Woman set up a table to share her collection of washers. Nothing was for sale | Hacker News Reader

Woman set up a table to share her collection of washers. Nothing was for sale

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248 pointsmooreds108 comments

If you draw a venn diagram of people that collect washers, and people that would set up a booth to talk to others, the intersection is going to be extremely small.

The intersection will most likely only contain this woman.

No, I think it will also include a smattering of Englishmen, a score of Germans and (maybe) a guy with a mechanical engineering degree who dedicated his career to washers.

Ok if you draw a third circle representing all women then this would be the only woman.

I suspect there will be a bunch of washer field engineers, and some washer CTOs.

Do you mean like to overlapping washers?

this is part of the first friday art walk happening every month in portland. i can imagine that while this display is still unusual in that context, a lot more people are going to be out looking for interesting stuff, and i'd like to think that at least once in a while an interesting conversation will happen. maybe someone collecting screws or nuts or even offers to add to the collection or someone working with these with their own stories to tell.

I looked at the photo before I read the tweet itself and was thinking that corner looked familiar! That’s the corner where Congress and Free St, right? I’d recognize it anywhere - when my kid was still small, the children’s museum was still there and I’ve walked past that spot a million times.

Yep, that is the building: https://pearlgallerymaine.com/

What do you think are the odds she's on HN?

If not... could we get her to join and do a Show HN? Or even an AMA?

Because I'd tune in.

Reminds me of this tool museum in Troyes, France: https://www.discoverfranceandspain.com/maison-de-loutil-et-d...

It is filled with hundreds of slight variants of different tools.

I honestly feel that way every time I walk into the hardware store.

When doing e.g. vehicle mechanics you need like 4 spanners of different shapes and sizes for each nut size, and like 3 different sockets of different lengths and tap width for each nut size.

My wife accuses me of buying slightly different tools for fun (which I do), but, like, you really need those slightly different tools.

I go shopping for, like, a pair of tweezers, and for some reason come out the other end with a kit of 27 different kinds of tweezers for $19.97. And then I stare at them for an hour and tweeze stuff in all the various ways. Then pick one and put it in the desk drawer, and all the others go in a baggie in a box marked "small tools". And every once in a while I think contentedly about how rich I am in tweezers.

My first thought is that this is kind of ridiculous. BUT. I bought a cheap pair of tweezers like 15 years ago and they are fantastic. The amount of flex is perfect. They're easy to use, but you can also apply a fair amount of pressure with them. It's just the one pair, and in a panic after misplacing them for a week I tried to find a back-up pair. Well, now I have a lot of tweezers. Cheap pairs. Expensive pairs. Made in Japan. Made in U.S.A. But still only one good pair. Dammit.

I have a lot of tools, especially specialty tools for electrical, and most of my hand tools are a piece of steel shaped slightly differently. Many variations on pliers, hammer, wrench, screwdriver.

I feel hardware stores went the opposite direction.

They show the popular, common things.

I sort of miss stores before the internet. You would get large stores that carried everything, so if you went there for one thing, you would find all the other stuff in the middle.

For instance, hardware stores before home depot/lowes usually had plumbing for all the homes in town, even the really old ones. Lots more brass than plastic.

Nowadays it's like trying to buy a computer at best buy.

Also in large “Home improvement” stores forget about asking for something non-standard of for any unintended application. For example if you tell an employee that you need “something to hold this part here but cannot be a screw because the back is hidden” they will look at you as if you were speaking in mandalorian. Most large auto parts stores are the same.

A few years back I found a youtube channel about unusual guns.

And it was fascinating because they had all these zany, really distinctive guns like four-barrelled shotguns and revolver-rifles.

Unfortunately they ran out of such weapons pretty quickly and the channel devolved into a lot of "this gun that looks and works just like every other AK-47 is interesting because it was made in Hungary, and most Hungarian AKs received an upgrade but this one didn't" which I personally felt was a bit of a snoozefest.

But if you're interested in seeing a great many very minor variants of mundane items, you might like gun history.

I wonder if you are talking about forgotten weapons with Ian McMullen. I could understand if you would get tired of seeing 50 different iterations of the same rifle. I take it as it is interesting to see how each country in the Warsaw pact or countries that the Soviet union supplied technical packages to, such as North Korea, China, or Vietnam, iterated on the design. How did they improve the design or what were there limitations in manufacturing. What can be learned from the changes they made.

For such, to each their own.

There’s an interesting museum in Cody, Wyoming that has thousands of guns, including some very interesting ones like whaling guns from the 1800s. Well worth a visit if you have an interest in firearms, especially from the ‘Wild West’ era!

It’s also one of a set of four museums, all of which are very interesting: Art, Natural History, Firearms, and Buffalo Bill.

https://centerofthewest.org/explore/firearms/

There’s a restaurant in Orinda that has a collection of antique firearms on the wall a revolver rifle, an elephant gun, some weirdo pistols with knives on the barrel. It’s super interesting to just see them in person. I’ve never asked for any of the stories.

The evolution of firearms is quite interesting because it reflects centuries of progress in chemistry, metallurgy, mechanical design, warfare, and so on. You can definitely tell a compelling story and keep going for a good while.

The problem is that collecting often devolves into obsessing over insignificant details, simply because there's more of them - and if you run out of, you can invent new ones. Look at people who collect coins or stamps and fawn over minor minting or printing defects, etc. The same goes for art collectors, comic collectors, you name it.

I find inverted jenny iconic:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/US_Airma...

We found a museum in Haines, AK that contained only hammers--the proprietor had stories to go with many of them. If you stopped to look at any given hammer for more than a second he'd tell you not just a history but an entertaining history of it. Highly recommended:

https://www.hammermuseum.org/

"It's hammer time" is the first heading, and then I see "Nailed it!" in the video

Somebody knows how to have fun lol

All he has is a hammer?

Probably everything looks like a nail to him...

There's a great tool (and everything else hand-made) museum in Pennsylvania, The Mercer Museum [1].

> The Mercer Museum is a six-story reinforced concrete castle designed by Henry Mercer (1856-1930) and completed in 1916. Today, it is one of Bucks County’s premier cultural attractions and a Smithsonian affiliate. The museum complex features local and national traveling exhibits, as well as a core museum collection of over 17,000 pre-Industrial tools. This permanent collection offers visitors a unique window into pre-Industrial America through sixty different crafts and trades, and is one of the world’s most comprehensive portraits of pre-Industrial American material culture. The museum also features a research library that is a center for local history related to Bucks County and the surrounding region, with its roots dating back to the founding of the Bucks County Historical Society in 1880.

1: https://www.mercermuseum.org/visit/mercer-museum/

There's a hammer museum in Haines Alaska with similar vibes. Countless different types of hammers.

https://www.hammermuseum.org

For all the CNC machining videos I watch (its a thing - check it out), If a person made a series of chill videos explaining the finer points of a well curated washer collection I'd watch it.

I can imagine watching an entire ThisOldTony video on washers. In fact, the topic of the video probably does not matter at all.

Thanks for turning me on to ThisOldTony! Im 4 videos deep this morning already.

This brings me a lot of joy. I hope she gets the attention she deserves. I'm fascinated by people with deep and narrow interests.

I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for this, but here goes: what attention does she deserve? I always wonder this with collectors. They simply gather things that were created through the ingenuity and know-how of others. This doesn't strike me as any more remarkable than the Funko Pop collector. Of course, I am NOT saying her hobby should be derided. More power to her. But it certainly doesn't strike me as something praiseworthy.

Neither are the drawings my young children make. But I'm going to praise them for it anyway, and I'm going to sincerely mean it when I tell them I love it.

I think it's a good exercise in humanity to find joy in the joy of others, and validating their joy is even better, even if it's not fruitful or even useful.

What does anyone deserve?

I'd stop and talk to her, because I'd find it interesting.

If you're new to building things that involve washers, and she's happy to teach the nuances of different washer types... that's helpful and awesome!

It's entirely possible she has mechanical engineering qualifications or aviation engineering certification, can machine washers and understands how and why all the variations are used much as, say, this person appears to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40629075

People that deeply understand particular subjects are valuable when those subjects are key to things that make the world work, they both keep things going for now and educate others to do the same in the future.

  They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
  They do not teach that His Pity allows them to leave their job when they damn-well choose.
  As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
  Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s days may be long in the land.

No hate from me, that's a fair question. Looks like she made herself available to talk about her hobby/passion, and organized it in a way that suggests effort and care.

I hope she gets at least the attention I would give her if I had the chance.

I know I'm going to get a lot of hate for this

Then why did you post it? To draw attention to yourself? To feel falsely superior to a complete stranger?

Bc the question was genuine. I really don't understand why collectors are lauded in some circles.

I think you are confusing attention and praise. Most folks here seem to be saying this is attention worthy not praiseworthy.

I don't think she "deserves attention", and in fact that's a very strange way to look at what she's doing, but odds are she's sharing her washer collection with other people because she enjoys collecting and talking about them. Saying it's about attention is both an insult and a logical stretch.

That was in the parent post, but I tend to agree with you.

It seems to imply an attention economy where that is the objective an cultural currency in a way I find off-putting.

No hate but saying that collectors simply gather things that others made is rather dismissive. It may certainly be true in some cases but it's also very possible that true, potentially even ingenious, effort was required on the part of the collector to build, maintain, and be knowledgeable about the collection.

Because there are people who are willing to spend an inordinate amount of time delving deeply into a hobby, and these people are also the personalities who will chime up in HN one day to point out your hobby code has (1) a potential optimization, or (2) a major bug, or (3) is really cool and they would like to use it one day in one of said hobbies.

If there's anything I've learnt, appreciate the wisdom of these collectors, whether to appreciate the simple design of a flower, or the esoteric nature of a highly complicated mechanical computer.

> what attention does she deserve?

All attention that was given, I guess. Its not like she is making anyone do anything. People who like it talk about it. That's all

In context I think “attention” just means the poster hopes some people stop by her table to talk. I agree with that.

I think this kind of activity is better for society as a whole than, for example, playing video games or watching TV. It’s natural these days to think well of people who care about things other than media.

To be honest i don’t understand washers. I heard that they are important and I put them where the instructions tell me / where i found them, but i wouldn’t know why. I hope others have a more intuitive understanding of them and not everyone is just cargo culting like I do.

Washers are designed to spread out the force of the bolt head over a larger area so that the bolt can be done up to a tighter torque without damaging the contact area.

They are actually quite malleable, which is kind of required because the contact area could be imperfect or ever so slightly angled.

A bolt on the other hand, there is almost no malleability there at all. Most bolts are rigid and inflexible because of their geometry and because the tiny threads need to be very strong.

In recent years, washers have evolved a little further and now many washers also include a locking feature to prevent the bolt from coming undone. You also see thicker washers and spring washers which are designed to regulate the bolt force even if the temperature varies a lot and the bolt expands or contracts.

Finally, the washer material might be important. Steel bolts corrode against everything, so most washers that you find are probably zinc plated or similar and designed to insulate the bolt head material from the contact surface material.

I deal with washers, in the development of precision mechanisms. They can serve a lot of useful purposes. For instance nuts and bolts can gouge into the parts that they're holding together. A washer provides a sort of sliding bearing between the two, that takes the brunt of wear, and is easily replaced.

It can spread out a load on a hole, including if the holes are made oversized to make up for tolerance variations in the parts. This is useful for bolting together wooden structures, or softer materials like aluminum.

Stocking a variety of washers could be cheaper than stocking multiple types of bolt heads and nuts.

It can be a spacer.

There are specialized washers that can take up small angular tolerance variations, such as the spherical washers in some bike brake pads.

You don't see them everywhere, and using them by habit isn't necessarily the right thing to do in all cases.

I am surprised she don't display any spring washers (there are maybe two?). They can look quite fancy. Plain washers get old quickly I guess when you got a set of outer to inner diameter ratios.

At least by NASA, spring washers have been declared mostly useless. I'm not an expert on bolt fasteners, but I personally haven't seen a spring washer in quite a while. So I guess she just knows her washers and doesn't care about the functionless ones.

Nylocks and Loctite killed the spring washer.

I'm using these now:

https://www.nord-lock.com/globalassets/mediavalet/web-assets...

... much better than a spring washer.