Is it worth buying a torque wrench? If you do any serious automotive work, you're going to need one. It's not enough just disassembling a car's front suspension, pulling a cylinder head or swapping out wheels and then putting everything back together correctly without any leftover parts. No, to do any of these jobs properly, you need to make sure all the fasteners are appropriately tightened, and this is where a torque wrench comes in.
The upper control-arm bolts on your Dodge Challenger may require, say, 55 pound-feet of twist, whereas the aftermarket head studs for a Subaru BRZ engine you're building might take 115 pounds plus an additional 90 degrees of rotation to be properly fastened. In these cases, and countless more, it's mission-critical to have a torque wrench. Available in a range of sizes and types, torque wrenches enable you to tighten fasteners to a specified torque value, which is extremely important, especially in fields like aviation.
Tightening nuts and bolts to a manufacturer-recommended torque range enables specific components - and the vehicle itself - to function as designed. Not following these specs can result in damage to your car or truck, shortened component life and many more headaches down the road. Properly tightening head bolts to a specific torque setting, for instance, is critical. You don't want to go through the aggravation of replacing a head gasket just to have it blow out again two weeks later because you didn't use a good torque wrench.
All this sounds both complicated and expensive, but luckily, it's neither. There's a wide range of available torque wrenches on the market today for every application and budget, from simple beam-style torque-wrench models that cost but a few bucks to electronic torque wrench units that are super accurate. Here are a few of the best torque wrenches available today, with our recommendations based on personal experience and buyer reviews. We'll update this periodically.
4 things to know about torque wrenches
- Manufacturers specify a torque rating for everything, whether it's a taillamp housing, wheel lug nut or a critical component like a cylinder-head bolt. Every component needs to be properly tightened - but not overdone - to work as designed and last as long as intended. This is why torque wrenches are so important.
- Yes, you can fudge things when tightening fasteners, that is, skip using a torque wrench because some automotive parts and systems are more important than others. If you're reattaching a piece of interior trim that should be torqued to 12 inch-pounds torque limit, you can probably just guess and nothing bad will happen. But if you're doing brakes, working on a steering system or tightening main-bearing caps, using a torque wrench and following the manufacturer's recommendations are mandatory.
- Torque wrenches are offered with different ends. These typically include ¼-, 3/8- and ½-inch sizes, though larger ones are offered. For many applications, a 3/8-inch unit is perfectly fine. For added versatility, many torque wrenches also come with adapters so they can be used with various sockets.
- Digital torque wrenches are probably the easiest to use. Just set the desired torque and they will alert you when you hit that amount. There are a few downsides, including that they require batteries, are more complex and tend to be a touch costlier than their analog counterparts. On the flip side, beam-style torque wrenches are incredibly simple, with basically no parts to break, but they're far more cumbersome to use. Splitting the difference are the clicking-style torque wrenches.
A smart thing to have in your toolbox
Torque wrenches... nope, they're not sexy, but they are super important. If you're planning on tackling automotive repairs, you'd be wise to have one of these in your toolbox. And the good news is, all versions are very affordable, easy to use and should be plenty accurate. It just boils down to personal preference. Do you want a simple one that's a bit more difficult to use, would you prefer a clicking-style torque wrench or are you all digital, all the time? Really, you can't go wrong with any of these tools, but you could certainly go wrong by not having one.