Two reasons.
Each piece of torque equipment should be calibrated every 12 months or 5,000 cycles – whichever comes first. There are two main reasons:
- This maintains the equipment to ISO standards and ensures accuracy and improved safety on all your jobs.
- Even carefully maintained torque equipment can lose accuracy across 12 months due to air pressure, dust, water or other environmental factors, or improper use.
Does torque equipment really need to be calibrated?
Do musicians bother tuning their instruments before playing them? Of course they do! They’re finely tuned machines that only operate like they should when they’re in perfect tune (and being played properly) – and your torque equipment is no different.
When things are busy, it’s tempting to skip calibration to ‘save time and money’, but we guarantee doing so will only cause the opposite in frustrating rework and, worst case scenario, equipment failure. Is that worth the cost saved from calibration?
View our range of Torque Calibration Tools.
How do I know if my torque wrench is accurate?
A good quality piece of torque equipment should always feel good in the hand – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s performing like it should. Even great quality torque equipment naturally falls out of calibration through regular use and in the best conditions. The only way to test torque accuracy is through a checking device.
Can I check whether my equipment needs calibration myself?
Yes. You can purchase your own checking device, like Norbar’s TruCheck series. These are an inexpensive and easy way to check torque accuracy and in turn the requirement for calibration, for various levels of torque to within +/-1% accuracy.
You cannot check the accuracy of a torque wrench with another torque wrench because of the 4:1 ratio, which means each piece of equipment must be checked against something 4x more accurate. So a torque wrench with an accuracy of +/-4% must be checked against equipment with an accuracy of +/-1% – which in turn needs to be checked against equipment with an accuracy of +/-0.25% and so on until you are testing against a set of carefully engineered weights and rods.
