Some weeks ago there was a thread about torque wrenches, and someone mentioned one that was available at Harbor Freight, but was way too many pounds of torque. well I thought I would give it a try and see if I could reduce the torque, for about 6-7 bucks I didn't have much too loose.
It can be done and quite easily, the wrench is well made even though it comes from Taiwan. The front of the wrench unscrews revealing that the pounds of torque are created with spring pressure. By replacing with a smaller spring the amount of torque is reduced. My local Ace hardware had a spring made by Century Spring Corp. it was 1/2" dia and 2 3/4" long using .072 wire. There is no limit to the amount of reduction by changing the diameter of wire and length of spring. By using about 1" length of that spring I was able to reduce the pounds torque considerably. you can also vary the amount of torque by how much you compress the spring. I think I'll get a couple more of these I can see use in many applications. I haven't figured how to measure what I have but it feels about right.
Bob
