I have lived under the spell of screws for more than 30 years, so it really can annoy me when scrap-quality screws are packed with an expensive piece of equipment. In my view the screw is not a significant fraction of a structure, so there is not much sense in economising on screws. Yet it is with screws that those expensive structures have to be assembled and held together, so the importance of screws is very much greater than their share of the value, and screws ought therefore to be of the best possible quality, not the shoddiest of all the parts built in.
The armchairs
We rearranged one of our meeting rooms and bought four comfortable little armchairs at KIKA. The colour and the material are great, the comfort is fantastic, the aesthetic experience is excellent — so what can be the problem? The customer has to fit the chair legs with the pre-packed screws, which in principle would be a few minutes’ routine work, if the screws were up to it — but they are not! Four screws per armchair are needed to fix the legs, but on every single chair one of the threaded wooden inserts is faulty, and the screw will not go into them. Annoying enough. In the end we solved the problem with great difficulty, but it took far longer than it should have, and the irritation cut the customer experience and satisfaction to a tenth. Was it worth it?
The scooter handlebar
I bought a Kugoo Kirin electric scooter. On the first longer ride I felt the handlebar wobbling in my hands, so I stopped at once. The handlebar was held by 4 hex socket screws, but these had worked loose from the resonance while riding, and one had already fallen out. It flashed through my mind what could have happened had I noticed too late and the handlebar had come off the vertical steerer tube … I am riding along and suddenly the handlebar is left in my hands, and the tube is pointing skyward at my stomach. I lose my balance and take a huge fall. At best I break myself up, at worst the steerer tube goes through my stomach. The solution? I solved it by replacing the screws and putting a drop of screw locking compound on each thread. This scooter had another design fault as well (it overheated and shut down), so I had to exchange it, and I was given an identical one in its place, on which exactly the same faults appeared. Annoying, isn’t it? Is this worth it to anyone?
The disc brake screws
Once I had become sufficiently disillusioned with the Kugoos, I ordered a brand-new Italian scooter instead, an Argento Active Sprort, and on the first ride I felt something jingling on the machine. I stopped, took a look, and found the following: of the three screws holding the rear disc brake, 2 were missing, and the one that was in place was completely deformed, its drive was chewed out and its head twisted into an unrecognisable shape. I could not even get it out. I took it to a kind panel-beater acquaintance of mine, who got it out for me, and then I refitted the disc brake with 3 properly matching, good-quality NONOX stainless and acid-resistant screws, and the scooter has been fine ever since. The scooter costs more than half a million, and 3 proper, good-quality screws would have cost a few forints. On the one, the handlebar; on the other, the brake — held by essentially nothing. Was it worth economising?
The coach screws
I needed a few hex-head wood screws (scaffold/coach screws) at home, so I dashed to a nearby DIY shop and bought some. Then, when I wanted to fit what I had bought them for, one head snapped off after another. It was hard to get at in the first place — you can imagine how annoying it was to work the remaining shanks out with great trouble! After that there was nothing for it, I had to go into my own company, even though I do not live nearby, open up the warehouse and take a few NONOX stainless and acid-resistant scaffold/coach screws, so that I could somehow finish the job I had started. Isn’t that annoying?
The fence
Finally, let me tell one more story: when a joiner was making our fence, I offered to bring NONOX stainless and acid-resistant screws out from work, but he turned it down. He said there was no need, he had good-quality screws of his own. The work was finished, I accepted it, and a few years passed. One day I decided the time had come to take down, sand and repaint the ash boards. All well and good, but the screws had rotted in. The gate-hinge bolts had seized onto their nuts, I could barely get them out, and the chipboard screws had gone brittle and fragile from the rust, and 90 out of every 100 snapped off inside. Since several hundred wood screws had been used, there was irritation enough.
The man I hired gave up, because he said a screw shank had been left in and, to his great annoyance, it had even broken his planer blade. In the end I had to pick out the snapped-off screws myself; in some places I could only remove them by drilling alongside, because the head had sheared off at the root and there was nothing left to grip. naturally I replaced them all with NONOX stainless and acid-resistant screws, but was it really worth economising on this at the start???
Typical faults I have come across on the market so far:
- The drive chews out, and the screw can neither be driven in nor removed;
- The head of the screw shears off;
- The thread is bad, it strips during assembly, and it can neither be put together nor taken apart…;
- The washers were left out, without which the screw head did not have the proper seating (I had to have two chairs replaced, because they began to creak from the poor seating and force distribution).
- The pre-packed screw was shorter than it should have been, which did not provide the necessary fixing length…
- The pre-packed screws were already rusty to begin with, or rusted up after brief use.
I say let us not be annoyed, and let us not annoy others: let us use good-quality screws for good products! At Menet-Trend we sell nothing else. Ever since Mekk Elek we have known that slapdash handymen get sent packing.
Need NONOX stainless and acid-resistant screws for the job? From stock, next day.
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