Ultra Torq
Increasing Torque Wrench Safety with Torq-Comm
Industry Best Practices for Torque Wrench Safety
The industrial bolting industry puts a lot of trust in bolting technicians. Many large-scale industrial sites count on their technicians’ commitment to torque wrench safety procedures to ensure the safety of their workers and the wider community.
More than one disaster has been traced back to a single bolt. So, how can the industrial bolting industry help bolting technicians work more safely and more effectively?
Common Torque Wrench Safety Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes. It’s easy to imagine an inexperienced technician, unfamiliar with hydraulic torque wrench safety, setting the pump pressure incorrectly. It’s just as easy to forget that a veteran technician, diligent with hydraulic torque wrench safety, might be having an off day or become complacent and make the same mistake.
These mistakes come with large personal safety risks. Limbs can be crushed between a reaction member and a reaction point and lives have been lost during catastrophic releases of hydraulic pressure.
Besides regular maintenance, there are two main ways to prevent these accidents:
- Getting technicians away from the tooling
- Keeping accurate records to be certain bolts are tightened fully and in the correct sequence
Torque Wrench Safety-Oriented Equipment
Torq-Comm has designed a hand-held device to complement recent innovations in hands-free operation. Nowadays, the technician can also set and adjust the pump pressure from up to 80 feet away, keeping technicians out of harm’s way.
The Torq-Comm Commander XT1000 also integrates data collection into torque wrench safety. The device tracks each bolting operation, including the technician, the tooling, and the load applied to each bolt, and stores it in cloud-based software.
Now you can connect to the work of technicians on-site and be certain of the information you receive. At no point can the information be manually altered, regardless of the user’s seniority.
Finally, the system has fail-safe features that account for human error. The system is able to tell if a technician is about to tighten a bolt out of sequence, and if it identifies this issue then it will automatically shut down, pre-empting a potentially costly error.
Efficiency of Torque Wrench Equipment
Safe work takes time as settings are checked and double checked. This system’s remote use, however, also makes the technician’s job easier. An experienced technician can now observe torque wrench safety procedures, while adjusting settings in a fraction of the time it would normally take.
The right equipment can do more than make workers work safely, it can make them work more efficiently as well.
Source: https://www.ultratorq.com/in-the-news/increasing-torque-wrench-safety-with-torq-comm/