coolkid_cody

I recently purchased the BBB Torquefix wrench at the LBS. They also had the Shimano Pro torque wrench. The plastic adjust knob on the Pro felt "sticky" when changing the settings upon first inspection and the BBB was much heavier. I've used a couple Craftsman wrenches that my dad brought home from his work and the BBB was around the same weight in account to size. Since I have no other knowledge about torque wrenches I attributed this to higher quality. I'm now thinking this has nothing to do with quality. Using the BBB is simple and seems to work well but there a jingling sound in the wrench and doesn't sound normal. Also when I set the torque to 0 as instructed to do in the manual the whole assembly goes limp. It doesn't seem like the parts inside should be able to do this and possible hit against the insides of the wrench. Do all of these wrenches do this? I am thinking of exchanging the BBB for the Shimano Pro and pay the extra $15. I didn't realize at the time that the wrench was Shimano compared to a no named brand. Could I get any advise as to which wrench is better? Opinions on both?

coolkid_cody

at least a few people have to own one of these wrenches. I found a thread about the BBB wrench but not one about the Shimano Pro or a comparison of the two.

DMF 

How much did you pay? More than about $20 is too much.

bjoerges

The heavier or lighter weight of a tool, much like the weight of a bike, says nothing at all about the quality.
Going limp at a zero torque setting sounds like it is doing what it supposed to do. At 1 N-m of force, it should disengage after roughly finger tight. If possible, what I would do to test if the tool is accurate would be get a 5 N-m only torque key (these tend to be pretty accurate as they are not adjustable) https://amzn.to/cGOJVm

Set your wrench to 2 N-m, tighten until disengage. Tighten with torque key until disengage. Set to 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, should all be disengaging right away. You might get a slight turn when you set to 5, but if you go as far as 6 and it's still disengaging immediately, you might want to swap out for a better quality one.

Also, the Shimano label doesn't always mean higher quality, sometimes it's just higher price.

Asi

If you have a scale, or a hook scale do this:
Find a fixed bolt (very tight bolt) in vertical position. You can lightly hold the square end in a vise. set to whatever value of Nm you want 5,10,15, etc. And place the hook scale on the handle and measure precisely the distance from the center of the square and the point of the handle you put the hook scale.
Now pull perpendicular to the handle of the wrench, from the scale! (not the wrench) and see the amount of "weight" indicated by the scale when it clicks the wrench.

The wrench was set at 10Nm for example, and the length of the handle (in meters!) is 0.2m(for example), so at this point you must pull with 50N (if the scale is marked in kg, 1kg=9.81N) so about 5kg, 5.09kg to be precise. What was the value of the scale? more? less? than the theoretical value, the difference between those to multiplied by the length of the wrench is the error at that value set.

You can repeat with other set values of the wrench, and repeat to see if the distribution of the errors are spread uniformly, linear, etc)

I recomend you to work in metric units, since this is the international system and all the formulas are in SI units. (that is meter, kg, second, candelas, Kelvin, Ampere, mol, and all the derivative of this basic 7 units)