At the age of 57 you are still thankful for the younger days when you were able to spend long days with your father in his workshop. That workshop location may have varied from one year or season to the next, but the tasks were often the same. Your father would be tinkering on a task that many today would pay someone else to do. Sometimes the task was reworking a mower part that had seized up, sometimes the task was a woodworking project that would provide food for the birds outside. At all times the tasks were meaningful. And while your father was busy at the chore he wanted to complete, he often took the time to set you up for some work of your own. You pounded hundreds of nails, drilled screws in and out of many planks of wood. Sometimes your results would be a short stool, sometimes you were simply practicing a skill your father could so masterfully complete.

During these days in the shop, you eventually learned the difference between rotation and torque wrenches and the purposes of different kinds of measurement tools. If your father needed a tool while he was working he would call out for you to get it for him. Sometimes these requests were followed by a description of the tool that he needed, as you routed your way through one tool box or another. Eventually successful, you would hand your father the tool that he requested and, often, watch your father’s work, getting a first hand lesson about the use of many of the tools in that work shop.

Today’s Mechanics and Engineers Require the Use of Torque Wrenches and Many Kinds of Rotating Equipment

Whether you are a young child assisting a parent or grandparent in the shop or you are a paid professional who engineers the greatest of projects, it is evident that there are specific tasks that can be completed if you have exactly the right tools. From torque wrenches to different kinds of rotating equipment, there are many times when the success of your current or next project will be dependent on the kind of tools that you have available.

Many engineers and mechanics, of course, are far past the simple work that goes on in a home shop with the help of a young assistant, but they too use some of the same tools. Consider some of these facts and figures about the work that is done with torque wrenches and other tools in a wide range of fields:

• Used to precisely apply a specific torque to a fastener such as a nut or bolt, a torque wrench is a tool that was invented by Conrad Bahr in 1918 while working for the New York City Water Department.
• Providing highly accurate load measurement data, load cells are frequently used as part of a weighing system because they offer non-intrusive services when properly installed and calibrated. They can also routinely achieve accuracies of around 0.03 to 1%, depending on load cell type.
• With a technology is very well established and has been proven for more than 40 years, most load cells use strain gauge technology.
• An electrochemical fatigue crack sensor system can detect cracks in the field as small as 0.01 inches in an actual structure and can be used for a variety of tasks and projects.
• Strain gauge type load cells, hydraulic load cells, diaphragm load cells, spool type load cells, and ring type load cells. are the five types of the load cells that are used. Which one is used depends on the primary and secondary element that is used to sense the force.
• Calibrating an instrument involves comparing the measurements of two instruments; one with a known magnitude or correctness that is known as the standard device, against which you measure the unit under test.
• Custom torque sensors exceeding the calibration limit are exercised to their nominal capacity but are only calibrated to 360,000 pounds per inch.
• Load cell and torque sensor units are designed to operate in a wide temperature range of -452 degrees F to 450 degrees F.

When was the last time that you worked in a shop?