All Articles

Trends in the Automotive Industry and How They Affect Fastener Suppliers

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 165

Perhaps with the exception of the consumer electronics industry, no other high profile industry seems to embody and embrace change as much as the automotive industry. In fact, new car buyers have come to rely on the fact that the new model year will bring exciting new changes and innovations. And although it may take several years to launch a specific new model into the market, the automotive OEMS stagger releases in such a way that they are consistently releasing new models and complete model refreshers every year. As such, suppliers to automotive OEMs and their vast Tier network must be always vigilant and striving to keep up-to-date with industry advancements.

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Joining High Strength Steel and Aluminum-Friction Element Welding

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 165

Perhaps one of the most difficult things to join together are thin metal sheets. The thickness is the problem because it just doesn’t allow successful joining using many traditional techniques. Industries such as automotive and aerospace which heavily rely on thin metal sheets for structure and support have traditionally been the first to adopt new joining methods that work. For example, automotive has perfected spot welding and aerospace the use of solid rivets and other special fasteners. As time has gone by, however, new, lightweight materials have been added to the mix, and traditional joining methods are quickly becoming unfeasible or obsolete.

Automotive OEMs are rapidly evolving their body-in-white designs to include a hybrid make-up of lightweight aluminum castings, sheets, or extrusions, mild steel, and high and ultra-high strength steel components. These hybrid structures magnify an already challenging joining scenario into one of much greater magnitude. In particular, the joining of dissimilar materials like aluminum and steel make most traditional fastening methods, like spot welding, unfeasible.

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Troubleshooting Common Quality Issues in Wire Raw Material

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 177

There are many ways that fastener manufacturers can make quality deficient parts. If one attempted to classify the source of all these different failure modes and quality issues, they likely would emerge with three or four general categories. One of these general categories and perhaps the single greatest contributor to end product quality issues is the quality of the raw material from which every fastener starts. This article will explore some of the most common quality issues related to raw material and seek to simply describe how each specific issue has an impact on final part quality.

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Automotive Cold Headed Components

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 176

The other day I received an email from an individual at one of the companies that I work with asking me if I was aware of any industry standards for wheel studs. I had to think about this for a bit and ultimately replied that I was unaware of any formal, industrywide document pertaining to this product. I went on to explain that in my experience, although many wheel stud designs were likely similar from one automotive OEM or supplier to another, that each OEM or supplier had their own special “spin” on part design and functionality. The result is a wide body of ‘Tribal Knowledge” on such parts but a dearth of formal, industrywide standards or know-how.

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Fasteners Enable Lightweighting Efforts

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Reprint from Hardware & Fastener Components Magazine, Vol. 41

Histories is full of examples of technologies whose invention long predates their actual practical introduction into society. We could say of these ideas that they were simply “before their time”. Although that would be accurate, it would probably be a fairer assessment to say that they required further maturing and the development of enabling technologies to make them work. Take, for example, one of the most iconic inventions of all-time, the electric light bulb. The earliest light bulbs were invented in the early 1800s. It would be eighty years later that Edison would discover the carbon fiber filament and create the first practical incandescent light bulbs. However, electric light wouldn’t become truly a mainstay in society for another thirty or forty years as enabling technology, such as electrical power generation, transmission and distribution, matured and became a practical reality.

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5 Things About Miniature Screws

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Reprint from Hardware & Fastener Components Magazine, Vol. 40

Humans seem to be fascinated with anything outside the norm. Everybody seems to marvel at things of immense size, like those big tractor tires that a grown man can fit inside, the world’s largest ball of twine, and the Great Wall of China. Equally fabulous, though, are things that are very small. In fact, the Guinness Book of World Records seems to have an endless number of record small things.

Screws and fasteners, like many other items, also come in very small sizes. In fact, there are threaded fasteners that are so small it is difficult to make out their features with the naked eye. Of course, it makes sense that there would be an abundant variety of miniature fasteners, since small assemblies must be held together just like their larger counterparts. Therefore, although they come in tiny packages, they are expected to perform in a big fashion.

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An Overview of Fastening Tools – Understanding Your Options

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Reprint from Hardware & Fastener Components Magazine, Vol. 44

Several days before Christmas of 2016, a truck driver was passing through Chicago on one of the primary expressways. All of a sudden he noticed a large obstruction in his path and swerved his truck to miss it. Unfortunately, in this maneuver he clipped an adjacent vehicle sending him out of control, flipping his truck on its side, breaking through the center concrete divider, and hitting an on- coming vehicle. Sadly, the truck driver lost his life in this tragic accident.

Accident scene investigators would later determine that this accident was triggered by a wheel that had separated off of another truck and was lying in wait on the roadway for an unfortunate victim. In answer to a spate of such incidents, in 1992 the United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sponsored a study to examine the cause and frequency of wheel separations from large Class 8 trucks. Shockingly the study determined that there are between 750 and 1050 such reported separations on U.S. roadways every year. That amounts to two to three every day. The study went on to find that the leading cause of such separations was improper nut and stud tightening during the installation or reinstallation after maintenance of large truck wheels.

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The Importance of Controlling Joint Tightening

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Reprint from Hardware & Fastener Components Magazine, Vol. 43

On December 23, 2016 a fatal crash occurred on a busy Chicago highway. A large tractor trailer truck hit a car, flipping over, and crashing through the center median hitting on-coming traf c. What could have been a horrendous holiday tragedy was limited only to the driver of the truck. Unfortunately, even one fatality is too many, especially if it is due to an entirely preventable cause.

Early reports claimed that the crash was caused by a wheel separating from the truck. It was believed that this caused the driver to lose control resulting in the subsequent chain of events. After accident reconstruction, however, it was determined that the truck driver actually hit a wheel (tire and rim) that had separated from another truck and was lying in the roadway.

Now what does this accident have to do with fasteners?

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Recess Drive Systems for Screws

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Reprint from Hardware & Fastener Components Magazine, Vol. 42

Precariously balancing atop a ladder, you find yourself holding the new light fixture you’re installing in one hand and in the other a screw driver with a screw delicately balanced from the tip. To your chagrin the ladder jiggles a little and the screw drops to the floor leaving you perched on a ladder holding a light fixture you can’t now connect. Whether you are into “do-it-yourself” projects or would never find yourself in this situation, this scenario repeats itself many times a day in many different ways throughout the world. Perhaps ending more successfully than the above example, the screw is driven into place providing the holding power it was designed to give. This is only possible because screws are designed with a drive feature, often an internal recess that accepts a screw driver bit that enables assembly.

Threaded fasteners, since their inception, have had to have some sort of design or feature that allowed them to be driven. Although most internal recesses are relatively new (less than 100 years old), slots have been used for a very long time. Slots are simple, easy to use, and pretty effective. However, newer designs introduce an array of technologies that address many of the challenges that fastener engineers and designers commonly face.

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“Staying Put” – About Keeping a Threaded Fastener in-Place

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 170

About twenty years ago I was travelling quite often between the United States and Europe. To make sure that my luggage arrived in one piece I purchased a medium sized, hard-sided suitcase. As I unpacked the suitcase at the conclusion of every trip I would find a loose screw or two rolling around the bottom of the suitcase. To be honest, I never could figure out exactly where these screws were coming from or how so many could come loose without the suitcase falling apart, but they clearly had loosened up from the suitcase and come out during travel. I began to worry that I was only one trip away from a major catastrophe with my bag, so that today I use a different suitcase when I travel internationally.

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