Nuts and Bolts

IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO NUTS AND BOLTS

All of my life I have been putting things together with nuts and bolts. Even when I was a kid I was putting Erector Sets together. When I was a pre-teen I used to like to build bicycles from spare parts I would get a hold of. In my late teens it was working on cars. In my adult years it ranged from putting a metal shelf together to building steel framed buildings (None of which have ever fallen down thank God). All of those things get assembled at least in part using nuts and bolts to hold things in place.

Now for anybody that doesn't understand this, a bolt is is a long rounded piece of metal that has spiraling "threads" on it with an end on it shaped to fit a wrench. The nut is a piece of metal shaped to fit a wrench with a hole in it with matching spiraling "threads" lining it. All my life the bolt was called a "male" and the nut was called a "female" but I guess nowadays you can call them anything you want. At least that is what I have heard lately. I guess this new generation surely must have the wisdom of the ages in them in some mystical way that us old people just are incapable of understanding. But, we are trying so give us credit for that at least. But now I digress...

Well anyway all my life I used a bolt that screwed into a nut to connect things. It seemed to work really well all my life so I just never questioned it. It's like they were actually made to fit each other perfectly to hold things together. Hmm, but then "appearances can be deceiving" can't they? Who am I to say? I mean ya know I'm just an old fool that's probably too scared to think outside the box of my "limited" thinking.

Well life was going along pretty good in my life of assembling things and feeling pretty good about it all until one day, I met a young engineer fresh out of college and he was telling me that things could also be assembled by using nuts connected to nuts and bolts connected to bolts and that such a combination was equal in structural integrity to using a bolt connected to a nut. When I told him that it isn't going to work and that there is no way nut2nut or bolt2bolt combinations are equal to nut2bolt combinations, he came unglued and started screaming at me that I had a serious phobia when it came to thinking outside of the box. I hadn't noticed that a whole crowd of his classmates in engineering school had gathered around and were all yelling at me, "Phobic! Phobic!"

Well I was pretty shocked at how mad they were at me but I wasn't about to hear any of all that yelling and screaming so I asked him how on earth are you going to connect a nut to a nut and a bolt to a bolt? He and his friends quieted down cause they decided they had a conversation going and were quite convinced they were going to convince me they were right. He explained that their engineering teacher had invented a way to connect nuts2nuts and bolts2bolts. It was a hollow plastic union with spiraled threads, one version for the nuts with threads on the outside and the other with threads on the inside for the bolts. When I heard that I just walked away. "Whatever!"...

See when I was young some of us in my generation got it in our heads that if you DIDN'T crank down on the nut and bolt together it was a lot easier to take them apart and use them some place else however and when ever we wanted to.. After a while people were connecting nuts and bolts but not even tightening them at all. We just never realized that repeated use of the nut and bolt would wear out the threads on them - the very thing that held them together. Before that, the nuts and bolts were cranked so tight that they practically became like one because of the pressure exerted. But I found out in real life that not cranking them down really didn't work very well at all structurally. The first earthquake and the structure would all fall apart. We learned the hard way that cranking down on the nut and bolt together was VERY important not only to keep the nut2bolt from coming apart but to keep the structure they were attached to from falling apart as well. That it's the integrity of the building itself that demands it.

So now we have a generation of engineers and builders who either are not even trying to tighten down on the nut2bolt at all (in case they want to use it somewhere else) OR they are busy trying so hard to prove their point that nuts can be connected to nuts and bolts can be connected to bolts using plastic unions. Nobody seems to realize that it's really about the structure and that the nuts and bolts are there to hold the structure together.

The reason I walked away from that virtual demanding crowd I mentioned above (and they are actually very real today) was because my generation has already built our buildings. Whatever is going to stand is going to stand and whatever is going to fall is going to fall. Maybe it's time to let this generation build their buildings.

But there's one thing they better know and I'm pretty sure they don't: As sure as you are breathing, your buildings will be tested and if you are wrong about your calculations about the structural "equality" of plastic unions and loose nut2bolts connection compared to solidly cranked down tight nut2bolts, those buildings are going to collapse not only on your own heads but on your children and your children's children. And like every generation before you, you are going to have to live with the horror of knowing that there is nobody to blame but yourselves...