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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.'"
The issue is not that the structures can't handle the winds. It is that the construction codes are not being followed by the builders. Construction is so poor because of cost-cutting by contractors and/or unskilled labor and cutting corners. This was true with Andrew (Miami) and continues to be true. If contractors built to the code and inspectors held them to it, alot of the damage seen would not occur. I have a house that was only 5 miles from the eye of Hurricane Charlie (140+ mph winds) and suffered minimal damage (a few pieces of soffet blown off, no shingles or other damage). But ... we watched the contractors and ensured that they did everything by the book. Neighbors saw their (oftern much more expensive) homes literally blown to the ground. Older structures (60's/70's) also saw little damage.
... just make sure the builders build to the code. Adding a better nail won't cure sloppy cost-cutting construction.
So
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.
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.
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?
Haven't spent much time in construction, have we? Through college, I spent a couple summers framing houses. The days were long, and you'd come home exhausted, but you had to absolutely work your butt off if you wanted to come in on budget and actually make a buck after paying labor. Of course, I was one of the labor, but it was a small, family company I was working for, so I got an idea of how the business side actually worked. Screws are *slow* to install, compared with a guy and a nail gun. When every extra minute is eating into the bottom line, the extra time it would have taken to use screws would have "screwed" us.
Non-removable nails don't sound that bad to me - once you knew what the hell you were doing, you didn't screw up much, particularly with a nail gun that drove nails in so deep you couldn't easily get them out anyway. If you missed by a small amount, you generally just threw in another nail and left the first one (bent over, of course, if it was sticking out). If they hold better and fit in the ol' nail gun, bring them on!
Normal screws the size of nails tend to fail in shear at much lower stress. This is not bullshit.
Larger screws made out of stronger alloys don't, but are typically too big to usefully stick a 2x4 to another 2x4, or hold a sheet of plywood into a 2x4 with typical installation accuracy. And require a pre-drilled hole, which at least doubles the time to install. These screws are not useful for typical building construction tasks. Cracking the wood all to hell installing oversize nails or screws incorrectly is far from the best solution.
Wood is a hard material to join really well. You can do all sorts of half-ass methods and get two pieces of wood to stick together adequately, but doing a really good job is a lot harder. Because it's got grain and fiber, you need a lot of bearing surface to avoid the connector pulling out. Screws do great at that, but have less shear resistance, and lower cost screws are too brittle and crack right off in shear (and sometimes in tension). Nails are great at shear and are made out of alloys that rarely crack, but can pull right out. Boat nails, ring nails, other stuff is out there, but this seems to be a pretty big advance in balancing the shear and tension capabilities, ease of installation, etc.
For absolute optimal strength, pre-drilled carefully sized screws work pretty well. This nail should be about as strong, but about 10% the effort to install, and probably a tenth the cost for the fastener.
There was a time that it was safe to assume that people at least had built a treehouse or some such and had a clue about basic woodworking techniques. Apparently that time is now past.