Fasteners
Fasteners, including nuts, bolts & screws have been around for centuries. The Romans used nuts & bolts to secure chariot wheels but it was the great Leonardo da Vinci in the late 1400's who first demonstrated the use of a jack screw for lifting loads. Early bolts were handmade and difficult to match with nuts, no two were the same. The Industrial Revolution demanded mass production and standardized sizing.
In 1797, Henry Maudsley designed a lathe that precisely cut threads and in America the notion of nut and bolt manufactory originated with Mr. Micah Rugg, a small country blacksmith, in the town of Marion, Southington Township, Connecticut in 1818. In studying the best methods of making tools to manufacture implements, he invented two machines for making carriage bolts. Carriage bolts, cup square hex or coach bolts as they are known today are still as popular now as they were back then.
Manufacturers in this industry produce a wide and ever-changing variety of products that fall under the general name "industrial fasteners." According to the Industrial Fastener Institute, the trade association for the industry, a fastener is "a mechanical device for holding two or more bodies in definite position with respect to each other. A high percentage of fasteners have threads as part of their design, but unthreaded items such as rivets, clevis pins, machine pins, etc., are considered fasteners as well." The industry produces fasteners using the primary manufacturing operations of heading, upsetting, forming, forging, and extruding. Fasteners primarily use ferrous metals for products, usually carbon and alloy steels. Most fasteners begin as wire, rod, or bar, which is cut to length, headed, and then threaded.
A typical hex-head bolt begins as a shaft of metal whose length is a number of times longer than its diameter. This shaft is placed in a die, a metal holder that maintains the shaft's position when it is struck by a punch, which is designed to impart the hexagonal shape of a bolt head to the shaft. Multiple punches are sometimes used to impart more intricate head shapes or to form harder metals. The headed shaft is then given an external thread in another cold-forming process called thread rolling. In thread rolling, the headed shaft is pressed between stationary and moving hardened-steel dies, which squeeze the material into the desired thread form. The nut that accompanies this bolt may also be cold-formed using a thread-forming tap that displaces rather than removes metal to form the interior thread. These and other processes like them constitute the major means by which industrial manufacturers produce goods.
Research and Technology
In the early 1990s, the fastener industry improved technology due to demands for stronger, lighter, and easier-to-use products. This trend for light, small fasteners continued throughout the decade—especially with the growth in popularity of laptop computers. Buyers were also demanding a variety of innovative and diverse fasteners such as self-locking, self-cinching, or self-sealing screws, bolts, nuts, and threaded inserts according to a Purchasing article on fasteners and the aerospace industry. Fastener manufacturers were also working to develop more environmentally friendly products, such as fasteners that maintain lubricity without the use of such plating materials as cadmium, a suspected carcinogen.
Throughout the decade there was much industry effort aimed at improving quality control so as to make total implementation of the FAQ unnecessary. "Improved industry standards, enforcement of those standards, and quality control personnel at both the distributor and manufacturer levels have made the FAQ redundant," according to Barbara Somerville in a 1998 article for Industrial Distribution. Towards this end, the industry instituted end-of-line quality control assessments and state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques such as quality assessment on the assembly line. The result has been greatly improved quality control and fewer rejects. "Under the old system, it wasn't uncommon to have a defect ratio of 50K/1 million," says Robert Harris, Managing Director of the Industrial Fastener Institute. "Today's in-line quality assurance techniques have reduced defects to below 100 ppm."
Fix8 Ltd offer a variety of fasteners - these include:
Hexagon set screws are probably the most common fastener used in the construction industry. It is fully threaded right up to the head, most commonly right hand threaded (although left hand is available) and availble in sizes ranging from 2mm to over 100mm in diameter. They are also available in a varitey of finishes including zinc plated, stainless steel grade A2 (304) & A4 (316), brass and hot dipped galvanised.