LACK OF STANDARD THREAD AND PARTS LENGTHENED WAR

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 41, 21 September 1949, Page 6

LACK OF STANDARD THREAD AND PARTS LENGTHENED WAR

For 100 years, engineers, watchniakers, farmers, home repairers, and tinkerers, have been confounded by nuts that won’t go on bolts; but at last Britain, the United States and Canada have reached agreement upon a unified screw thread system for most sizes and for ail but specialist purposes. No one can ever know what nonfitting nuts and bolt threads have cost, but it is many, many millions. It has been said that lack of standardisation cost the Allied Forces at least one more year’s fighting in World War II through holding up munitions production. Wartime Lessons For instance, it is history that one of the important cases of early British reversals in the Middle East was the lack of standard parts in the equipment of tanks and motor vehicles; failure of a single part which was non-standard could not be replaced from standard stock bins, and the tank or truck was out of the war. Here is another example: During the days of most urgent need of more and more aircraft America undertook to build Rolls Royce aero engines. But Rolls Royce built to metric (Continental) dimensions, and this necessitated redrawing every plan, down to the last extreme detail. Then no perfect enough tables existed for changing ope system of measurement into another with sufficient accuracy for aero engine work. The upshot was that two whole years were spent in calculations and redrawing plans before the first engine came off the assembly line, at a time when the need for aero engines were absolutely desperate. In a thousand ways the fully efficient teaming up of the machines of the two greatest nations was blocked by the pitch of a thread. A hundred years ago it did not matter, but today almost all modern mechanisations—and civilisation itself—are literally held together by screws, rivets, bolts, and nuts. Lead To Others Already Britain and the United States have prepared full particulars for issue in their own countries, and it is hoped that all the Commonweaßh countries will follow on.

That cannot be for some time yet, for industry cannot be equipped with new machine tools overnight, and there is, in any case, no compulsion about adoption of the unified screw thread system. But it is bound to grow and widen, and some day half-inch nuts will (as a general thing) fit halfinch bolts, whether the machine, or whatever it is, was built in Britain, the United States, or a Commonwealth country.