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.

Man, you let one dude's comment live in your head rent free for almost a decade? It's a top 10 list, not a thesis defense, sometimes people just wanna see the picks without the backstory.