If you have been in business as long as we have at Bob and Sons Automotive, you can honestly say “We’ve heard it all”. When customers ask us, “Why do you hand torque every vehicle you work on”, we know just how to answer.

Many auto repair shops will use a torque stick to torque the lug nuts on a customer’s vehicle. Each torque stick has a range that it will torque to and hopefully flexes or stops torquing at that level. If not, you could have over-torqued wheel lug nuts.

Some shops won’t even use torque sticks and will rely on their “years of experience to know when to stop the air gun”. This method is not recommended for a number of reasons. What happens if they have a new hire who doesn’t have the expertise to be able to listen or feel for the right torque? What happens if the setting on the air gun is turned up or down and no one checks the setting? Yup, you guessed it, either under torqued or over-torqued wheels.

What happens if the air compressor in the shop trips and shuts itself off? No one realized that the shop air wasn’t at the proper level, no one double-checked the torque on those tires, and poof you have a serious problem shortly thereafter.

The wheels on our vehicles are what contacts the road, if we don’t have the lug nuts properly torqued on our vehicles then we are driving unsafely. This is the reason we, at Bob and Sons Automotive, hand torque every wheel that we remove. This is easy and cheap insurance for us and our customers that the job was done right and everyone operating or traveling in that vehicle will ride safely.