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.
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