That's how to make a single screw as a one-off, using basic machine tools. That's not a production process.
Screw making was automated by 1871. Here's an early automatic screw machine.[1] The video says 60,000 screws a day, but that must have been the whole shop, not one machine. You can see that the cycle time is about 10 seconds per screw. Who needs computers? We program with cams! Complex cam-programmed industrial machines were what made manufactured parts cheap.
Here's synchronized thread rolling using a CNC lathe.[2] That's a more modern one-off approach. Thread rolling squeezes the threads into the screw, rather than cutting out metal. Rolled small screws are stronger than cut screws. Needs a specialized tool.
That's not the full speed modern production process. This is.[3] A relatively simple machine turns out small screws at about one every 250ms. Over 100,000 screws per shift. This screw rolling machine can go down to 0.6mm, so it can do the job in the original video.
Here's a larger, slower, bolt rolling machine, so you can see the process.[4] It's very simple. A round piece of metal is rolled between two file-grooved die plates, and the threads are pushed into the metal.
And the importance of that is hard to overstate. Originally fasteners were the product of blacksmiths, and blacksmiths tended to be the best paid people in a village after the bankers. It wasn't rare to see 'hardware' (nails, screws and other useful bits of metal) be painstakingly recovered and recycled and you could find items such as nails and screws in inheritances because of their value.
Without modern cheap fasteners our society would quite literally fall apart.
Acoup.blog had an excellent series on this[0], but anything made out of iron was stupendously expensive. Even neglecting the work to forge it into final shape, the metal alone was expensive. Kingdom Come Deliverance started with a good quest that highlighted this [1, sections relating to Kunesh] but didn't follow through and for game balance reasons iron is way too cheap in that game. In reality, even a small axe or hammer would have been so expensive that it would be an heirloom object.
We are completely spoiled by modern materials science, I'm typing this out resting my elbow on a workbench that would have been worth a literal kings ransom 500 years ago, and now having a 4x8' bench of 5/16" plate steel isn't an insane thing to own. 500 years ago, this bench would equal the yearly iron output of a normal European country, with a price tag to boot. And automated manufacture of fasteners makes the modern world run, even with a lathe making a single screw takes me at least 5 minutes assuming everything is already set up. Forging a nail? Here [2] is a modern blacksmith taking ~2 minutes and 3 heats to forge a simple nail. Having exposure to blacksmithing, I'm always shocked at how cheap modern fasteners are.
I have had the great experience of learning some blacksmithing techniques from Brad Silberberg, who is a master professional structural artisan blacksmith and former president of the Blacksmiths Guild of the Potomac. He also has some pieces on permanent display at the Smithsonian. He uses the making of nails as a form of physical meditation in motion where he gets to turn off his brain and just use his arms. When he's on a roll, he's making three nails in a single heat. Which is apparently about the speed that a good Nailer did back in the day.
If you want to learn more about blacksmithing, I would point you at the Artisan Blacksmith Association of North America at ABANA.org.
One of my cousins is a blacksmith, one of very few remaining in Western Europe. He has a ton of interesting knowledge and is the nearest equivalent to a real life Popeye that I've seen. One day, visiting in Canada there was a chunk of ground that needed to be opened up in spite of being frozen. He took a pickaxe, swung it overhead and aimed for the frozen ground. Then he ended up having to hold on to it for dear life when it rebounded. He looked quite funny, and I'm super happy that he managed to hold on to it, it would have done a lot of damage if he had not.
Most of his work involves horses, which brings in good money but is a real risk for your back.
There are almost certainly blacksmiths in your country, most of them have concentrated on either farrier (horseshoing) or ornamental work. Blacksmithing is still a very common way to do architectural work, think railings or decorative ironwork for buildings. It is sadly a dying trade, those 2 paths above are basically the only ways to make money in the trade besides custom knife making, which is more of a separate trade anyway.
Farrier work is still needed, since factories can't stamp out horseshoes that exactly fit the horse's foot, so a blacksmith needs to custom match the shoe to the hoof.
I'm curious why you say it is a risk to your back? Farriers can definitely get injured, I know a few who have had broken ribs, but I've never heard of that having back issues. Is there a risk I'm not aware of?
Blacksmithing for architectural preservation is being taught at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston SC. The school was created in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo when it was discovered that there were few artisans in the US able to do the level of work needed to repair all the historic buildings that were damaged.
They offer a 4-year Bachelor of Arts degree with concentrations in blacksmithing, carpentry/timber framing, plastering, stone carving, and classical architecture. Many of them go on to start their own firms after graduation and gaining work experience.
> There are almost certainly blacksmiths in your country, most of them have concentrated on either farrier (horseshoing) or ornamental work.
Yes, as I wrote, my cousin is one of them.
When shoeing a horse you carry a good chunk of the weight of the horse, and that's before we get into the kind of contortions you have to go through to do a proper job mostly under a horse.
That high speed machine is wild. Some of the most common parts in the world are crazy accurate but since they are produced in such huge volumes they can still be cheap. Screws and ball bearing that you can buy for $10 a pack are order of magnitude beyond what even a king could buy in the middle ages. I'm not even going into how you can buy processors/memory with features on the order of nanometres for single digit dollar amounts these days.
I've always wondered if there is a way to gauge overall quality of screws? I tend to do electronics refurbishment and restoration as a hobby and I have no way of gauging the overall quality of screws and any scraps of info seem to be buried across various forums.
Also a dumb question, is there a way to identify the exact size of a driver that was meant to turn a particular screw? For example, you can use various sizes of Philips to turn a philips screw. Some might be slightly too small and others might be slightly too big and while the screw turns it may be damaging the screw even though it is not apparently visible at the moment. This also goes back to my original question about quality. I find a lot of screws seem to be really soft metal. Is this a quality issue or is that by design? Wish there was some central resource I could learn all about screws from instead of having to scrounge random forums.
Fastener quality can be all over the place. To the point that if you buy a batch at the local building store that you can get excellent quality or stuff that isn't usable at all. It can be pretty tricky to determine what you've got without opening the box, but looking carefully at the finish of the threads on bolts and screws will tell you about the quality. As will length variation, the presence of blinds (screws that have no thread), heads that look sloppy or that have varying distance to the start of the thread and so on.
A typical screw or bolt needs three to five threads to reach maximum strength, if you just screw a screw into a plate or sheet of wood for three to five threads you should be able to torque it down to under it's sheer strength (which for almost all fastener dimensions and materials is specified). If it breaks then you can consider the whole batch faulty.
The easiest way to ensure that you get good quality is to go for the premium brands of fasteners, it won't be cheap but at least your stuff won't fall apart when you need it most. Avoid retail outlets, buy where the professionals buy.
PicQuic in Canada sells handles with an extensive range of 1/4" driver bits that also work in power tools, see eBay and http://picquic.ca/bits-and-accessories/
> Wish there was some central resource I could learn all about screws from instead of having to scrounge random forums
For electronics, a ton of screws are of the poorest quality since they are only intended to be used once for assembly.
For your question about screwdriver fit, unfortunately that ends up being a judgement call. Be forewarned that for 'phillips' there are identical looking JIS screws [0], it takes a bit of experience to identify what driver to use. Some basic guidelines are, to use the biggest driver that will still bottom out at the tip in the screw, and if the product is of Japanese origin to use JIS drivers. It's very hard to measure, but with experience it isn't hard to tell what but a screw uses. Fit a good quality driver into the screw, and visually check if the flutes of the driver engage all the way to the end of the screen's flutes. Note that you need to use a good screwdriver here, I've seen the cheap screwdrivers ground at 15 degrees off of the correct angle.
And if you want all the specs on a particular screw, picking up an older copy of Machinery's Handbook will give you more detail than you were aware existed.
Although from your question, it seems like you are working with poor quality screwdrivers. Cheap screwdrivers make any screw feel like garbage and strip out stuff, it's worth it to invest in good ones. Surprisingly, harbor freight [1] has a set that I own and I would recommend over my Wera drivers, they are not bad at all. If you want to buy once and be done, Snap-On makes by far the best set [2],although keep on mind that $200 price tag will also need to be supplemented with another $50 Phillips #3 driver.
Or, if you don't need to access screws down deep wells of plastic and can use them, the Bosch replacement bits for impact drivers commonly available at hardware stores are fairly decent, although they aren't as good as the Harbor Freight Icon set linked as the cheaper option. This is one thing where quality costs, and you need to determine if you want/need that quality. But if every screw is feeling soft and stripping, it is almost certainly your drivers.
Off-topic but I just finished hiking in Swiss Jura mountains (albeit in canton Vaud and not Jura, namely part of Cretes du Jura ridge hike), beautiful forests which remind me of nature back home in eastern Europe.
One question - why did watchmaking industry started/thrived in those rather remote places up in the mountains? I get that not everybody wanted/could be in Geneva, but remoteness helps little when doing business, apart from driving costs down. You need very specifically skilled people to get to those remote places. Some small village(s) say near Yverdon les Bains would make more sense to me, in the past and now too. On the way back saw new big glass&concrete building of Vacheron Constantin literally in the middle of nowhere, in between 2 forests and small road.
> In the early 1800’s the Lépine calibre was adapted to factory production by French watchmaker Frédérick Japy. This development favoured Swiss watchmakers more than it did the French as Swiss farmers and peasants would spend their winter months making watch components for firms in Geneva. As further technology was implemented for mass-production, Swiss watchmakers were able to produce watches at much higher volumes than their rivals.
related question - I learned on a long bed Logan toolroom lathe. cant _really_ cut threads on that guy because of all the slop, but I often do a prepass to get things started before I use a die.
I've really been interested in getting a jewelers lathe with a goal of making smaller parts and particularly screws. but it looks very expensive and intimidating. many thousands of dollars for a few pounds of 100 year old steel with a lot of very fussy and foreign looking tooling. I really love to fix things up and learn, but would love some advice about how to start.
What is the industry standard for a decent, non-antique small manual lathe? Everything I see is either 50+ years old or mediocre-looking Siegs or otherwise suspiciously white-label-ish or it's a super-fancy CNC alien spacecraft that costs substantially more then a house.
There isn't an industry standard any more, because manual lathes are essentially obsolete in industry and have been for decades. In toolrooms and job shops that still keep a manual lathe around for simple setups and repair work, it'll probably be an old lathe because there are still tons of excellent old lathes in circulation.
If you have the space and the budget, you probably want a TRAK toolroom lathe - they have a CNC controller with a simple conversational interface, but they're designed to be used as a mostly-manual lathe with canned cycles. Excellent machines from a supplier that really understands the needs of toolroom and job shop machinists.
If that's too big and/or too costly, you probably want a rebuilt Hardinge HLV-H. Yes, they are 50+ years old, but they're basically the perfect small lathe and they can still hold very tight tolerances if they're properly cared for. The HLV-H is still being cloned by a number of the higher-end Taiwanese manufacturers, for very good reason.
Failing that, try Precision Matthews. They sell basically the same import stuff as everyone else, but they have very good QC and aftersales support. Something like the PM-1236 is a massive step up in rigidity and quality compared to the <$2000 Chinese machines. Not perfect, but by far the best value if you want to buy a new machine.
I've got an SC4, and the casting and basics are very solid (for the weight and price). The compound slide is junk, but the rest is remarkably good. The DC variable speed variants are the way to go.
Obviously 'big iron' is better. But even if you've got the space, you've got to choose between high prices and the risk and project of going second hand.
I would not use a Sherline for really fine work. I'm sure it can be done but you'd get a lot more mileage out of a slightly larger but more solid lathe. Sherline's main advantage is that it is cheap, but machinetools that you intend to use in anger will end up having a multiple of the tools cost in tooling anyway so you may as well get something a bit more sturdy.
If you don't mind having to spend some time on cleaning and oiling, it can often be worth it to get an old lathe from an industrial auction; often you can find them for a few hundred dollars.
Yes, pretty much. But even machinists age and some of them move into managed facilities and then they have to leave their gear behind. It is super sad when it happens. And of course they really die as well...
I know a fairly large number of hobby machinists and some of them are quite advanced in age. They still turn out quality work, doing stuff that they love. But you can tell that in some of these cases the writing is on the wall and they'll stretch it as long as they can.
I don't have to make really small screws very often so I don't claim great experience.
That said, I've found that it's fine to turn down the stock on the lathe but using tiny dies, <1mm, on the machine is a pain (I have to relearn the 'feel' every time).
My solution is to clamp the die and use a pin chuck and do the operation by hand. This way, I've some tactile feedback and I don't wreck either the die or the work as often.
Of course, that's no solution if one needs hundreds of them.
I don't make many, especially nowadays. I had to make them occasionally when repairing instruments, meters etc. It's a fiddly business if you don't do it regularly and I'm often impatient (it's not something I like doing, it's just a means to an end).
Moreover, trying to figure out what the threads are is often pot luck (thread gauges down there are nigh on nonexistent-in my world anyway—and you need a microscope or thread viewing metrology stuff which I don't have). British instruments before, say, 40 years ago usually used BA (British Association), US—UNF and European and Japanese—ISO metric, but then there's also the pre-ISO metric to contend with on old stuff.
Surprisingly, when they're that small it often doesn't matter. Guesstimates combined with brute force and ignorance usually got the job done.
It's fair to say I'd rarely tackle anything below 0.8mm although I once filed a smaller one by hand. Fortunately, most of the time I scavenge screws from old instruments, clocks, watches and laptop PCs (these however are larger, usually between 1 and 3mm). I never throw away old stuff without disassembling it for the screws.
Nowadays, it's not a problem because it's easy to get packs of just about any size screws one wants, it wasn't so 40 or so years ago. Incidentally, my grandfather was a watchmaker and jeweler and my father a mechanical engineer so I saw watchmaker's lathes at a very young age.
BTW, my fulltime profession is moving electrons about (or trying to). They're somewhat smaller than those tiny screws so I can only guess where they are by proxy. ;-)
Ha, thanks. A 'damn frustrating' life would be a more apt description, methinks. I somehow muddle through like most of us do.
PS: I've just noticed an apostrophe typo in my post— 's instead of s', which I now can't correct. You see, one has to be an annoying persnickety bastard to muck around with this stuff.
Even the hand-made watches use some mass-production techniques. Those thin gears for example are often made dozens at a time from a single block of metal that is then sliced up. Or conversely, layers of metal are pressed together and then the teeth are cut into every layer simultaneously.
I have a manual lathe, a manual mill, a shear, a few welders, a cnc router, a cnc plasma cutter, a few band saws, a couple chop saws, a surface grinder, a couple hydraulic presses, a cutting torch, and more money than I ever care to think about in tooling. It is definitely a hobby where you accumulate things over the years and not something I would recommend buying all at once.
It's funny because I get stereotyped two different ways: People that I make parts for at home think I am computer illiterate, and machinists that I model parts for at work assume I have never seen the inside of a shop.
From my talks with people who machine parts, precision can be super interesting, plus a bunch of equipment to measure from micrometers, calipers to indicators.
Precision is a marvelous thing. Every detail must be accounted for. I remember reading a brochure about surface plates (a reference of flatness), and the body heat of the person handling it would be accounted for.
Check out this classic text which is almost required reading for anyone working with precision mechanical stuff. It mentions ways to measure and machine parts down to millionths of an inch, and stuff like mills and lathes using temperature-controlled cutting fluid.
“Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy” Wayne R. Moore – 1970
Some of the highest precision manufacturing in our country is located in extremely rural areas because nearby highways introduce too much vibration otherwise. Even relatively humdrum spindle assembly is typically done in clean rooms to make sure no dust gets in the bearings. Super high precision machining is even more extreme. It's a wonderful thing to dive into but it also makes me happy to be in software sometimes. (That said, my friends in machining are happy they're not in software so take that as you will :)
IBM built some very isolated labs in buildings not far from the rail lines and highway in Zurich. When I heard about it I wondered if it might have been cheaper to build elsewhere.
It really is. I have some small experience with the industry, an acquaintance I didn't expect to have. The engineering that goes into metrology-grade measurement is incredible.
Screw making was automated by 1871. Here's an early automatic screw machine.[1] The video says 60,000 screws a day, but that must have been the whole shop, not one machine. You can see that the cycle time is about 10 seconds per screw. Who needs computers? We program with cams! Complex cam-programmed industrial machines were what made manufactured parts cheap.
Here's synchronized thread rolling using a CNC lathe.[2] That's a more modern one-off approach. Thread rolling squeezes the threads into the screw, rather than cutting out metal. Rolled small screws are stronger than cut screws. Needs a specialized tool.
That's not the full speed modern production process. This is.[3] A relatively simple machine turns out small screws at about one every 250ms. Over 100,000 screws per shift. This screw rolling machine can go down to 0.6mm, so it can do the job in the original video.
Here's a larger, slower, bolt rolling machine, so you can see the process.[4] It's very simple. A round piece of metal is rolled between two file-grooved die plates, and the threads are pushed into the metal.
This is why screws are cheap.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCmnUP5gx78
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eWghSLN3ng
[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HWmu4gxmois
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlfq_Pbh6PQ