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Just realized my gauge readings were lying to me for 6 months
I used to trust my digital manometer blindly during load testing. Then last Tuesday I ran a routine check on a 3-year-old traction unit in a 12-floor office building in Austin and the numbers looked perfect, but the car was moving like a washing machine on spin cycle. I swapped in a spare analog gauge from my truck and the pressure difference was almost 40 psi off from what the digital unit said. Turns out the digital one had a bad transducer, and it had been drifting slowly for months without me catching it. Now I cross-check with the analog every time I set safety brakes or do a full load test. Anyone else ever had a digital tool fail so gradually you didn't notice until something else acted weird?
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anthonyh8523d ago
Had a similar thing happen with a torque wrench years back. It was one of those fancy digital ones and it read fine for about a year, then I started noticing bolts on a sheave assembly kept working loose even though I was clicking them to spec. Borrowed a beam style wrench from an old timer and turns out I was under torquing by like 25 percent. The digital one had some kind of slow sensor drift and never threw any error code or anything. Made me realize these tools can go bad so slow you just adjust your whole sense of what normal looks like without knowing it. Now I keep a cheap mechanical backup for anything that actually matters and check them against each other every few weeks.
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