Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics Torque wrenches

I prefer the dial torque wrenches like the Seekonk 0-75" pound unit. I have a couple others. I think one is a Snap On or Proto or something like that and it goes 0-30" pounds. The beauty of the dials is you can watch the torque climb in proportion to how much the screw is turning. Why is that important? Sometimes you run into soft screws or poor metal in the receivers and when you are tightening up the handle will be moving and the needle will be moving up and when something starts stretching or the threads yielding (stripping) the needle will stop while the handle continues to move. The dial gives you a visual that can't be seen with any of the common scope torque devices. It doesn't matter that they are spot on. The materials we are torquing are not near perfect.

With the old click type wrenches 10/22 receivers were famous for stripping 1 or 2 inch pounds before the specified torque. With the dial you can see that happening and stop just as it just starts to happen. This will save you from having to remove a broken screw or stripping a receiver. It will also detect cheap screws like we commonly find on Vortex and Burris rings or bases. The dial wrenches save us a couple times a eek from breaking or stripping a scope screws.

I will no longer use a clicker on anything other than lug nuts and bigger fasteners. My race car engine has 3/8"-24 head studs and a clicker wrench just a few pounds off will strip them right out of the block. I have switched all my torque wrenches out to dial wrenches now so we can see that before I wreck a $12,000 engine block. A few years ago a clicker wrench cost me a $2000 set of Jesel rocker bodies that was about 4 pounds off at 26 foot pounds.