Tag Archives: Finishes

A “Galling Development” – What Every Distributor Should Know about Thread Galling

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Reprint from LINK, Spring 2021

A number of year’s back I was engaged by a Midwestern distributor to review an application problem that had intermittently plagued one of their more important customers. Upon meeting with their customer, I learned the problem occurred during the assembly of a stainless steel Nylon insert lock nut to a like stainless steel screw. Although this was a sporadic problem, when it occurred the customer would experience assembly difficulties like nuts that were very hard to turn, nuts that reached installation torque levels before seating, and in the worst cases, nuts that became totally frozen (seized) in mid-run down position, often breaking the screw in torsion.

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Protecting Fasteners from Corroding Part 1: Basics of Corrosion and Protection Mechanisms

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Reprint from China Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 190

The man walked to his tool box, selected the right sized socket and returned to the piece of machinery he was trying to repair. He stared for a moment at the nut he was trying to loosen. It was badly corroded but he had done this many times before. Carefully seating the socket fully on the nut he began to apply pressure. At first nothing happened but then he felt a tiny change in the resistance, reinvigorating his incentive to keep pushing on the bar. Just as he thought he had given it his all, a resounding loud snap occurred catapulting him and his tools forward as his efforts were no longer restrained by the once stubborn but now broken bolt and nut. Crashing into the floor, he yelped in pain and cussed his misfortune.

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How Environmentally Friendly are Your Fastener’s Finishes?

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Reprint from China Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 49

At 9:45 a.m. on February 20, 1947 The O’Connor Electro- Plating Corporation of Los Angeles, California experienced a tremendous explosion leveling the company’s facilities and much of the surrounding four block area. The aftermath of this disaster left 17 dead, 150 injured, and 116 buildings damaged or destroyed. The cause was an unstable mixture of perchloric acid and acetic anhydride, a substance nearly as explosive as nitroglycerin, used by O’Conner in an experimental aluminum polishing process.

Although this example is perhaps one-of-a-kind and certainly not characteristic of the normal consequences of a metal finishing process gone awry, it does illustrate the crucial nature of the processes employed and the serious consequences to human safety and the environment when things go wrong. Additionally, in recent years, stories of gross industrial negligence such as the poisoning of municipal water supplies or polluting the land an industrial facility is located on or near have become all too commonplace. In fact, some of these incidents have been raised to global awareness through television documentaries and films such as “Erin Brockovich” (the story of a California town’s water supply tainted with hexavalent chromium).

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10 Things to Know About Automotive Fasteners

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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.

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Automotive Platings and Coatings

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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.

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Fasteners and the Environment

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 159

In recent years both government regulators and self-policing industries have made giant strides in more environmentally conscious activities. Although the fastener industry does not possess the multitude of opportunities for improvement that some industries do, the industry is not completely absent of them either. This article will explore six trends within the fastener industry that are reaping positive results to an ever increasing environmentally conscious society.

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Galvanic Corrosion: Knowing How It Works and Steps to Protect It Are Important

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From Fasteners Technology International, April 2014

Anyone that has ever worked on rehabbing an older home has probably encountered a plumbing connection where an old galvanized steel pipe that has been connected with a newer copper fitting such as shown in Figure 1 is in bad shape. The discovery of this condition may be purely accidental, or more likely, if such a connection has been in-place for any length of time, the ticking time bomb represented by this condition has finally gone off and it is leaking or broken.

So what is this condition? It is a classic case of galvanic corrosion. Fastener engineers, designers and end users, especially in instances where metals are being clamped in wet environments, must be very wary of this possibility and make efforts to avoid future problems.

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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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