What parts did you break?

More than once, the built in clamp on the seat tube. All times it was a very, very expensive mistake that basically destroyed the frame because it snapped. I say more than once because I am an idiot that usually needs to burn my hand more than once before I stop touching the hot pot.

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Adrian in Vancouver

Lyrrad responded right away and they are usually really good with bike mechanic responses.

I'm one that believes that most bicycle components do not require a very high degree of accuracy in torque. Something you can buy at a hardware store that holds a plus/minus 5% accuracy rate is going to be fine. The problem is that you don't want to use the same wrench for stem bolts as you would for crank bolts, so you likely need two torque wrenches to cover the spectrum of bicycle maintenance.

For the value brands, I like Tekton. Here's the 1/4" torque wrench for $45. A 1/4 torque wrench should cover your small parts, like stems, seatposts, chainring bolts and brake rotor bolts bolts. If you want to use a torque wrench for crank bolts, centerlock rotors, cassette lockrings, bottom brackets and other larger things then you want a 3/8" wrench.

You can mix and match sets from the hardware store to get everything you need, but buying the Park Tools socket and bit set makes sense. Just grab a 1/4 to 3/8 adapter somewhere to use those sockets on the small torque wrench.

fwiw, I am a big fan of Wera tools and all 3 of mine were accurate out of the box (a friend and relative neighbor is brought them into one of his companies for calibration). ymmv

Most manufacturing has improved quite a bit but you'll still occasionally have a misaligned/poorly machined faceplate that'll dig into a carbon bar at or below the proper torque (ritchey wcs for example - yeah anecdotal but it sure as hell did happen :) ) and that pretty much sucks.

Buy good stuff and treat it well

Centerlock rotors and cassette lockrings require very little torque.

That's interesting because I've always liked a beam type for the low torque stuff. I like the feedback and feel you get. I know people don't like them because of access issues but the main ones, for me, are things like stem, seat post, bottle cage and they work there. I can imagine for someone in a shop they are slower but I'm in no hurry with my own bikes.

But Park haven't made the one I've got for a while now so I guess I'm in the minority and there is a good reason they stopped.

Everybody is! The German brands are usually pretty sweet.

Until you undertorque your cassette since you have been annoyed with how hard it is to remove it, and then it ends up biting into the splines on your lockring, permanently damaging it. Literally the reason I got a torque wrench for my cassette, although I do admit most folks do not use one (my hub must have been a softer metal.)

40-50 Nm is fairly high in the bicycle world. That's about the range for both of those.

I can tell you that if that's how you see it - that's totally cool, but please do not tighten anything on the Cervelo frames.

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Next races on the schedule: none at the moment

There are likely many things you use in your life that others would deem superfluous and might ask the question “why would you use that?” If you are going to respond with a non-responsive response, let’s at least make it a useful non-responsive response, and educate OP (and others) as to why you believe a torque wrench is not necessary and he/others can then determine whether he still may want to use it even if it is not necessary.

Torque wrenches give the user a false sense of security.

I'm definitely in the torque wrench camp. While they're not extremely accurate or precise, they're far better in those regards than hand guesswork. And even for items where a torque wrench isn't really needed to ensure safety, it often gets better results. Like, if you have a steel square-taper spindle with a steel bolt with a 14mm hex head, you can torque the crap out of it without breaking things, but any excessive torque is more wear on the crank arm's taper and more offset to the location of the crank arm and chainrings.

(Fun story: I literally just replaced the FD on a bike because of this. The previous FD was an MTB model that could just barely clear the chain in small-big to avoid rubbing. After a crank arm re-installation, the chain was softly rubbing the FD cage in one spot in the pedal stroke when going hard, even with the low limit totally backed out and no cable tension. The replacement FD is able to come far more inboard... it also amusingly has very low leverage and can move pretty far outboard, I think it could handle a quadruple crankset no problem.)


"350ish Lbs or 40nm" is a typo for "350 inch Lbs or 40nm," not "350 foot Lbs or 40nm."

So AJ what type of torque wrench do you use now?

That's the problem. Too much bad design out there. Too many under built Carbon components and lousy seatpost clamps.