In the world of gears and screws, they say, Lies a whimsical dance, a playful array. Righty tighty, lefty loosey, they decree, A rhyme of mechanics, a playful spree.
With a twist to the right, oh, the magic it weaves, Securing the bond, as it deftly achieves. Righty tighty, a clockwise turn to bind, A snug little twist, a connection defined.
Yet the left beckons with its whimsical call, A twist to the left, a loosening sprawl. Lefty loosey, a counter-clockwise flow, Unraveling secrets, it willingly shows.
Righty tighty, lefty loosey, they sway, A duet of motion, in their mechanical ballet. Twisting and turning, they whisper in song, A symphony of movement, where they both belong.
So heed their advice in your mechanical groove, Righty tighty, lefty loosey, a mantra to prove, In the dance of mechanics, they hold the key, A delightful rhyme, a whimsical decree.
Man living in a 120 year old house means it’s always wall roulette any time you want to hang anything. Is that a brick, or is it fake mortar with the consistency of hummus. Who knows let’s find out
I’ve got a better one for you: a certain piece of 11kV switchgear has little M10 steel bolts attaching the cable box cover. If you turn them too quickly with the cover under tension the steel heats up through friction and welds the fucking screw into the thread.
The latest version uses M13 and I think the problem has been mitigated a bit, but I’m sure it can still happen, and there’s a metric shit ton of the old stuff out in the wild.
All full of SF6 as well, which is a very cool (I really want to inhale some and sound like Darth Vader) but also really bad greenhouse gas (20x worse than CO2), and with so much out there inevitably some of it leaks (with a 20 year time delay from a leak to the gas reaching the upper atmosphere), but we can’t be having switchgear taking up more space and commercial enterprise profits diminishing to cover it so we just continue our global exponential growth in use of the stuff.
Was looking for a picture but I had a bolt for the valve cover on a pickup stretch to about an extra quarter inch while I was trying to get it to torque. One of those times where trusting my gut that things didn’t quite feel right saved my ass.
Had a 10mm deep socket the other day with a 1/4" socket size. Couldn’t find a 3/8", so I found an old adapter and when loosening the 5th bolt on my intake manifold, got the old “hmm… that shit is moving to free to fast”
Thankfully a small screwdriver could poke the 1/4" adapter piece stuck in the socket out, so I can live to make the same mistake another day.
I only ever use a torque wrench if it is critical to do so, such as a cylinder head where clamping force needs to be equal around the entire part. Most of the time, using a torque wrench on an automotive application is wishful thinking due to space constraints and I can easily approximate it on smaller fasteners by feel without an issue. The only time I have issues with threads stripping is when I'm removing a bolt that someone else has already overtightened.
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