A guy at the avionics bench told me to stop trusting the torque wrench in my box and check the calibration card first

William Thompson · 2026-10-15T23:25:04.871281+00:00

I was helping swap a pitot tube on a King Air last Tuesday at our hangar in Reno and this older avionics tech named Dale was standing there watching me grab my torque wrench off the cart. He said, "You ever look at the cal sticker on that thing?" I told him yeah sure, somebody gets it done every year. He pulled it out of my hand, flipped it over, and the calibration expired four months ago. I felt like a total idiot. He explained that the tool crib guy retired in the spring and nobody took over the tracking, so we had at least three wrenches floating around the floor with dead stickers on them. We went through the whole cart that afternoon and found two more, one of them off by almost 10 percent when we tested it against his bench standard. I have been signing off on stuff with that wrench since summer and now I am sitting here wondering how many fasteners I torqued without knowing. Anybody else run into a gap like this when someone leaves, or is it just my hangar that let the cal board fall apart?

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A guy at the avionics bench told me to stop trusting the torque wrench in my box and check the calibration card first | Aircraft Mechanics - Opinions Matter