Tag Archives: Quality

What Is Your Philosophy of Quality?

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, September/October 2019

What are your thoughts about quality? At one level this would seem to be a simple question to answer, but I speculate that if we asked that question of a large group of individuals, we would get a multitude of different answers. To most individuals, quality is subjective and may look very different at one moment than it does at another. Take, for example, the scenario of dining out. If the food is delivered to your table with a sloppy presentation, you may consider it to be of lesser quality than a dish that was presented well, even though the flavors and taste are still excellent. In this case, the quality decision is being made more on appearance than performance.

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Six Things I Learned Building a House

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, September/October 2018

In 2005, my bride of several years and I entered into an adventure and decided that rather than buying an existing home, we would build our first new home together. For many, entering into such a project is likely to test the mettle of their relationship, but my love for building projects made this an easy decision, and thus, I was not intimidated to act as my own General Contractor. So, we hunkered down, began working with an architect friend, and soon had a plan ready to go. Next came the arduous process of finding and hiring subcontractors.

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Workplace Development: It’s Too Important Not to Get This Right

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, November/December 2019

In recent years, the universal chorus of manufacturers across the country seems to be how they are going to recruit new members to their team to keep up with new openings and backfill the exodus of an older workforce that is quickly retiring. To their chagrin, they have learned that even if they have a good solution to this first challenge, other, often more imposing challenges quickly follow suit. Once they have new team members aboard, they find themselves challenged to bridge an ever-widening skills gap. As a result, workplace development in the form of education and training has become increasingly more important.

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What Building a Home Can Teach About Customer Service

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, July/August 2019

About 12 years ago, my wife and I built the house we currently live in. I acted as the General Contractor. Although for many, this choice turns out to be a disaster, it went reasonably well for me, and in fact, I enjoyed doing it. So it is no surprise that I should find myself once again playing General Contractor in a major construction project.

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Why Do Fastener Suppliers Usually Focus Their Attention on a Single Market Segment?

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Reprint from LINK, Winter 2021

Have you ever considered why most fastener suppliers, whether a distributor or manufacturer, tend to predominantly supply customers in a single market segment? In other words, consider for a moment, aerospace and automotive customers, it is extremely rare for a fastener supplier to support both industries. Although rare, it is not unheard of for a company to supply different market segments. In fact, I can cite several examples of manufacturers that have operations focused on different market segments, including several companies which have construction and automotive focused operations and one that has both aerospace and automotive focus. However, without exception, these operations are supported separately from different sites or as completely separate and independent operating divisions.

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Is There Value in Application Engineering?

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Reprint from LINK, Summer 2021

I began my career in the fastener industry over thirty years ago as an Application Engineer. This was a great place to start, and, perhaps, the most cherished time of all my years in the industry. I suppose that Application Engineering can mean different things to different people, but within the fastener realm this role is pretty universally understood as an interface which works with the customer to provide the best fastening solution. This not only means choosing the correct fastener but also the related joint design, fastener heat treatment, finish, packaging, and any number of other design or process related decisions.

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A Primer on Fastener Marking

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Reprint from LINK, Summer 2020

A number of years ago I owned an old John Deere tractor that was clearly showing its age. As I tooled around my yard cutting the grass I noticed that the engine was laboring more and more and it was consistently blowing oily blue smoke from the exhaust. I knew it was time to either retire the tractor or rebuild the engine. Although I had never done it before, I decided I would try my hand at rebuilding the engine.

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Why Fastener Standards are So Important

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Reprint from LINK, Spring 2020

I just returned from a meeting that included many of the leaders of the North American fastener industry. Amidst the discussions of the impacts of COVID-19 and 2020 Presidential Elections, I found myself in several discussions about fastener standards. Although I understand that among this important and influential audience other topics reach higher priority, I was surprised to find a complete absence of understanding and interest into why fastener standards are important and perhaps even critical to their organizations.

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New Flat Die Thread Rolling Technology

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Reprint from China Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 189

One of the delights of being an independent consultant is the wide assortment of people I meet and projects I get to review. Over the last ten years the two problems that I am most commonly approached about include skills development and thread rolling. In fact, I have written many articles in the last ten years and the one that I most frequently have inquiries about years later is related to problems in thread rolling. This is truly a step in the fastener manufacturing process that is ripe for innovation.

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Common Problems Faced by Manufacturing in Nut Processing

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Reprint from China Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 188

Nuts, like screws and bolts, are, generally, a high volume commodity. As such, the most predominant method of manufacturing them starts
with cold forming a blank. However, lower volume or large size nuts more often use hot forging or screw machining techniques. For the purposes of this article, we will limit our discussion to the cold forming manufacturing method.

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