Hackaday: When you think of machines you see around you every day, you probably think about your car, computer, or household appliances. However, the world is full of simple machines. One simple machine in particular, the inclined plane, shows up a lot. For example, think of the humble nail. If you are a woodworker or even a homeowner you probably have bags of them. They certainly are all around you if you are indoors and maybe even if you are outdoors right now.
2 comments:
This was a super interesting article to read, it opened my eyes to a lot of the engineering that has gotten overlooked because it is such a minute part of most of our lives. Some of the material in this article I remember going over in Production Science first semester; namely, the different heads of nails and screws that are meant to be used in different applications. It was also nice to see how nails and adjacent technology has developed overtime, from the ancient Egyptians using wooden pegs as a form of the modern day screw. It’s definitely not something I originally thought could have so many variations in design, purpose, application and producing process. Thinking about how far the engineering has come, it’s crazy that most of the anatomy remains the same, with a head, ,shank and point. One of the things that really caught my eye about this article was the type of nail that “Some nails have a coating that melts from the hammering friction to glue into the wood.”
Wow this was fascinating. I never realized how much thought went into something as simple as nails. It does make sense however as nails have been around for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Something that stuck out to me in particular is that blunt ended nails are less likely to split wood that diamond point? I would have never guessed that. It also causes me to wonder why we use diamond point nails then. I guess it makes sense as blunt nails would cause a depression then split while diamond point immediately splits the fibers. I also knew there were many types of nails in the sense of types of metals, thus strengths in different applications but I never knew there were so many different forms to nails. I also found the videos on how nails are made fascinating and informative. I can’t imagine how much time it took to prepare for building when each nail had to be handmade.
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