#4 Thankful for YOU

Did you know the first screw factory was a failure? Sadly, it's true. 

In 1760, two English brothers from Burton on Trent, Job & William Wyatt, patented a screw-cutting machine (Patent No. 751) which appears to be the first major advancement capable of true mass-production. Their machine could cut 10 screws per minute and was considered one of the precursors to mass production machinery. The Wyatt’s machine made a labor of several minutes into one of six or seven seconds while producing a much higher quality product. It took the brothers 16 years to raise the capital to open a factory but for some reason, the Wyatt brothers’ business was not successful. 

Poor Job and William.

So this week we're thankful for our customers that keep our doors open.

Thanks to all of you!

Here is an advertisement from an old nut & bolt company back in 1884 from Darlaston, England.

Click here to read more about the history of nuts & bolts in Darlaston, England, dating back to 1800.

#3 Thankful for Olives & Grapes

The first screws go back to the Ancient Greeks (or Ancient Romans, depending on where you look for information.) Both Ancient Civilizations would press olives and grapes to make olive oil and wine (still loved today by both the Greeks, Italians and many others) and they used screw presses, a type of machine press in which the ram is driven up and down by a screw...like this.

From Wikipedia's Screw Press Page: the screw shaft can be driven by a handle or a wheel. It works by using a coarse screw to convert the rotation of the handle or drive-wheel into a small downward movement of greater force.

Basically the screw press creates a strong force to be exerted on an object with minimal effort from rotating the handle or wheel - the screw makes it possible. 

Thanks to the deliciousness of olive oil and wine, the screw was invented - so thanks grapes & olives! 

#2 Thankful to the Screw - Helix Vs Spiral

Our month of gratitude continues with us showing the difference between a spiral and a helix - we're thankful someone figured this out as all of our screws and bolts depend on it:

The words spiral and helix can be confusing as both are used to reference curves that "wind around". I have heard people refer to the length below the head, including the threads, of a screw as a spiral but that's wrong - it is a helix! A spiral is a curve that winds around a fixed point with a continuously increasing radius and a helix is a three -dimensional curve that twists around a cylinder at a constant inclined angle. If anything, sometimes a screw starts as a spiral and then turn into a helix...meaning the the point is a spiral but the shaft is a helix. Have a look at the helix on a bolt and screw:

#1 Thankful for Fasteners

Fasteners are an integral part of infrastructure - our buildings, our objects, our cars. We can find fasteners in just about everything. All the things that facilitate our productivity, our happiness, our safety, all being held together with these sometimes little and sometimes large things that clamp parts together called fasteners.

And since it's November, we're going to show a little gratitude by sharing some interesting fastener facts, starting with this one:

The difference between a 'bolt' & a 'screw': bolt refers to a male fastener that requires a nut to function, whereas screw refers to a male fastener that is mated into a matching female thread in a work piece. The bolt and nut assembly requires two tools to tighten or loosen, whereas a screw only requires one as the part with the female threaded hole is typically stationary. 

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

One more year with this Turkey...thanks everyone for working hard and working with us, whether you enjoy the blog or you're buying fasteners, we're thankful.

I love Heavy Metal

Today we draw attention to the importance of metals. 

We found an article from a few years back written by Mark Nesbitt that points out the pros (and some cons) of a society that appreciates & even relies on the things we build out of metal. The first paragraph is awesome:

"The earth’s crust is rich with minerals and transforming these ores into – metal tools, machines and equipment of all sorts, motor vehicles, solar cells, wind turbines, computers, the internet, communications satellites and the rockets that put them in orbit, medical equipment and innumerable other products – allow us to live a quality of life much different from that of our parents and grandparents. Stop and think about it. Even the most basic things we take for granted, from the roads and highways we drive on to flat screen television panels, are products of mining. Society not only relies on, but demands it receives the manufactured products it wants and has become accustomed." (Click to read the whole article.)

SO TRUE!

Our lives would be so different without the people who know how to transform metals into things that make us happy & safe. So today we say thank you to those folks.

Thanks miners and manufacturers!

Robot Nutcracker

We're thankful for fun stuff. 

Look at this Robot Nutcracker - it cracks nuts with a screw device!

You can buy one at the Museum of Modern Art Store

Tool Bit Pen

We're so thankful for smart people making clever things. Check this tool out!

Saying Thanks to Screws, Nuts & Bolts

I came across a sweet blog post written by someone who realized the importance of fasteners in her life as she was moving out of an apartment - her name is Tess Wilson.

Image: Tess Wilson

It's literally a tiny read and by paraphrasing it I feel like I'm simply rewriting it so I will just urge you to click and read it. She did a great job of acknowledging the little tools and the positive impact they had on her life.  She expressed her thanks to these amazing things and of course I LOVED IT!  Perfect for our month of gratitude.

Here is the article:  98 SCREWS: What's Holding Your Apartment Together?

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Still Lifes of Screws

With November being a month dedicated to gratitude, what better way to stop and reflect than with a still life.

I found these beautiful paintings from a woman named Jenny Armitage.

They are still lifes of jars of left over fasteners (we can all relate to that.)

A household staple immortalized in these fantastic paintings.

The light, the colors - they are pretty and they make me feel good.

I even love the idea of a window sill full of different jars full of different fasteners.

I just might move my jars out of the garage and into a pretty sunlit window. 

Sigh...I think fasteners are wonderful.

If you'd like your own painting, you can buy one here.

Nuts OR Bolts?

Have you all seen this Ford Car commercial? It's so funny and it deeply makes me appreciate both nuts AND BOLTS!

Especially at this time of the year, when we start feeling thankful, this commercial brings out my gratitude.
It's so awesome! 

And now I want a Ford.

A Fastener Thanksgiving...

We're open today until 5p and then we'll be back Monday morning.

Have a good one!

Who's with me?!

Dagnabbit, we couldn't figure out how too make a 'G'.

But G or no G, it's Friday so
Have a great weekend!

Customer Appreciation

Last week we got a nice phone call from a customer who wanted to make sure we knew how appreciative he was for how we had helped him.  He told us how thankful he was for making things easier on him. He said if he had ordered the parts from some other place on the internet it would have taken him 7 days and he would have lost sleep over whether the bolts were going to arrive fully threaded or not. Then, if they were wrong, he would have had to send them back and wait another 7 days for the proper ones to come!  With us he was able to have a reliable contact person - who personally checked they were fully threaded - and his parts delivered the next day! He was so thankful for our service that he called us just to tell us...and it touched us deeply. So we're actually the thankful ones.

We're so thankful to have such nice customers!

Election Day

Today's a big day for the USA & no matter who wins we're thankful for our right to vote.

 

We're thankful

It's that time of year when we say 'thanks' for the things we are grateful for, and we of course are thankful for fasteners. 

We know that we're very fastenercentric here so it's not surprising to hear that we're thankful for them but, in reality, everyone owes these little bits & pieces some gratitude.  To better explain this I'm reposting an article I found on the internet that made me feel proud to sell them:

'Why the need for industrial fasteners?'

Screws are the pervasive and unseen power holding our industrial world together. Solely gravity can claim a better ability for preserving items together. Once one speaks of fasteners such as tek screws, zip screws or self tapping screws, one pertains to all manner of fasteners, bolts, anchors, Velcro, threaded bars, and so on.

Fasteners hold two or far more objects in place, with the aim of enabling zero movement. A screw joins two items as one. You may possibly most of the time wonder: why don’t individuals just construct things as one piece in the initial arrangement? Why use the middleman of screws? The answer is that not everything is small & adequate to erect, ship, or otherwise manipulate. Without fasteners, there would be no skyscrapers. There would be no cars. There would be no Velcro tennis shoes or quick-release point costumes.

There are many various kinds of screws, made of different materials. The most recognizable fastener is the screw. As absolutely everyone knows, it is comprised of a head, a shank, and threads for guiding the fastener in, to arrange and for maintaining it in there. The head can take many forms, including those that permit the screw to be removed once it has been inserted, and some that decrease the chance of folks from getting rid of the screws at all. The lengths, widths, and pitches of the threads all vary. (The pitch is the angle that the thread is set at; low pitches enable for less complicated and much more gradual insertions, though high pitches are far better suited for metalwork.)

Most screws are made of steel, but there are many cases when plastic screws will do the trick. Plastic material fasteners are non-conductive, and, in many circumstances, heat-resistant.

Whatever type of fastener you need, there is one on the web for every single kind of job imaginable. Simply think: people are tool users, and screws are arguably one of the single most very important tools in history. If there had been no fasteners, you almost certainly wouldn’t be alive today.

From toys to tuna, cars to chemicals - the mighty fastener is helping to make all of it.

So, to the fastener gods, thank you!

And to everyone else,

Happy Thanksgiving!

Lastly, I have no idea who to credit but click on the link below and you can see where I found it:

Why the need for industrial fasteners?