Reprint from China Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 45

During my first twenty five years in the fastener industry I worked for a fastener manufacturer that focused primarily on automotive fasteners. Several years into my tenure I had the opportunity to work on a project outside of the automotive industry, with a large computer and peripherals manufacturer. After many months of project work it was obvious that the project was dead-on-arrival. This was an uncustomary loss and as I reflected on the reasons for this, the one that stood out above all the others was that we were simply not equipped to support the needs unique to this industry segment. We were very capable of providing the necessary application engineering and had the manufacturing capabilities, but we were too ingrained in our own paradigms and lacked important industry specific knowledge so that we failed to execute properly to meet the customer ́s needs.

Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 172

When I started in the fastener industry thirty years ago, our automotive customers were significantly divided in how they approached the platings and coatings used on fasteners. The spectrum ranged on one end from OEMs that had only a handful of choices to the other end of the spectrum where it seemed there was an option for every engineer that had been convinced by a plating chemical supplier that they had the best mousetrap. In the intervening years this has mostly changed, so that today, even though each automotive OEM still has their own set of standards and preferred finishes, the selection has tightened up considerably so that all the OEMS are now doing relatively similar things.

To understand how we have arrived at the place we are today, one has to understand a number of trends and occurrences that have either helped or forced the industry to go in a particular direction. Most of the rest of this article will focus on these discrete events to assist us in understanding the landscape today.