Author's Homepage: Kurt M. Marshek
Chapter 10: Threaded Fasterners and Power Screws
"A layperson might consider threaded fasteners (screws, nuts, and bolts) to be the most mundane and uninteresting of all machine elements. Looking deeper, the engineer finds that these seemingly simple components exist in amazing variety and with design details representing remarkable ingenuity. The economic implications of fastener design, both threaded and nonthreaded, such as rivets, are tremendous. For example, the airframe of a large jet aircraft has approximately 2.4 X 106 fasteners costing about $750,000 in 1978 dollars. The safety implications of the fasteners used in many machines - particularly vehicles carrying people - are obvious. Corrosion considerations are often critical, for differences in materials used in fasteners and clamped members give rise to potential galvanic cells. Many fasteners must be designed for easy, low-cost (often automated) assembly. Ease of disassembly is often important, too, where servicing and pars replacement must be considered. On the other hand, difficulty of disassembly is sometimes important for resisting vandalism. As a further requirement, ease o disassembly for scrapping and recycling of components and materials is becoming increasingly important. (it has been facetiously suggested that automobile fasteners should withstand safely all operating and safety-related crash loads but be so designed that upon dropping car from a height of several feet, all fasteners would fail, permitting the pile of components to e easily sorted for recycling!)"
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