I torqued the same panel 40 times before a guy asked about my extension
Last Tuesday I was doing a panel closeout on a King Air in the hangar in Wichita and my torque wrench kept feeling sketchy, like the click was mushy and happening way late. I blamed the wrench, swapped it out twice, even pulled a different one off the crib, same thing. A guy who has been doing this about 30 seasons walks by and asks what extension I'm running. I say the 6 inch wobble, the same one I've grabbed for every panel job since I started. He tells me to do the math on the added length and the wobble flex, because a torque wrench is only honest at the square drive. So I ran it dry on a tester with and without the extension and the wrench was reading about 25 percent off with the wobble on there. I had been trusting that setup since my first shop and never once checked it. Now I'm wondering how many panels I have sent out that were not as tight as the logbook said. Does anyone else run a correction chart for extensions or do you just grab a shorter one?