BeigeJournal

Carroll Smith’s Nuts, Bolts and Fasteners and Plumbing Handbook by Carroll Smith. Motorbooks International, 1990.

I learned of this book from Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools website. The title pretty well explains what the book is about. Carroll Smith was a race car builder, and so to some extent the book is race oriented, but anyone who uses fasteners for critical jobs will find the book informative. Quite a bit of the book ends up describing how things are done in aerospace or structural engineering, largely for the purpose of explaining how things are done when they really need to be done right and cost is not important. Smith frequently mentions the very expensive fasteners used on fighter aircraft or rockets to show what is possible even as he dismisses them as far too expensive and hard to obtain for race car use. Those of us who’ve heard a lot about the right way, the wrong way, and the FAA way might find his endless praise of the virtues of aerospace techniques a bit different from what we are used to hearing, but certainly most of the approved fastening methods are very safe and reliable even if sometimes awkward and expensive. Certainly more thought, attention, and money generally goes into aircraft fasteners than goes into what you see on bicycles or street cars, and we can learn a lot from that.

The book starts with a brief introduction to metallurgy to explain stress and strain, elastic limits, yield points, stress raisers, fatigue and the like sufficiently for those not familiar with the basics to understand the rest of the book. Nuts and bolts are a major part of the book, of course, followed by traditional and blind rivets, quick-release fasteners, and flexible hoses and their connectors.

The book is written in a chatty, conversational style. There is always the risk of going to far when using that sort of style, and perhaps he did go a tiny bit too far, but overall I found it very engaging and readable. It is certainly much more fun to read than the written by committee style often found in technical material. Praise for good products and scorn for bad is abundant. There are a great many photographs, drawings, graphs, and tables. At times it would be helpful if the figures were numbered so that the text could refer to them specifically rather than leaving the reader to hunt around for the figure being discussed in the text.

This is a fantastic guide to how and why do things right when bolting, riveting, or plumbing. Highly recommended.