Perhaps you’ve seen them, demonstrations of a machined piece of metal that upon further inspection is actually two pieces machined so perfectly that they appear as one. With extremely tight tolerances, it’s not possible to determine where one piece of metal ends and another begins — that is, until the secret is revealed. Inspired by such pieces of art, [Andrew Klein] sought to put this high level of machine work to practical use. And so it was that his as-yet-unnamed Screw With No Slot came to be.
A brass rod pushes down to reveal the keyed center section.
The screw’s disc-like appearance looks as if it’s a metal trim piece to cover a bolt hole. But in the video below [Andrew] shows us the trick, pushing a brass rod into the middle of the disc to reveal the hidden three-point slot. The center of the disk is actually a separate bit of finely machined metal that is spring loaded to stay flush. A specially designed wrench keys into the rounded concave triangle shape cut into the face.
The wrench is made with brass to avoid marring the precision surface. It uses three magnets to hold tight to the screw’s 410 magnetic stainless steel. [Andrew] didn’t spill the beans on how this was done, but we haven’t seen any process other than electrical discharge machining (EDM) that can achieve this level of mating precision. If that topic is new to you, we recommend checking out [Ben Krasnow’s] lab experiments on the topic.
We can’t help but be taken in by the beauty of the fastener, and it immediately sent our imaginations into a National Treasure induced dream-like state. [Andrew Klein] has yet to name this fastener, and he’s soliciting ideas for names in the video below the break. If you have such an idea, you can comment on his video. He’s also exploring the viability of the as-yet-named fastener as a commercial product for high end furniture builders.
Have you ever wondered whether it’s worth the time and expense to install threaded inserts into your 3D-printed projects? [Stefan] from CNC Kitchen did, and decided to answer the question once and for all, with science.
If this sounds familiar, it’s with good reason: we covered [Stefan]’s last stab at assessing threaded inserts back in March. Then, he was primarily interested in determining if threaded inserts are better than threads cut or printed directly into parts. The current work is concerned with the relative value of different designs of threaded inserts. He looked at three different styles of press-in inserts, ranging in price from pennies apiece to a princely 25 cents. The complexity of the outside knurling seems not to be correlated with the price; the inserts with opposed helical knurls seem like they’d be harder to manufacture than the ones with simple barbs on the outside of the barrel, but cost less. And in fact, the mid-price insert outperformed the expensive one in pull-out tests. Surprisingly, the cheapest inserts were actually far worse at pull-out resistance than printing undersized holes and threading an M3 screw directly into the plastic.
[Stefan] also looked at torque resistance, and found no substantial difference between the three insert types. Indeed, none of the inserts proved to be the weak point, as the failure mode of all the torque tests was the M3 bolt itself. This didn’t hold with the bolt threaded directly into the plastic, of course; any insert is better than none for torque resistance.
We enjoyed seeing [Stefan]’s tests, and appreciate the data that can help us be informed consumers. [John] over at Project Farm does similar head-to-head tests, like this test of different epoxy adhesives.
Zip ties, Ty-Raps, cable ties; call them what you will, but it’s hard to imagine doing without these ubiquitous and useful devices. Along with duct tape and hot glue, they’re part of the triumvirate of fasteners used to solve nasty problems quickly and cheaply. They’re next up on the list of mechanisms we find fascinating, and as it turns out, there’s more to these devices than meets the eye.
Look around yourself right now and chances are pretty good that you’ll quickly lay eyes on a zipper. Zippers are incredibly commonplace artifacts, a commodity item produced by the mile that we rarely give a second thought to until they break or get stuck. But zippers are a fairly modern convenience, and the story of their invention is one that shows even the best ideas can be delayed by overly complicated designs and lack of a practical method for manufacturing.
Try and Try Again
US Patent #504,307. One of the many iterations of Judson’s design. Like the others, it didn’t work.
Ideas for fasteners to replace buttons and laces have been kicking around since the mid-19th century. The first patent for a zipper-like fastener was issued to Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine. Though he was no slouch at engineering intricate mechanisms, Howe was never able to make his “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” a workable product, and Howe shifted his inventive energies to other projects.
The world would wait another forty years for further development of a hookless fastener, when a Chicago-born inventor of little prior success named Whitcomb Judson began work on a “Clasp Locker or Unlocker.” Intended for the shoe and boot market, Judson’s device has all the recognizable parts of a modern zipper — rows of interlocking teeth with a slide mechanism to mesh and unmesh the two sides. The device was debuted at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and was met with almost no commercial interest.
Judson went through several iterations of designs for his clasp locker, looking for the right combination of ideas that would result in a workable fastener that was easy enough to manufacture profitably. He lined up backers, formed a company, and marketed various versions of his improved products. But everything he tried seemed to have one or more serious drawbacks. When his fasteners were used in shoes, unexpected failure was a mere inconvenience. If a fastener on a lady’s dress opened unexpectedly, it could have been a social catastrophe. Coupled with a price tag that was exorbitantly high to cover the manual labor needed to assemble them, almost every version of Judson’s invention flopped.
It would take another decade, a change of company name, a cross-country move, and the hiring of a bright young engineer before the world would have what we would recognize as the first modern zipper. Judson hired Gideon Sundback in 1901, and by 1913 he was head designer at the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company, newly relocated to Meadville, Pennsylvania after a stop in Hoboken, New Jersey. Sundback’s design called for rows of identical teeth with cups on the underside and nibs on the upper, set on fabric tapes. A slide with a Y-shaped channel bent the tapes to open the gap between teeth, allowing the cups to nest on the nibs and mesh the teeth together strongly.
Sundback’s design had significant advantages over any of Judson’s attempts. First, it worked, and it was reliable enough to start quickly making inroads into fashionable apparel beyond its initial marketing toward more utilitarian products like tobacco pouches. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Sundback invented machinery that could make hundreds of feet of the fasteners in a day. This gave the invention an economy of scale that none of Judson’s fasteners could ever have achieved.
The machinery that Sundback invented to make his “Separable Fastener” has been much improved since the early 1900s, but the current process still looks similar, at least for metal zippers. Stringers, which are the fabric tapes with teeth attached, are formed in a continuous process by a multi-step punching and crimping machine. For metal stringers, a coil of flat metal is fed into a punch and die to form hollow scoops. The strip is then punched again to form a Y-shape around the scoop and cut it free from the web. The legs of the Y straddle the edge of the fabric tape, and a set of dies then crimps the legs to the tape. A modern zipper machine can make stringers at a rate of 2000 teeth per minute.
Plastic zippers are common these days, too, and manufacturing methods vary by zipper style. One method has the fabric tapes squeezed between the halves of a die while teeth are injection molded around the tape to form two parallel stringers. A sprue connected the stringers by the teeth breaks free after molding, and the completed stringers are assembled later.
Zippers have come a long way since Sundback’s first successful design, with manufacturing improvements that have eliminated many of the manual operations once required. Specialized zippers have made it from the depths of the oceans to the surface of the Moon, and chances are pretty good that if we ever get to Mars, one way or another, zippers will go with us.
The handheld screw driver is a wonderful tool. We’re often tempted to reach for its beefier replacement, the power drill/driver. But the manually operated screw driver has an extremely direct feedback mechanism; the only person to blame when the screw strips or is over-torqued is you. This is a near-perfect tool and when you pull the right screwdriver from the stone you will truly be the ruler of the fastener universe.
A Bit of Screw Driver History:
The kind of fun you can have with really cheap bits.
In order to buy a good set of screw drivers, it is important to understand the pros and cons of the geometry behind it. With a bit of understanding, it’s possible to look at a screw driver and tell if it was built to turn screws or if it was built to sell cheap.
Screw heads were initially all slotted. This isn’t 100 percent historically accurate, but when it comes to understanding why the set at the big box store contains the drivers it does, it helps. (There were a lot of square headed screws back in the day, we still use them, but not as much.)
Believe it or not the “Robertson” screw came out before the Phillips. Robertson just hated money and didn’t want to license his patents. So it’s only now that they’re in common use again.
Flat head screws could be made with a slitting saw, hack saw, or file. The flat-head screw, at the time, was the cheapest to make and had pretty good torque transfer capabilities. It also needed hand alignment, a careful operator, and would almost certainly strip out and destroy itself when used with a power tool.
These shortcomings along with the arrival of the industrial age brought along many inventions from necessity, the most popular being the Phillips screw head. There were a lot of simultaneous invention going on, and it’s not clear who the first to invent was, or who stole what from who. However, the Philips screw let people on assembly lines turn a screw by hand or with a power tool and succeed most of the time. It had some huge downsides, for example, it would cam out really easily. This was not an original design intent, but the Phillips company said, “to hell with it!” and marketed it as a feature to prevent over-torquing anyway.
The traditional flathead and the Phillips won over pretty much everyone everywhere. Globally, there were some variations on the concept. For example, the Japanese use JST standard or Posidriv screws instead of Philips. These do not cam out and let the user destroy a screw if they desire. Which might show a cultural difference in thinking. That aside, it means that most of the screws intended for a user to turn with a screw driver are going to be flat-headed or Philips regardless of how awful flat headed screws or Philips screws are.
