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Had to choose between a $400 torque wrench and an old beam-style one, guess which one saved my fork
Ngl I picked the cheap beam-style from a pawn shop in Tucson over the fancy digital one, and it read the same on a carbon steerer bolt. Has anyone else trusted the old school tool over the new tech and came out fine?
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emery_craig29d ago
...so it's a slightly different number and the bike doesn't explode. People act like you need NASA grade tools to tighten a bolt. I mean, cool that it worked, but let's not pretend the pawn shop find is now your lucky charm.
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sullivan.piper29d ago
Nah I gotta disagree with you there. The number being slightly off is kinda the whole point when you're torquing carbon, that stuff doesn't give you a warning before it cracks. And for a fork steerer, that's not a "oops my handlebars are loose" situation, that's a "my face meets the pavement" situation. The beam style being dead simple means there's no battery to die, no sensor to drift, no firmware update to mess with your readings. I trust a piece of spring steel over a microchip any day. Plus, if a pawn shop tool survives 40 years of abuse and still reads close to a brand new digital one, that's not luck, that's proof the design just works.
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