west.henry•20d agoProlific Poster

That air show in Oshkosh taught me a hard lesson about torque seals

I was working the line at a small regional carrier back in 2018, and we had a Cessna 172 come through after a rough landing. The pilot said he'd already had a mechanic look at it, but I pulled the prop spinner off anyway and found a missing torque seal on the hub bolts. It turned out the last guy just snugged them by hand, no torque wrench at all. Has anyone else run into something like this where a previous repair looked good but was actually half-baked?

3 comments

3 Comments

caleb_thomas9320d ago

I've seen torque seals catch bad work more than once, they're not just decoration.

the_john20d ago

I read somewhere that torque seals are mostly just for show anyway...

troyreed16d ago

Are torque seals really that hard to break if someone's determined to cut corners though? I've seen guys peel them off clean with a heat gun and nobody's the wiser. @caleb_thomas93 probably caught some honest mistakes, but half the time those seals just get crudded up with grease and you can't even read the number anyway.