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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

> Righty tighty, lefty loosey, right?

This phrase always irked me, because when you're rotating something, it's not moving either left or right. The top of it moves right, the bottom moves left. Is it tightening or loosening?

Further, the only time a phrase might be needed to work out which way to tighten something is when it's unusually-positioned, for example upside down or facing away from you, and in those cases "righty tighty, lefty loosey" gives exactly the wrong answer (to the extent that it gives an answer at all, since "clockwise" and "right" are not the same thing).

I prefer the phrase "clockwise moves the thing you're turning away from you, anti-clockwise moves it towards you", which I'm hoping will catch on.

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I'd guess it is related to the conventional way steering wheels work--turn clockwise to steer the vehicle right, counterclockwise to steer it left. Hence, clockwise gets associated with right and counterclockwise with left.

I have no idea why steering wheels work that way. If I had to guess it would because most steering wheels are below eye level so it makes sense that you move the top of the wheel in the direction you want to go.

Note that if you are holding the top half of a steering wheel that follows this convention, then when you turn the vehicle the centriwhatever force on you will tend to oppose the force you are using to turn the wheel. If the steering while used the opposite convention, that force would reinforce your force. That positive feedback would make it a lot easier to lose control during the turn.

Without power steering, holding the steering wheel at the top gives you more leverage than holding it at the bottom. When holding the wheel at the top, turning right is a matter of moving your hands to the right.

ITT people who have never used a wrench.

> Righty tighty, lefty loosey

I remember an old mechanic sarcastically saying this when I was a kid and as as he worked on an old car that had wheel nuts that did up the other way on one side of the car.

It really pissed him off.

A quick search seems to show that this was a thing. https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-old-Chrysler-cars-have-lug...

I read the first answer there, but it didn't answer the related question: why don't all cars have that weird setup now? Is there a modern design feature that we have nowadays that allows for normal threading on the left-side wheels that keeps them from coming loose?

I think it's:

> Improvements in metallurgy, changes in brake design, first to finned drums and then to disks, and changes in wheel nut architecture, from flat washer to conical design have effectively reduced the problem.

I feel like this is the sort of thing that actually makes less sense when you develop explicit reasoning skills. as a child, "righty tighty, lefty loosey" made perfect sense. it never occurred to me that right/left could be relative to the bottom (from my perspective) of a jar lid. only when I started learning about math and coordinate systems did I think "right/left relative to what?".

I've adopted the right-hand rule: The screw goes the direction my thumb points when my right hand closes. And if it's something left-handed like a bike pedal, it's easy to just use the other hand.

I prefer "clockwise lockwise".

The phrase is talking about the top surface of the circle as the circle is facing you, since that’s normally where your vantage point is when you’re turning something with your hand. You have to think things through more carefully if the circle is oriented differently (imagine reaching through a broken window to turn a doorknob).

> This phrase always irked me, because when you're rotating something, it's not moving either left or right. The top of it moves right, the bottom moves left. Is it tightening or loosening?

And the answer is "You look at the top, of course, why would it mean the bottom?"

Think of the vantage point of observer standing (& his land under his feet also rotating with circle causing him to always rotate along the rotation.) at the center of that circle. ACW will always be right moving to him, CW will be left.

The other is, follow the fingers not thumb.

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