How Much Power Do You Lose w/ Universal Adapters? Dyno Test For Science 1

[Music] welcome back to the torque test channel you guys liked our air hose size versus power and power loss from extensions video but we still owe you an answer on universal impact adapters from that original comment here so on today's episode from our new four science series we'll try to answer that so we got five popular test subjects today both pinned and pinless and we're gonna see what makes them different measure them see if the angle they advertise is accurate of course test them and chart their power loss for each then try to break them and succeed for most and take them apart to use some new equipment that might help tell us some of the story behind all this info then sort of rank them to sum it all up we really appreciate all of our new subscribers we're continuing to put every dollar this channel earns right back into the channel by prototyping new test rigs that you'll see soon buying tools and testing equipment for more interesting videos just like this one so for our impact universal adapters today we have the pin style which is sun x model 2300 shown here this is pretty popular among mechanics we know then we have the tecton pinless which is at the time of buying the best selling of the category on amazon despite coming out roughly in the last year and it's only twelve dollars so we're excited to see how that performs at the cost then we got the gearwrench x-core which was very much not twelve dollars we paid twenty six dollars and thirty cents not exactly breaking the bank or anything at that price but still more than twice the tecton this is the well-known gearwrench's sort of latest and greatest pinless design but to us sort of just looks like the matco universal socket shape that's we know to be super smooth in the hand and this is this gearwrench is also very smooth in the hand then we got the harbor freight u-joint style universals which were a wallet crunching nine dollars for the three so about three dollars a pop these are different than the others in that they can do a full 90 degrees articulation but we assume you pay for it in durability and power transfer they do call them impact adapters so we'll have to see then yes of course the niko universal from our five piece set that we said we would test in our extension video this is also pinned like the sun x but sort of a smaller overall size frame and it's also around ten dollars we'll see how that does as well now we've been saying the words pinned and pinless a lot a little on that first pin means there's a three-piece assembly inside a ball a socket and then a pin going through the center uh retaining that ball as the center of the ball is sort of hollowed out there's these collars that cover the pin to keep it from coming out and these angle and adjust fine but being as they are sort of hollow on the ball end and the force from your impact wrench is being transferred through that small pin surface area they're accused of being less durable harder to control its extreme angles and larger in size overall and potentially lose more power i guess we'll see in that regard the pinned universal's pinless cousins are like the alec baldwin to their william baldwin counterpart potentially slimmer sleeker usually a bit more expensive and of course big solid balls on the business end as everyone loves or at least in tecton's case they appear to be using the same or a similar version to the new hex ball socket style that astro also came out with a couple years ago in their pinless sockets that's supposed to improve impact force transfer and according to tecton be stronger and smoother than other designs which they show here a design like sun x and a design like gearwrench well we can already rule out one of those claims because it's definitely not as smooth as the gearwrench design out of the box which is like a four lobe design that as we said mirrors matco's universal sockets that everyone knows and loves i'd say they're the same as macos but mackos are us-made and these are taiwan so we're assuming some apex brain trust sharing going on there but only time and testing will tell if that's really true we'll report back on the matco front that smoothness from the gearwrench is nice but how good it feels out of the box does few people any good what we care about is how these things feel after being used and how they feel after being abused really are they floppy are they they feel like sand inside we'll we'll see but before we jump into the agadas as you see here we're touching on their specs a bit first is the ones they don't advertise both pin universals measure about 2.47 inches and the gearwrench x-core comes in a noticeably longer two and three-quarter 2.75 inches whereas the tecton comes in a bit shorter at 2.57 the sun x hits bang on at 27 degrees at max articulation and the nikko comes out to about 26.5 degrees almost 27. the gearwrench which advertises 30 degrees nails at exactly 30 degrees and then the tecton which also advertises 30 degrees hits about 30 and a half 30.5 degrees it looks like so far the pin let's see an advantage here at this max angle articulation in this group oh and this floppy snake too yeah this will obviously give you plenty of angle when you need it up to 90 degrees or past well let's get into it this baseline test is from the same socket testing video earlier this week so it has the same baseline 603 foot-pounds for all these upcoming universal tests they will be held in a similar angle roughly 11 to 15 degrees to match the wobble extensions we also tested this is achieved by simply pointing the gun at a mark we made on the dyno nothing's scientific first we'll do the harbor freight sort of u-joint style just because we think it's fun now i'm not sure how much it was able to be seen on screen there because the hand was covering it in the beginning but as soon as we pressed the trigger this thing let out a puff of smoke like it was having an exorcism and a ghost was leaving its body it didn't improve from there expelling what we can only assume to be tears and metal shards throughout the first half the run before coming to a halt at 282 foot pounds just 46 of its original figure that's worse torque loss than a 15 inch long extension and it really didn't survive the bind and extra wobble left to right shown here is enough for us to call it a day for this one we don't really want to see it explode we have families to go home to at the end of the day after all next we have the 10 nico pinned universal held at roughly the same angle that's about a 28 loss definitely losing something but not as bad as the wobble extension that was 385 foot pounds now here's the 15 sun x pinned so within around one percent of its pin brother the nico so we can probably call that a wash still around the 29 loss overall we're going to show the 26 dollar gearwrench x-core pinless next it's the most expensive in the bunch so let's see how it does it's a bit of an oof there 337 foot pounds is a 44 loss and is enough to be felt for sure that's worse than the harbor freight wobble extension held at the same angle not stellar company b with we think we'll take this apart coming up in a few minutes and take some wild guesses as to why that might be last up is the tecton 12 universal this is also pinless let's see how it does so 395 there just five percent more lost than the sun x but 34 35 total in case you're curious as usual we do multiple runs usually three just like in our impact testing and show the median result on screen but these were pretty consistent when held at the correct angle which is was surprising to us so here's all the universal impact adapters again on screen along with the wobble extension harbor freight that we tested in its last series it's interesting to us that the pinlist made less overall than the pinned and that the x-core made so much less in general although we have quite a history here of snapping the pins on pen style sockets so maybe the trade-off between the two of between pinless and pinned is durability since we wanted to know that after learning these numbers we decided to dive a bit deeper in this video than we usually do and see if there's more data to be found to sort of accelerate wear on these sockets we strapped on a three-quarter inch air earthquake we borrowed and used a half-inch impact adapter to sort of bring the pain to each one of these test subjects what we're after here isn't necessarily max peak torque but high dynamic torque the power per blow aided by the large mass of the hammers in this large three-quarter inch impact wrench that is what has the potential to wear these sockets quickly and if you're curious about the results from a three quarter inch to a half inch impact adapter or three quarter inch impact wrenches in general we'll eventually get into those we like to have multiple test subjects before we start to try and understand and compare power between tools while using a three-quarter inch impact is definitely not ideal it would probably take us years to wear all of these adapters and probably not evenly as we don't tend to use this type of tool a lot and it definitely did the trick too here's the results after running them at an equal amount of time with this three quarter inch the niko failed about three quarters of the way through the process it didn't break but it refuses to articulate in multiple directions now it's sort of stuck in one plane of motion the sunx did great this is the other pin socket still the same sort of feel and motion that it was when new and the wear that's evident from the outside looks to be simple breaking in wear marks no scoring no roughness the gearwrench x-core got beat to heck not sure if you could tell from the clip we showed but it has a lot of back and forth movement while in use compared to the others and as soon as we moved the angle around on this thing while i was impacting it started spitting chips and dust all over the workbench like it was puking its guts out it was definitely not happy to show up for work today you can see from the results here mushroomed over edges every lobe has small chips and nicks and material missing from it all together whereas before it felt like the smoothest adapter in the bunch now it feels like a box of rocks it doesn't like to move and some positions will just no longer move there at all as for the tecton pinless we feel it may have actually improved after abuse it feels smoother easier to articulate than when it was news as far as where it's kind of like the sun x it has wear marks like the oxide coatings missing there but nothing really to see as far as actual wear no edges or burrs to really catch anything on so we'll have to take these apart to learn more and we tried fiddling with pixels for about 15 minutes to pop out the different retaining rings and such before grabbing a cut-off tool which is usually our instrument of choice sorry we're brutes and we don't have all day these really didn't want to come apart you'll have to ignore any of the plentiful straight lines and cut marks you might see on these going forward the nico pen style definitely has some burrs on its hollow ball end looks like the pin left some jagged teeth marks on its opening enough to catch on with the center punch and the pin itself definitely has a bit of a wobble to it when you roll it back and forth although maybe it is hard to see here either way this combined was enough to drop the universal part of being a universal adapter now doesn't really move around on the other hand sun x is looking much better than its pinned brother and it's no surprise that it looking bigger on the outside meant it had bigger components on the inside maybe these were able to last longer due to that the pin has wear marks where it would contact the openings of the ball in but mainly just cosmetic on the finish sort of wear marks and the ball end and openings look very gently used with no burrs to speak of leaving the gearwrench for last the tecton is a similar story to the sunx ignoring our cut marks plenty of love marks where the finish is worn away sort of at the hex peaks the points but mainly just that no burrs or material missing or anything to catch a fingernail on you can definitely see the six sided ball here and within that socket and sort of see the similar shape sort of makes sense i guess that a hex socket drives something hex shaped efficiently as that's mostly what we're doing all day on cars so the gearwrench x-core it's a different story we really had to hack this one to get it out but check out the abuse that already existed on this thing the thin lobes here were all misshapen mushroomed over nicked missing material basically everything you don't want to see when you look on the inside of the socket end it sort of becomes clear why it's driven by these super small tabs that protrude into the socket and drive those four lopes the size of these tabs is a head scratcher for us and the fact that they have basically nowhere on these protruding tabs and a ton of wear on the ball loaves leaves us some questions you can see that there's a bunch of back and forth movement and room for it to move back and forth on this drive end before it engages that ball lobe with the tab and it seems the tecton was pointing out this all along they show these tiny tabs here in the comparison image this raised even more questions for us which we felt a hardness gauge could help shine some light on now as commenters on our community page have rightly pointed out hardness does not equal toughness but it does give you an otherwise hidden piece of the puzzle let's look at that puzzle after discussing with a socket factory in taiwan and a manufacturer in the u.s the pieces of that puzzle or pi in this case include at least five starting in the top right failure testing we got that covered we definitely caused some of these to fail then alloy or in our case just knowing what that base alloy is luckily for us we made sure to choose all chromoly impact adapters each adapter we bought is made from chromoly and the specific chromo alloy available and used for sockets in asia and specifically in taiwan especially is scm-440 or as we call in the us-4140 the only slight difference being among all of these pieces and adapters is the tecton who calls out 4140 as well but uses 8660 for the ball drive end which is a chromoly but it's a nickel chromoly so that's a piece of the pie that's more or less covered next in the pie is the asme standard that applies to your tool which for us is b107.2 written for extensions in universal joints used with an impact specifically section 4.6 showing what we're working with here it states for a half inch drive the range of hardness should be 38 to 55 rockwell c which is the measurement we're going to be taking next is hardness which is what we're talking about we're going to determine that for each piece of the socket assembly even knowing this alone among similar material types can help to tell the story about why some parts beat up others why some parts bend or mushroom versus others that might fracture or break when we see that last is treatment which we have no idea other than surface coatings we don't know the specific heat treatment and 47 herbs and spices that go into the quenching and normalizing cycles they use to establish the toughness they're after but we do have four fifths of this pie to help try and provide some info on what we do see which is tools either being grenaded or not so that's good enough for us we think it's about as good as anyone who's not actually the people who make the socket could potentially do so let's take a look at the sonex first as it fared well in the pin category the ball and drive-in measures 51.8 rc pretty hard as far as an impact socket goes since chrome hand tools are usually harder than impact but not hitting that upper limit of 55 yet the socket end measures 50.5 and the pin itself measures 53.4 apparently the pins may often times be crv or tool steel like s2 on these so that may not compare as well as the other pieces but it's interesting to see them all around roughly the same hardness on a socket that performed well next up is the niko which is one that sort of got stuck in its socket the ball and drive-in measure 54 on the rockwell c the socket measures near identical 54.3 and the slightly bent pin measures 51.9 so the pin was a bit softer softer still than sun x but not significantly roughly in the same category of hardness yet the nico failed and the sun x didn't this we believe comes down to the difference in size between the two sockets that extra bulk and mass and pin diameter of the sunx appears to be soaking up some of those big impact blows better than nico did or at least this is our assumption next we have the tecton the drive end measures a very hard 58.6 points and the socket end comes at 55.1 right up in the upper limit of the asme spec so still exceeding it a bit with the 58.6 in the drive end but then again this is the only major socket component here that's not 4140 chromoly it's 8660 nickel chromoly which is known for being a bit harder and having its peak tensile strength at higher hardness so considering its performance and its near non-existent wear i'd say it's probably working out pretty well last of course we have the battered and bruised gearwrench the four lobe drive end measures 45.6 rockwell certainly not low in the impact socket spectrum but definitely the lowest in this group overall by at least 10 points the socket end brings an eye-opening discovery though topping out the charts at 65.8 rc that is rock hard a good japanese chef's knife in your kitchen might be 62 64 rc but 65.8 that's well above the asme spec of 55 and we can't think of one reason you would need almost any tool to be this hard except maybe a scribe it also might explain why these tiny drive tabs look fine while as the lobes on the socket drive end which are full 20 points softer look like rocky after 12 rounds with ivan drago although we're surprised to see the tabs didn't shear off completely at that hardness as hard doesn't always mean good it seems strange that in an afternoon of testing we could see this torque loss beat up this tool see which parts are excessively damaged and find this huge hardness disparity yet gearwrench has had this for one to two years with plenty of negative reviews and their r d team has really no answer from a design standpoint that we know of and they're not a small outfit i'm not sure what the cause for that is but back to the show as a whole let's take a look at how these all stack up in summary so here's a list with all the data we've discussed so far we're not going to dive into it too much because we've already been talking too much already but roughly for a pinless style adapter we would recommend tecton and for a pin style we'd recommend sun x especially at those price points we enjoy diving deeper into subjects and tools like this from time to time as long as you guys are willing to come along on that journey with us if stuff like this is what you want to see again sometimes let us know in the comments and we'll do more similar processes with other tools and universal sockets themselves on a modified testing rig with a smaller drive size for popular brands like snap-on matco and others maybe revisit this gearwrench x-core on that type of tool as well thanks for watching and we really appreciate it you

Channel: Torque Test Channel

Views: 270,114

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Id: f0xhgQiTGUY

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021