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Exceptional Customer Service is Good for Business

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From Fasteners Technology International, October 2013

About a month ago, I was driving to Detroit, MI, USA, for a couple of days of meetings. I was a little early for my first meeting, so I decided that I would stop at a restaurant and kill an hour checking emails over an iced tea. I started searching the roadside signs and spotted one for Culvers, a mid-western USA burger and frozen custard franchise, a couple of miles ahead. My wife and children are especially fond of our local Culvers restaurants, so this seemed like an excellent place to stop. When I went in, I asked to purchase an iced tea. To my surprise, the young person standing behind the counter handed me a cup and told me that the iced tea was on the house. I was shocked and even protested that I was happy to pay, but she was steadfast. I took my cup, got my iced tea and reveled in my good fortune.

Now this is a good illustration of an empowered employee making a prudent gamble in customer service. This however, is not the end of the story, nor is it really the one I’ve set out to tell. I was so impressed with this gesture though, that on my return trip home, I decided that I would make it a point to return the favor and patronize them for lunch. What happened next still has me impressed and retelling the story. When I walked in, there was a young man in his late teens or early twenties manning the only occupied register with a line of maybe six to eight hungry people waiting to order.

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Strategies To Mitigate Fatigue Failure in Fasteners

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From Fasteners Technology International, August 2013

Although component failures have probably been around for as long as man has been putting things together, it wasn’t until the early to mid nineteenth century that engineers began studying the progressive failure mode that we know today as fatigue. Although highly undesirable, fatigue is a relatively common failure among fasteners and regretfully can lead to some dramatic and even life-threatening consequences. A great deal of progress in understanding fatigue has been made since the nineteenth century, and yet there is still much to be learned. Fortunately, enough is understood today that specific strategies and practices can be employed when a bolt or screw is designed in an application at risk of fatigue failure. This article will look at the basics of fatigue in fasteners and preventative measures that can be adopted to reduce the risk of failure and improve the durability or life of the fastener component.

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The Art of Thread Forming Fasteners, Part Two – Thread Forming Into Plastics, Light Metals, and Steels

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From Fastener Technology International, June 2013

In Part One of this two-part series, we looked at the general principles of thread forming that apply uniformly regardless of screw or material type. In an ideal world, “one size would fit all” and any screw could be universally used in any material. However, anyone that has ever tried to thread a standard sheet metal screw into polycarbonate or into a thick steel plate might attest to catastrophic results. Why? Quite simply, the fastener being used was never designed to perform in these materials.

Therefore, the first ground rule that any Fastener Engineer or Designer must employ is to choose a fastener that was designed to work in the material and the situation intended. There is some excellent fastener technology that works well in the applications it was designed for, but not so well with other materials. So it is incumbent on the Designer to know as much as possible about all aspects of the joint and not to simply assume that because the fastener works well in thread forming such-and-such a material, that it will work well in a different one.

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The Art of Thread Forming Fasteners, Part One – General Principles

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From Fastener Technology International, April 2013

One of the roles of every Fastener Engineer or Designer is to look critically at each new problem and develop an elegant solution that is as simple in form as it is effective in practice and efficient in cost. That often means using the minimal amount of resources to gain the maximum achievement. The “art” of thread forming fasteners provides a powerful tool in the industry arsenal to achieve such results for customers.

When it comes to fastened joints made up of a threaded fastener and some type of nut member, there are really only two varieties, those that start with a nut member thread already in-place and those that depend on the threaded fastener to create its own mating thread. A great deal of technical information can be found where both screw and nut member are threaded, but far less is available and understood on those where the nut member thread is formed by the screw itself.

This two-part article series will attempt to remove some of this mystery. Part One will explore the basic guiding principles of thread forming. These are principles and behaviors that are true regardless of the screw or nut member material. When I am done, it is my hope that the reader will have gained an appreciation for how thread forming works and the general areas of concern for the Fastener Engineer when he or she designs such a joint.

Part Two will explore the more specific and specialized cases of thread forming into thermoplastic, light metal and steel materials. Although not the only materials available for thread forming, these three categories represent the majority of areas where thread forming fasteners are utilized today.

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Heat Treating Basics – A Primer

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From Fastener Technology International, February 2013

A couple of years ago, I took up Sporting Clays, which is a shotgun shooting sport where the target, a four inch round clay disc, is presented to you in two different ways over a course composed of maybe 10 to 15 different stations. Although I am still “developing” my skills, I have found this to be a fun and challenging sport. I have enjoyed it so much that for my birthday last year my wife presented me with a year’s subscription to one of the sport’s magazines. This too I have enjoyed, but it quickly showed me, with no lack of frustration on my part, how very little I really know about the sport. I couldn’t tell you what the different target presentations are intended to represent, how competition is properly scored and for that matter what much of the terminology means.

In much the same way, when I was confronted early in my career with the process of heat treating fasteners, all but a few basic concepts that I remembered from my beginning Engineering Materials class were unknown and cloudy. As I gained more experience, asked questions, learned how parts were manufactured, saw the process and participated in the industry’s technical community, I gained clarity and understanding. However, for those not normally engaged in technical activities or those new to the industry, I imagine that much about heat treating is shrouded in mystery. Why does one heat treat a fastener? How does it work? What is some of the important terminology? This article is intended to help give some simple answers to these questions and unwrap the mystery for those that have no reason or need to hold a metallurgy or engineering degree, but desire to know a little more about fasteners.

For the purposes of this article I will limit our discussion to basic carbon steel and carbon alloy fasteners. This covers the vast majority of fasteners, but certainly not all. Many specialty and highly engineered fasteners utilize more exotic materials that have special and unique metallurgy and often complicated mechanisms to improve physical properties. The bottom line is that this topic can be studied to great depths and there is much to know, even at the simplest level. This article will only touch on the most basic of these concepts.

 

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Are You Familiar With Common Failure Modes On Roll Threaded Products?

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From Fastener Technology International, December 2012

I can vividly remember the first time I walked onto the manufacturing floor of a fastener manufacturer. I was not a rookie to a manufacturing environment, having spent the previous two years in a large metal stamping facility, but the “rat-tat-tat” sound of multiple headers banging out hundreds of parts a minute was a big departure from the “ker-chunk” sound of a 2000 lb press forming a car’s hood or quarter panel that I had grown accustomed to. Although the headers were center stage and what I would subsequently naturally showcase during hundreds of plant tours in the years afterward, it was the humble thread roller that left an indelible memory during that first plant tour.

I suppose this impression was far less the result of any impressiveness of the machine itself and more on the ingenuity and complete unexpectedness of the rolling process. At that time, my paradigm was shaped from the only experience I had in threading a bolt, and that was using a tap and die set on my garage workbench. I guess I simply assumed that all threaded fasteners employed a tap or die in some fashion.

Therefore, I was fascinated to see parts being rolled between two flat plates at speeds so fast that they obscured the parts and transformed them into an unrecognizable blur. I walked away transfixed and appreciative of the creativity and ingenuity of some long past engineer. It would only be much later that I would fully appreciate the art of this process, but also the multitude of ways that it could produce defects and defective parts. This article is not intended to be an in-depth and detailed look at process, dies, set-up or any number of other factors that play a part in the conditions of the end product, but rather a brief introduction to the common failure modes that can result from thread rolling.

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Is It Worth Its Salt?

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From Fastener Technology International, October 2012

In the early days of my career, when I was occasionally working on new part approvals, and then later when I was overseeing such activity, a common and frustrating event was to discover that parts submitted to the customer for approval did not pass their salt spray test. This was particularly confounding because those same parts would have passed our internal testing and often that of our plating vendor. I would quickly come to learn that this is a common industry problem and one likely experienced by every fastener manufacturer or distributor at one time or another.

To compound this frustration, I learned that although the experts have long debated the pluses and minuses of this test, regardless of which side they fall, they universally agree that this test may not provide similar results between test cabinets (even though all process parameters have been followed) and that the mechanism of failure is so radically different from real world application, that there is no known or accepted correlation between salt spray hours passed and actual performance in real-world service.

One might logically ask then, what the value of this test is, what is really happening amid that salt fog and why other test methods haven’t replaced it. The following is an attempt to understand more about the process and tackle these and other questions regarding this universal and deep-rooted test method in qualifying fastener quality and ability to withstand service corrosion conditions.

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Doing it Right the First Time

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Designing the right joint or fastening system up-front with some value and application engineering techniques in the early design stages is extremely important.

From Fastener Technology International, August 2012

In the 1998 movie, “Armageddon”, as he is being strapped into a space capsule atop a rocket, Rock Hound, the character played by Steve Buscemi utters this line to Harry, the character played by Bruce Willis, “Hey Harry? You know we’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has two hundred and seventy thousand moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”

 In my opinion, this ranks as one of the most humorous lines from Hollywood in recent years. But unfortunately, one that expresses, at its core, an attitude that all too often seems to prevail among even the best and most enlightened users of fasteners.

 How often have you heard that, “it’s only a screw, nut or bolt” or found yourself in a tense situation trying to make or locate a fastener because your customer failed to appreciate the engineering complexity, time or dollar constraints associated with making or procuring the right one?

 Naturally, most of the readers of Fastener Technology International probably have a healthy respect for how much engineering goes into specifying, designing and manufacturing the right fastener for a specific application. You realize how critical a fastener can be to the overall success or failure of a customer’s project.

You can probably cite multiple instances of customers that have failed to adequately consider the design of the fastened joint or waited to the last minute to choose the proper fastener, and then had the audacity to wonder why your company cannot support them. How often have these delays or oversights ultimately cost the customer precious resources and you “reputation points”?

 Fortunately, no one needs to find themselves in this predicament. With proper education, communication and the latest in application and value-engineering tools, many of these pitfalls can be avoided. Generally, it doesn’t take a significant investment of time or resources to work with a manufacturer, authorized distributor or knowledgeable party to conduct value and application engineering services early in the design cycle and eliminate much of this frustration on the backend. In most cases, it is clearly evident this early investment can pay significant dividends later in the design cycle.

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Converting Screw Machined Parts to Cold Formed Parts

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machinedFrom Fastener Technology International, June 2012

In this day and age where customers are expecting more suggestions and input from their suppliers,
a recommendation to convert a part from screw machining to cold forming could provide advantages.

As more customers and OEMs reduce engineering and purchasing staffs, they are placing greater dependence and responsibility on their vendors and suppliers to generate both quality and cost improvement ideas. If your customer only purchases standard cold formed fasteners, providing ideas might prove to be a real challenge. However, if your customer’s product is either complicated or its purchasing or engineering resources are not well educated in cold forming technology, there may be an opportunity to conduct a value engineering exercise and review the possibility of converting screw machined parts to cold formed parts.

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