I am not an expert to do the work of a mechanic, but I do spend quite a bit of time working on my electric car conversion project in my garage. I thought to do some maintenance on my project donor car partly to save some cash on it and I also enjoy on doing that maintenance work myself.
For me, it is best to spend cash on maintenance tools and materials of less than $200 than to paying someone some mechanic to do the work for me.
I bought large number of hand tools which is a wonderful thing and by doing all the maintenance work myself, I was slowly but surely improving my understanding on the mechanical workings of the my electric car.
When I was working on the suspension part of the vehicle, I had to work on the rear end by removing the rear suspension to make sure the springs was able to hold the extra weight of the deep cycle batteries. I had to take out and put the shock absorbers back on again.
The technical guide book for my donor car contains all kinds of numbers to tight the fasteners, hence, I bought the Gorilla Automotive TW605 torque wrench just to do that job. Apparently, I need to tighten the bolts holding the absorbers at a certain torque. Too tight and it will spoil the nut or not tight enough and it will cause the absorbers to vibrate.
The Gorilla Automotive TW605 wrench was also very useful when I needed to work with big nuts on the U-bolts which have to be tightened to in various conditions above 90 foot pounds. This wrench worked really well actually.
But I do have a pet peeve about the TW605 and that’s its head is closed with some low rate stamped sheet casting. Not so good when you accidentally drop the wrench from a certain height! Even though I try not to drop any tools on the floor, but sometime I do and the wrench was one of it, which caused a small dent.
Generally, the weight of the wrench is good and feels solid. You can even keep it in your car and use it as a self defense weapon. If you need a tool which can measure torque, the TW605 will come it quite handy. Here are what I like about the wrench:
The micrometer user interface on the wrench is easy to understand and can be seen clearly. The torque settings can be changed from ft-Ibs to in Ibs.
The “clicking” noise will be heard clearly as you reached the limit of your torque setting. You can even fell the mechanical feedback on your hands as you pull on the torque wrench.
How about drawbacks? Well there are some. The TW605 will generally cost 30 percent higher than over torque wrench in the market! But if you need a handy torque wrench in your garage, click on the button on the right to order the Gorilla Automotive TW605 from Amazon.com and have it delivered to your doorstep right now.