"It wasn’t until 1841 that Joseph Whitworth managed to find a solution. After years of research collecting sample screws from many British workshops, he suggested standardizing the size of the screw threads in Britain so that, for example, someone could make a bolt in England and someone in Glasgow could make the nut and they would both fit together. His proposal was that the angle of the thread flanks was standardized at 55 degrees, and the number of threads per inch, should be defined for various diameters. While this issue was being addressed in Britain, the Americans were trying to do likewise and initially started using the Whitworth thread. "
It hasn't even been 200 years since invention & usage of standardized parts. We've come a long way.
Small parts like bolts are standardized, but things like car parts that easily could be aren't. Car manufacturers fight tooth and nail to block third party suppliers of spares for their cars. It will always be like this because most car manufacturers make very little profit from cars themselves. All the money is in credit fees and aftermarket care and servicing. If you can control the market for that you make a lot more profit.
This is true for cars, electricals, furniture ... everything really. It's only the very simple base elements that are standardized.
Ah, but are those going to be different brands across companies? After all, most auto manufacturers have multiple brands (traditionally, the big three automakers had a low-end, middle-tier and high-end brand, e.g., Ford’s Mercury-Ford-Lincoln trinity, although in the last thirty years a number of brands were shuttered. Add in international consolidation (Chrysler was owned for a while by Daimler-Benz and now by Fiat, Ford used to have an ownership stakes in Jaguar, Volvo and Mazda among others) and you might be seeing intra-corporate part sharing, not inter-corporate.
It does happen that smaller car makers will use parts from other makers in their cars because it is too expensive to design and produce all of the parts themselves. Switches, tail lights, etc are often done this way.
It is not uncommon for parts that are made by third parties will be used in cars by different makers. Aisin makes transmissions used in many brands. This can backfire when the third party maker has a production problem which affects a wide range of cars in multiple makers. The Takata air bags were used in many brands of cars until they were found to blast shrapnel into the faces of occupants. Takata has been struggling for years to produce enough replacement parts to fulfill all of the recalls.
> Car manufacturers fight tooth and nail to block third party suppliers of spares for their cars.
Source?
A cursory glance [0] at a few 2020 model year cars from many brands (Volkswagen Golf, Genesis G70, Ford Mustang, Toyota Corolla, Honda CR-V) show a multiple of aftermarket parts for most common items (ignition components, brake components, steering and suspension components). I’ve owned a dozen cars that I’ve repaired almost 100% by myself, and it’s very rare to be unable to find aftermarket parts; usually only in cases where the car is sufficiently old and uncommon that the manufacturer is the only one interested in making parts anymore (as was the case with my RX-7).
Some brand-new (2023+) cars may not have aftermarket parts available, but this is almost always because they’re too new for the aftermarket to have made any yet.
About the only parts that are hard to find third-party are those that are too low-volume to be profitable: modern headlight and taillight assemblies, which usually last for thousands of hours and may only need replacing in a collision; body panels that generally only need replacing in a collision; specialized controllers such as for adaptive suspension or pseudo-limited-slip-differential-through-braking. ECUs are commonly brought up as an example (“the manufacturers don’t want people modifying the cars they own!!”) but this really boils down to both the manufacturer and aftermarket companies not wanting to be held responsible by the EPA/other environmental agencies, as well as the fact that ECUs very rarely fail relative to, for instance, brake rotors or fuel pumps.
In the USA, bolts can come in plenty of sizes, but 2-56, 4-40, and 6-32 are common small bolts.
You want metric? You would think 2mm, 3mm, 4mm would be enough, but no! There are 2.5 mm, 3.5 mm, 4.5 mm etc. Are these 'necessary' even if they can be produced as 'standard'?
It's the old saw about Standards -- there are so many to choose from.
Standardization and modularity are really the keys to making things that last and reducing our material impact, as opposed to the semi-disposable manufacturing we do now.
But the current financial/capitalist system does not incentize modularity, or creating open standards.
Another option is the biodegradable route, as chosen by so many human civilizations we don't see much evidence of.
It was here on HN where I learned about a city in now-Cambodia (I think) revealed by ground-penetrating radar. I found it fascinating, and I love the idea that awhole city could leave so little evidence.
A huge part of it is that when you're working with wood, standardization isn't terribly important.
Nails can vary in size, hammer them in. Even screwing into wood really doesn't care terribly much as long as the drill and the screw are roughly the same width.
And today we have US and UK regular garden hose threads: same TPI, same diameter, slightly different thread pitch. You can turn the former about 1.5 turns onto the latter before it jams up.
While interchangeable, standardized parts are significant, they are unnecessary if we make and repair our own stuff out of materials sourced from the land and water, and said stuff includes: canoes, paddles, baskets, bedding, shelter (even large houses for several families), hand tools (including weapons), and clothing, off the top. These "old ways" will keep us going on Earth awhile yet, and not just scudding along the bottom, but thriving, together.
I often think about how the simple machine of the screw is such a profound and impactful invention. From furniture in our home to the home itself to spacecraft we have sent into the cosmos, the screw has been quietly holding our world together for millenia.
It hasn't even been 200 years since invention & usage of standardized parts. We've come a long way.
https://www.nord-lock.com/insights/knowledge/2017/the-histor...