Old school tools

I’ve never actually owned a torque wrench, but I’ve always wanted to. In truth, I’ve gotten pretty far along in my life without one… but you never know. Maybe now I’ll actually tighten a bolt on my bike to spec instead of how I do it now which is “feels tight enough and bring a wrench on the first couple of rides in case it slips.”

I do already own a vernier caliper, but it’s plastic and digital (I had to look up to confirm if it’s a caliper or a pair of calipers. Both are acceptable apparently. And in the process of that I learned that the British spelling is calliper. But I can’t bring myself to use that.). This Mitutoyo caliper is wonderfully smooth and you could fiddle endlessly, and satisfyingly, to get a measurement down to less than a tenth of a millimeter.

So when I saw these tools at a garage sale this weekend, it was like an early Christmas. He had a couple more good calipers, available cheap, and I’ve since looked up the price online… turns out I could’ve bought and resold at a profit.