Top Gadget of 2006 — The HurriQuake Nail

eldavojohn writes "Popular Science is naming its Best of What's New of 2006 and the one at the top doesn't have much to do with circuitry or computers. Instead, it's a nail. Not your average nail though, the HurriQuake nail [flash] spent six years in development." From the article: "As the Bostitch team tweaked the head-to-shank ratio, Sutt and metallurgist Tom Stall worked on optimizing high-carbon alloys, trying to find the highest-strength trade-off between stiffness and pliability — the key to preventing snapped nails. 'Meanwhile,' Sutt says, 'we were focusing on how to keep the nail from pulling out.' The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail's shaft from its point, experimenting with the size and placement of the barbs. 'You want the rings to have maximum holding power,' he says, 'but if they go up too high, it creates a more brittle shank that shears more easily.'"

Comments

A better nail

[Duncan3]

They are called screws, and they have been known for a few thousand years to be vastly better then nails. Most any floor that's nailed down squeaks for example. And if you want something really good, you use bolts.

And their "patent pending" features you'll find on most all the masonry nails in the hardware store.

Re:A better nail

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody missed the point. These new nails bridge the gap between traditional nails and screws yet cost less than screws. Screws add more time for installation and labor as holes need to be pre-drilled if you want them to be straight and you can't use anything as quick as a nailgun. These can be used in normal nailguns and add only $15 to the cost of constructing a house with them compared to traditional nails.

Re:A better nail

[cooldev]

In other words, you're saying that Bostitch's team of researchers spent six years researching and designing a product and accidentally overlooked the screw? And in naming it a "Best of What's New", PopSci also must have also overlooked that very subtle and mostly unknown but perfectly viable alternative: the screw?

And of course, for the patent pending features I'm sure they never thought to go to a hardware store and look at other nails. It's clear that your 20 seconds of thought is superior to their six years of research.

It's so typical of Slashdot readers to waaay underestimate and devalue real research & development and the seemingly minor innovations that come out of it, but fall short of completely revolutionary turn-the-world-upside-down grand-scale innovations -- like building a time machine and teleporter (that's also portable and inexpensive, of course!).

However, looking at your home page, as a researcher it's surprising that you're one of these people.

Re:A better nail

[cowscows]

Your average screw won't pull out easily, but fails to sheer stress much sooner than a framing nail. I'd imagine it's possible to design a screw that resists sheer forces as well as a framing nail, but it'd likely be large and expensive, or else someone would've done it already and they'd be in wide use.

Bolts are nice, but expensive and time consuming.

Re:A better nail

[cooldev]

AC:

This is innovation in the same way the Microsoft does "innovation".

Actually, this was my primary reason for responding. Because it's not a teleporter and time machine all-in-one device, you and many others like you don't find it innovative. That's not because it's not innovative, it's because you don't understand what innovation is. You confuse innovation with some sort of absolutely-pure groundbreaking invention, whereas 99% of real innovation consists of incremental (and sometimes subtle) improvements such as this. But even those small improvements are important and often take years of research and development.

I think we all know by now that just because its been patented doesn't mean that its original or non-obvious...

It hasn't been patented; it's patent pending. Maybe it will get rejected. But with most innovations, they're "obvious" once you have 20/20 hindsight, even though it may have taken years of research and development and testing to figure out.

Re:A better nail

[greginterrupted]

They are called screws, and they have been known for a few thousand years to be vastly better then nails. Most any floor that's nailed down squeaks for example. And if you want something really good, you use bolts. And their "patent pending" features you'll find on most all the masonry nails in the hardware store.

All of the comments I have read so far are about shooting down this guy's invention. I guess there are more computer programmers than framers or contractors on Slashdot.

The example of squeaky floors is something that is directly addressed in the article. The nails have a twist towards the head of the nail to make them less likely to back out. It works under normal conditions, too - it doesn't have to be used in only hurricane prone areas.

Patent pending features? I've build many structures and worked at a few hardware stores, and the only thing that masonry nails have going for them is that they are thick, slightly harder than common nails, and they have a twist. They will still pull out of wood in a hurricane and probably will squeak if used incorrectly in a wooden floor instead of driving them into concrete.

The guy in this article put ring shanks on the nail, gave it a twist so it wouldn't back out, and put on a larger head. I've never seen a nail like that before. He ALSO re engineered the material because he wanted an alloy that was hard enough to function as a nail, but soft enough so that it would not snap under stress. It took hundreds of prototypes to create this nail, and the article says that this technology will only add $15 to the building cost of a house. I think that's quite an accomplishment.

Also, the screws they use in construction are WEAK. They're cheap steel (or a cheap alloy) and are galvanized. Sure, they work for decking, but are NOT suitable for use in framing, while these nails are. The screws you are thinking of have a countersunk head on them and they will also pull through a board easily. I've snapped these screws off using a cheap 12v electric drill.

What have you invented lately?

Build a better nail

[Miertam]

And the construction industry will beat a path to your door. Yes screws are a better fastener but they take much longer to install driving the labor costs up. This is a case where they applied complex tech to the design of something simple and improved it.

Nails still much faster.

[Kadin2048]

Even a screw gun / power driver with self-tapping screws takes a lot longer to drive each fastener, than a pneumatic nail gun. I don't think there's any way that you can drive a threaded fastener with anywhere near the speed that you can drive in a nail. In the time a person can drive in a screw, you can put in a handful of nails.

Re:Wooden houses

[mschuyler]

Let's do a test. (We may actually be able to do this with historical data.) Take the average European city with houses made of stones, bricks, etc. Take a similar US/Canadian city with houses made of wood. Apply a 7.9 Richter scale quake. Measure resulting destruction. Would you rather be in a 17th century English brick house on the historical register with no changes allowed? Or in a modern American wood house building-code compliant? Would you rather have a tile roof in such a situation? or maybe composition?

FYI Re: Building code compliance. I've just participated in building a few houses. The new codes are really putting the screws to earthquake construction, literally. The new braces required between foundation and joists are really incredible. Zillions of nails in each brace and every hole must be filled. Contractors amy not want to do it, but they MUST use the new techniques or they don't pass inspection. The codes are evolutionary, but hey do keep getting tougher.

FYI: Wood houses. Seattle, for example, is only 150 years old. Tere are still lots of forests here, lots of wood. Great Britain, for example, ran out of oak to build the Royal Navy ships, so one of the admirals under Lord Nelson planted a bunch of oak trees on his property in hopes there would be enough oak for the Royal Navy to build ships in 1900.

Re:Great!

[Dun Malg]

but builders will hate it; not only because removing a nail will be ridiculously difficult, but also because homes that don't fall down don't have to be re-built. If you make your money building homes and you build homes that last forever, then you will eventually become obsolete. The trend since the 1950's has been to build homes using progressively cheaper materials with progressively shorter lifespans.

Bollocks. Typical ridiculous conspiracy theory nonsense. Builders do not engage in "planned obsolescence". They don't necessarily even plan to still be in the business by the time a "planned obsolescent" house would fall down, much less plan to be the guy re-building it. Ten years later, when the crappiest built house starts to show its age, how did the crappy builder ensure that he would be the one the current owner would call? Furthermore, have you ever met any general contractors? It's hard enough to get a house built, much less play puppetmaster with the rough carpenters' materials in such a Machiavellian way as to make the house fall down just in time for them to show up offering to help. No, the notion is entirely absurd. The reason builders use cheap materials is very simply the obvious one: cheaper materials cost them less, which maximizes their profit on a fixed bid job.