Tag Archives: Quality

The Basics of Fastener Sorting

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From Link Magazine, Summer 2014

Over twenty-five years ago when I first started working in the fastener industry PPAP, ISO9000, and zero defects were not yet commonplace ideas. In fact, when I first started, sorting was all manual and reserved pretty much only for salvaging parts that a customer returned with a major problem. Today, it is a very different story. A large percentage of fasteners made or sold in the U.S. are sorted, with some companies serving certain industries or customers adopting the philosophy of sorting 100% of their
parts.

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The Power of Value Engineering – Converting Screw Machine Parts to Cold Headed Parts

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From Link Magazine, Spring 2014

As markets become more global, customers are ever demanding new ways for suppliers to deliver them value. Over the last ten years or more, these same companies have been reducing their engineering and purchasing staffs, creating a new dependence and responsibility in their vendors to generate both quality and cost improvement ideas. For many distributors, this new responsibility is an unwelcome diversion in their already hectic and changing environment. However, for a select few, these new expectations present a unique opportunity to be exploited and profited from.

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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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Self-tapping Fasteners for Lightweight Designs

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From SAE International, April 2014

Abstract:  As automotive technology rapidly provides advances in lighter weight designs and materials, the technology to fasten and join them must keep pace. This paper will explore two uniquely different fastening technologies that are being used to address some of today’s demanding application challenges in plastics and thin steel and aluminum sheet. These are two areas of application that have historically provided few good options for designers, especially as they attempt to push the envelope with progressive, light weight designs. The first technology is self- tapping screws for plastics that, although not new, are now evolving to enable smaller bosses and shorter thread engagements, and incorporate light weight design options. Although dependent on the demands of the application, these screws can be produced in both steel and, now, lighter weight materials such as aluminum and plastic. The paper will explore how these technologies can be employed by the designer to obtain desired weight reduction initiatives over more conventional threaded fasteners for fastening plastic. The second technology are self-tapping, thermal forming screws that enable fastening of thin metal sheets that normally are unable to safely accommodate a threaded fastener joint because of the minimum sheet thickness. This technology is proving especially useful in automotive body-in-white applications where multiple stacks of aluminum sheet, mixed applications of aluminum and steel, multiple stacks of thin steel, and applications into extruded aluminum or magnesium members, particularly with one-sided access are necessary. This portion of the paper will specifically explore how this technology allows lighter weight aluminum or thinner steel sheets to be used since a robust and secure threaded joint can be formed. (Article No.: SAE 2014-01-0785)

Available for Purchase on SAE International: http://papers.sae.org/2014-01-0785/

Basics of Austempering — A Thermal Hardening Process for Fasteners over HRC40

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From Fasteners Technology International, February 2014

What do many lawn mower blades and automotive spring steel clips have in common? When considering their applications, probably very little, but in their product realization, they likely have both employed Austempering (a heat treating process) as their method for strengthening and toughening. Although over 75 years old, Austempering is a heat treating process that has really only become practically viable and commercially employed in the last 40 years. Austempering will likely never supplant conventional quench and tempering processes for the majority of threaded fastener applications, yet some of the advantages are so compelling that there will always be interest and activity in expanding the current application field. At hardness levels above 40 HRC, Austempered parts demonstrate improved mechanical properties such as toughness, ductility and strength over their quench and tempered counterparts of comparable hardness. Austempered parts undergo significantly less distortion, which reduces the subsequent cost of post heat treatment remediation.

Since this technology has direct application for the fastener industry, both now and well into the future, it is advisable for practitioners of the industry to have an understanding of the basics and enough information to consider what future possibilities might be waiting out there. The goal of this article is to provide a simplified explanation of this complex process and to explain some of its more compelling advantages.

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Why Fastener Distributors Should Embrace Training

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From Link Magazine, Winter 2013

During a visit home in my junior year of college, I was told a story about something that happened to two brothers I had known from scouting. They were a couple of years younger than me and still in high school at the time. Their father had purchased a car for them with expectations that they were to be responsible for its care and upkeep. In their zeal to prove to their father that he had made a wise investment in their development, they decided to change the oil themselves. So they went out, purchased several quarts of oil, a filter, and proceeded to drain and replace the oil.

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Fastening Solutons: Plastic Clip-On Bosses for Thin Sheet Applicatons

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From Fastener Technology International, December 2013

I have an older garden tractor that I use to cut my grass. Several years ago the engine began to puff smoke and quickly deteriorated to where it was evident that I either needed a new tractor or to rebuild the engine. Since a new, comparable tractor was not in my budget, I decided to rebuild the engine on my own. This meant removing the hood and cowlings to gain access to the engine so that I could take it off the frame and rebuild it. On this tractor, each side of the engine compartment is shrouded by a separate metal panel with two clearance holes in the top corners, which allow a screw to pass through and clamp the panel in place with a metal J-type clip located at a connection point behind the panel. Although this type of joint had worked fine for almost 30 years, after removing these screws and reconnecting them a couple of times, the much harder spring steel clip “stripped” the threads off of the softer screws and they began to back-out. Of course this created a problem when the tractor was running because there was no clamp load left and the panels would vibrate loudly.

Initially, my solution was to retighten the screws, later I began rotating them between joints, and finally I replaced the old screws with new ones. None of these solutions worked for long and I finally got fed up with it and decided to fix it for good.

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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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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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