Awesome Screws

There aren’t many products that can be made by the millions, but hardware like screws are one such item. This video from SatisFactory Process takes us inside a facility in China that cranks out mass quantities of screws every day. Machines straighten coils of steel wire, cut, shape, then thread the screws before they’re heat-treated for strength and washed.

Screws are one of those everyday objects we take for granted but are critical to holding together everything from our kitchen appliances to our vehicles. Process X takes us inside Japan’s Okitsurasen factory to see how they turn coils of steel wire into millions of precision screws, washers, and other hardware.

Screws come in all shapes and sizes. In this video from Mike at Chronova Engineering, he show the process of creating an insanely small 0.6 mm screw for use in a watch. After milling down a metal rod on a watchmaker’s lathe, the part is turned in a threading die, its head cleaned up, and a slot cut into it with a skinny saw blade.

Maker Ross the Random has a thing for turning hardware into critters. After he transformed a few nuts and bolts into a shiny hornet, he took a single screw and managed to massage it into a palm-sized sculpture of a scorpion.

There are factories that churn out millions of screws every day. But when you want something truly special for your project, you make your own, one at a time, like Clickspring does. In this clip, they show off the creation of a single domed-head blue screw, just one small part that sits inside of a Byzantine sundial calendar.