If you’re like us, you’ve got at least one bin dedicated to keeping the random hardware you just can’t bear to part with. In our case it’s mostly populated with the nuts and bolts left over after finishing up a car repair, but however it gets filled, it’s a mess. The degree to which you can tolerate this mess will vary, but for [EmGi], even a moderately untidy pile of bolts was enough to spur this entirely 3D-printed mechanical bolt sorter.
The elements of this machine bear a strong resemblance to a lot of the sorting mechanisms we’ve seen used on automated manufacturing and assembly lines. The process starts with a hopper full of M3 cap head bolts of varying lengths, which are collated by a pair of elevating platforms. These line up the bolts and lift them onto a slotted feed ramp, which lets them dangle by their heads and pushes them into a fixture that moves them through a 90° arc and presents them to a long sorting ramp. The ramp has a series of increasingly longer slots; bolts roll right over the slots until they find the right slot, where they fall into a bin below. Nuts can also feed through the process and get sorted into their own bin.
What we like about [EmGi]’s design is its simplicity. There are no motors, bearings, springs, or other hardware — except for the hardware you’re sorting, of course. The entire machine is manually powered, so you can just grab a handful of hardware and start sorting. True, it can only sort M3 cap head bolts, but we suspect the design could be modified easily for other sizes and styles of fasteners. Check it out in action in the video below.
Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean we don’t like more complicated hardware sorters, like the ones [Christopher Helmke] builds.
Thanks to [john] for the tip.
Clever device, though requires the screws to have approximately the same head height and shape (probably chokes on button heads) for them to roll straight.
It appears to me the heads go into the groove, so it’s rolling on the threads.
The rotator may need to be more matched to the head.
Several dozen flat rectangles sure is the PERFECT thing to 3d print…
Honestly, I’ve had this thought many times before but if you need a bunch of different, specifically sized rectangles and you’ve already got CAD models and a 3D printer, sure, why not? A laser would be better and sure, you could manually cut them but in both of those options you need appropriate thickness feedstock rather than practically universal plastic filament.
Wait? To use this machine you have to first sort your bolts by size, to only pick the M3?
It seems so yes, my biggest pain is to actually sort them by diameter not lenght, so please add this yet another complication to design and the machine would be perfect :)
Anyway Omnisiah would be proud of the techpriest and his bolt action contraption;)
Now if the “Box of the Desperate” would only contain bolts… 😅
This guy should be paid boatloads of $ to make opening credits for TV series or movies.
I actually printed this.
It looks cool, but I’d call it a draft version.
The hopper doesn’t lift the screws properly, the lift boards need to be thicker.
The screw lift and turn mechanism is troublesome, most (99%) of screws get stuck and won’t roll onto the rolling section.
The flap that lifts them is also very flimsy and could do with reinforcement behind it.
Tolerances are too tight on the slide panels, I had to sand them down a bit, use ptfe lube and work it alot to loosen it up.
I don’t mean to be a downer, but I was rather disappointed.
I hope work continues on this because it would be very handy.