$379 Harbor Freight Icon Torque Wrench Faces $790 Snap-On In Project Farm's Test

Accuracy and consistency are important to consider when buying any new torque wrench, but a recent comparison by Project Farm proved that more expensive wrenches aren't necessarily more accurate. The YouTuber put torque wrenches from a range of brands to the test, including Snap-On's $790 torque wrench and Icon's less pricey alternative. Alongside the major brands, Project Farm also tested several cheap torque wrenches from lesser-known brands, and the results were surprising.

Snap-On's torque wrench performed well across the entire range of tests in the comparison, confirming that it's a safe bet for professionals looking for high quality. However, that shouldn't be a surprise considering its hefty price tag. There's no single, definitive answer to the question of whether Snap-On tools are worth the cost, but Project Farm's test shows that they might well be worth the investment for demanding professional applications.

Buyers who can't justify paying Snap-On's prices will likely have considered Harbor Freight's Icon tools, and Project Farm's testing showed Icon's torque wrench to be a solid alternative. Although the $379 Icon torque wrench had a larger margin of error than the Snap-On at 50 ft-lbs when it was box fresh, it was slightly more accurate when torquing to 250 ft-lbs. After 1,000 cycles, the Icon torque wrench produced an average error of 0.58 ft-lbs at 50 ft-lbs, which is still comfortably within its claimed accuracy. However, it was still beaten by the Snap-On, which showed an inaccuracy of only 0.17 ft-lbs after the same test.

Both the Icon and the Snap-On torque wrenches were consistent across the tests, while rivals from the likes of Craftsman and DeWalt showed a notably larger variation in accuracy over time. Several of the lesser-known brands that Project Farm tested also performed poorly, although one cheap brand stood out as being surprisingly accurate.

A torque wrench from the brand Suercup, which the YouTuber said cost him just $78, had an impressively small margin of error both when it was new and after it had been through 1,000 cycles. Alongside the Snap-On and Icon tools, the Suercup was the only other torque wrench he tested that showed an average error of less than 1 ft-lb when new and used.

While professionals are very unlikely to opt for a little-known Chinese brand over either Icon or Snap-On, the strong performance of the Suercup in Project Farm's testing proves that weekend wrenchers and novices don't need to break the bank to get an accurate torque wrench. If you're still new to the world of project cars and still getting to grips with how a torque wrench works, there's zero point in buying from a big-name brand when the right cheap wrench will do a good enough job.