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Comment by frognumber | Hacker News Reader

> Small fasteners are cheap enough that it's not worth sorting them.

It depends if you count time in hours (you're mostly right) or days (you're wrong).

I have a bin of small screws and bolts which I've removed from devices. An hour spent searching for the right fit can save 1-3 days shipping time. If I'm in the middle of something, the advantage of being able to continue with whatever I'm repairing / building / doing ultimately saves hours of time in the end too. Breaking up a task each time I need a part loses focus and velocity.

What I'd really like is some machine vision system. If I remove fasteners from a laptop, I often don't know what they are. I'd like to be able to have the identified without having to look for service manuals. Ideally, it'd be attached to some way to sort too.

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They're not so cheap that you can just buy them when you need them. They're so cheap that you can keep them in stock!

Totally agreed about how annoying it is to lose days to shipping time for trivial purchases though.

Having stock of everything you may one day need is going to require a lot of space though. I used to have about one grab bin full of all of the most commonly used metric and imperial sizes nuts and bolts (and only with hex heads) in my metal working shop and that already took up quite a bit of space.

Having stock of every possible type of M3 screw/nut you could ever need does not take up a lot of space and also doesn't cost that much. $100 and it'll feel like you have a lifetime supply of every possible type you'd ever need and because of the time saved over the course of your life (and inflation) it'll definitely be a sound investment.

What does take up space is the part of your brain where you thought you had knowledge of every possible type of M3 screw/nut you could possibly need. After a few years of owning a "massive" collection of M3 screws/nuts that part of your brain will expand by an order of magnitude and suddenly you'll be looking to stock up on something like, "tapered torx head, alloy 18mm M3 screws" and maybe even nylon M3 screws/nuts.

Example: A few years ago I needed a square M3 nut to go into a 3D printed part. "No problem", I thought. I have plenty of square-shaped M3 nuts. Except the square nuts I had didn't fit in the part! "What the heck? Why is the slot for the square nut so thin‽" Turns out there's a standard for thin square nuts, DIN 562 where the thickness of the nut is 1.8mm instead of the usual 2.2mm and I didn't have any of those.

Now I have a little baggie of 50 M3 DIN 562 nuts (well, probably ~40 remaining) that is carefully marked separately from my other little baggie of regular M3 square nuts and I know better than to think, "I have all the types."

I think the key word there is M3. There is a Cartesian product between:

- Screw thread (M3 isn't the only type; and not all screws are ISO Metric)

- Screw length

- Intended material (wood, metal, plastic, matching washer, etc.)

- Head type (e.g. pan head, etc.)

- Driver type (e.g. Torx, Phillips, flat, hex, etc.)

- Screw material (e.g. brass, stainless, various coatings, etc.)

- Screw strength (e.g. structural screws which can handle shear, etc.)

- Special properties (e.g. self-tapping)

... and so on.

In most cases, there's a good-enough replacement in my big bin of oddball screws. Sometimes, I do need to redrill or retap the hole first.

What helps is to know roughly what is in your big bin of oddball screws etc. Sorting by rough groups can help though: a bin of oddball bolts, another for oddball nuts etc. That way you at least narrow it down a bit without requiring a ton more space for bins that will have at most two screws in them.

The really time-consuming bit is comparing similar screws or bolts. They all look the same.

Come to think of it, IF I had a quick way to identify them (e.g. a machine vision system), I could keep the organized by keeping DISsimilar screws together.

Sheldon Brown had a system where he kept 5mm/10mm/15mm/... in one color, 6mm/11mm/16mm/etc. in another. Color + very rough size was good enough to find the right tool: https://sheldonbrown.com/colorcode.html

Something similar might work for fasteners. Binning the would help a lot.

If I could identify them in the first place.

For which I need some kind of open-source machine vision system or something.

To answer your question: I have screws, bolts, and nuts left over from installing things, from fixing devices (e.g. laptops), etc. all sorts of place. This morning, I disassembled a clock which broke to see if I could fix it.

I tend to reuse parts when building things. The little plastic screws from the clock are perfectly usable. I can drill a hole in a piece of plastic, and screw them in. In this case, I don't need precision. For something like a laptop, I do. One of the bolts fell out of my laptop, and I'd love to be able to quickly find a replacement.

That's interesting: given a picture of this assortment of screws point me to the nearest equivalent of an M3x12, could be longer but not shorter, preferably with a hex head but Torx is also good. That would be a useful thing to have. But that's going to be a lot harder than it may seem at first glance.

True, small stuff doesn't take up a lot of space. But bigger stuff does and it really adds up.

Hm, I didn't even know about the differences in square nuts, and I've been around the block a couple of times. Thank you for that new bit of knowledge. In return: setscrews... don't get me started on those. There are so many kinds, shapes and sizes that's a whole new category. And all manner of driver bits, I have so many of them I need to organize those too...

Three minor but frustrating differences that have caught me have been cosmetic issues, which don't really matter until they do.

I bought screws from a company for several years when suddenly they changed the head by adding some knurls to M3 socket head screws. A different set of Truss head screws had a small countersink type feature added around the torx drive. And then the finishing process changed. All subtle changes but when one screw out of 20 is different it stands out. My solution was to track batches of cosmetic screws and compare them before transitioning to the next batch. Leftovers go in a spare parts bag.

Interesting, what kind of workpieces do you make that you put that much attention to detail? Are these for display? Or is it just very high level of workmanship applied to otherwise normal articles?

This was for occasionally handheld measurement instruments. Ultimately it might be a little nit picky, but I figured if it was noticeable to me it might be noticed after a while by a user and then bother them. Some users would never notice but why risk it?

While thinking about what to do I went down a rabbit hole learning about clocking screws. I decided that was far from necessary but if I ever make something really nice for myself in metal with the right design I might give it a try.

https://blog.lostartpress.com/2019/04/18/the-church-of-the-c...

Very much appreciated, I love such attention to detail and I would definitely notice and see it as a sign of dedication. Likewise flat screwheads lined up with the slot aligned with the edge that the fastener is nearest to. Old school marine woodwork with brass screws is done like that and it really shows off the workmanship.

Whoever worked on that church seems to have had the same idea :)

This is the way. Over the years I’ve built up a good intuition for which cables, power ends, brackets, and fasteners might come handy later and I keep them on hand, broadly sorted into those categories. For example, those plastic kits of VESA screws that come with a new TV are nice to have around because they usually have assortment of machine screws, stand-offs and nuts, and they’re usually blister-packed.

I have a container I inherited when a relative died filled with little drawers of random nuts, bolts, screws and other fasteners that has saved the day several times over the years when I needed something. Spending a few min going through those drawers has saved me days and days of waiting for parts/going to the store/stopping/starting a project again.

One thing that helps me when I'm disassembling something with an unfair number of fastener sizes is grabbing an egg carton, following a pattern I can replay, and using the carton to catch all the different sizes as they come out.

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