adjustable.
i have those already.
i mean the ones where you set the NM.
need ranges from 19 - 117.
thanks
that’s what I have
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Aldi did have one on offer for £7.50, (last week) reduced from £20.
I have one of them I use only for wheel nuts/ bolts, and it is accurate. I have two others, a 0-80nm 3/8th drive which I use a lot on the motorcycles, and a 50-200 1/2 inch drive which covers everything else.
You’ll probably have to buy two wrenches though, as I don’t think there’s one available with the range you want.
In my experience the ‘digital’ ones are a pain to use and not as accurate as the mechanical ‘click’ type, unless you go really upmarket and spend hundreds on them.
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I have 2 Teng torque wrenches, a small one for up to 25Nm and a larger one for up to 105Nm. Really all you need.
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Machine Mart sell them. A reliable company to deal with and you can actually go into a shop and see what you are buying. I’ve just invested in a heavy duty, battery powered impact wrench from them. Or at least, my wife asked me what I’d like for my 66th birthday and that’s what I got!
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How do you know it is accurate and to what level of accuracy? It is very easy to be precisely inaccurate. £7.50 is £6.25 before vat, if which there has to be an immense amount have to be put in a container and shipped across the world for Aldi to make a profit on. I’m not expecting world class calibration!
Torque specs on a MX5 aren’t exact;y like, say, an aircraft, where tolerances are much less. Everything has a range.
NA/NB torque specs
https://www.miata.net/garage/torque.html
Wheel nuts; 89-117NM. so 103NM is bang in the middle, a 13.6% variance. For wheel changing, 13.6% accuracy is good enough, if you always (as you should) select the middle rating. But propshaft bolts are +/- 5%, sparkplugs are a whopping +/- 21%. Sometime, I need to convert those specs into tolerances, but not now, as I’m sitting on a beach in a faraway place. But 5-20% tolerance doesn’t suggest high precision tools are needed for the typical home mechanic. I come from an industry where we think in terms of +/-0.01%.
The one exception is cam cover bolts, which is why people ask about low end torque wrences. These bolts are seeminglyh made of chocolate, so I look at the low end setting. I’d look through that list of settings, decide which jobs you are going to do, and let that determine which tool you need to buy. If you are going to do complete engine and gearbox rebuilds, then you probably need to spend the dinerae on a Snap-On or similar.
For what its worth,my general purpose torque wrench is Blackspur, and for the once in 5 years job, a Kamasa. Do I recomment Blackspur especially? No particularly, it seems neither good nor bad, because I have nothing to compare it against, in terms of experience.
In the shop, open the torque wrench case, and look for the calibration sheet, where some engineer, in the factory, would have run some checks and signed it off. Even the cheap Chinese ones will have this. If there isn’t one, the tool is a toy, don’t bother with it.
Most torque wrenches on sale through tool shops, like Machine Mart (Clarke’s in Machine Mart’s own brand), will be good enough. More importantly is consistancy; is the design of the wrench such that it is easy to set it, and the setting doesn’t drift during use (usually you adjust on the handle, but the scale is sometimes not easy to see, and you set with a locking nut, some of which don’t lock that well).
Don’t bother with Aldi for tools. They are not that cheap for the price you pay. ie. cheap stuff is junk.
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Fwiw it comes with an individual certificate, however a vice, and a 25lb weight confirmed it’s accurate at 50 lbs ft. Which is about midway through its range. Good enough for the fixings I use it for which usually have a tolerance anyway.
Re price: they were £20, and it was only the last of the stock that were reduced to £7.50. I doubt if Aldi are making any money on them.
ie a loss leader.
Blokes rush into Aldi to snag a £7 torque wrench, come out with shopping bags full of biscuits. cakes, strange relishes etc.
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I would only ever buy a cheap tool if I expect it to be disposable, quality tools should last my lifetime and then some.
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I dont think they are that expensive new .
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I’ve had a LIdl torque wrench for several years. It was about £15. It’s not to hand, but as I recall, the range is about 30 Nm to 210 Nm. It’s a 1/2" wrench. I bought it because most of what I’ve seen said about Lidl tools is that they’re reasonable quality. Not professional, but OK. That was good enough for me, as it doesn’t receive lots of use.
After a while, I realised that a wrench with lower range would be handy, so I went for this…
Draper 64534 3/8" Torque Wrench
Range is 10 Nm to 80 Nm. Useful for sump plugs…, spark plugs.
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I bought the Halfords ones that I believe are made by Norbar who are high quality.
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