The world has a lot of different standards for a lot of things, but I have never heard of a place with the default screw thread direction being opposite.
So does each language have a fun mnemonic?
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This phrase has never made any sense to me. It’s a circle. If one side is moving right, then the opposite side is moving left. So the phrase only makes sense if you specify which side we are talking about, which nobody ever does. Therefore it’s completely illogical to me while everyone else just gets it. Side note: Autism can be a real bitch sometimes.
Edit:
Clockwise and counterclockwise may be more intuitive for some people. Is the clock-hand (wrench) going forward in time, or backwards. But I don’t know of any quick rhyme for that
Yes, that verbiage makes way more sense.
But the entire rotation is either clockwise (right) or counterclockwise (left). Ultimately, its just a helpful reminder which way to turn lol
Clockwise and counter-clockwise makes sense.
But when you say “right” it’s not clear which side of the circle is being referenced. If the top of the circle is moving to the right, the bottom is moving left at the same time. So the saying only makes sense when you specify that you’re talking about the top of the circle.
you have to have never seen a steering wheel to not understand which side of the circle is being referenced. it’s always the top. who would even reference anything else and why.
“turn it right”
“which part???”
“the middle of course, you absolute alien”
Because people get confused when there is no space for the wrench at the top, and they put the handle at the bottom and try to move the wrench left or right, not referencing the top of bolt.
Because they aren’t using the saying as a clokwise/counter clockwise reminder but as a flat out instruction.
I think we can all understand how it functions but that doesn’t make it “correct.” It’s spinning around a circle. Exactly half of its moving right as the other half moves left. That’s why we have the terms clockwise and counter-clockwise. If left and right were actually reasonable for something spinning in a circle this wouldn’t exist.
yes it would. we always have redundancy, especially in speech. also we’re not robots, technicality doesn’t matter, how we communicate does. do you get confused when people say something like “that’s all behind us now” meaning the past? do you literally turn around and argue that there’s nothing really behind you and they should have said in the past instead?
I don’t get confused by any of this. Stop pretending like everyone else is stupid. If you’re looking at the hands of a clock, they aren’t moving right when they’re moving clockwise half of the time. The applies to everything moving around a circle. Left and right are only useful if you’re looking at a specific segment of it. Clockwise is what we use for rotations everywhere else. For example, look at this wiki page that says this: “Rotation or rotational motion is the circular movement of an object around a central line, known as an axis of rotation. A plane figure can rotate in either a clockwise or counterclockwise sense around a perpendicular axis intersecting anywhere inside or outside the figure at a center of rotation.” Right is literally never even used in that page, and left is only used once. The terms don’t make sense for rotations. We can make up rules for how they can be considered for rotations, but they fundamentally are not words used to describe rotations. Do you get confused when people say there are more useful words to describe a function?
Yes, it’s always the top side of the circle in this context, or you can think about how clock hands do go in a specific direction, because they’re a radius, not a circumference. There, now it’s cleared up for you.
The clock hands move right when at the top but left when at the bottom.
In Australia, it’s the other way around and the clock will try to eat you or at least sting you to death.
Imagine it as if it were a track you were driving around, which way would you turn the wheel?
It’s getting so convoluted at this point just knowing clockwise/anticlockwise is infinitely easier.
Yes! That concept makes way more sense.
If a steering wheel has you this perplexed then I beg you to never ever drive a vehicle.
If you’re gripping the bottom of the wheel you move your hands left to make the car turn right. Which is kind of the whole problem here. Rotation around a centre doesn’t happen right or left. That’s the whole reason why the words “clockwise” and “anticlockwise” exist. Translation = right, left, up, down, forward, back. Rotation = clockwise, anticlockwise.
It doesn’t matter where you hold the wheel. When you’re turning right, you’re always doing the right movement for tightening a screw, no matter the hand position. That’s the point.
A clockwise rotation turns a car to the right (in forward gear) and tightens a nut (right hand threaded). But this is not a rotation to the right. It’s a clockwise rotation. You can’t rotate “to the right”. That’s the point.
If I ask you to turn the car left and you give me this speech I would eject from the car.
Yes, and I would be devastated to see you go.
Am I going clockwise or anticlockwise round the track?
So you’re explaining rotation, in terms of a smaller imaginary rotation, which engages with imaginary traction wheels, which engage with the work to be turned?
If that works for you, great, but it is complicated.
No im trying to illustrate the parallels between how you turn the wheel, how the car turns in response to that , and how they are all related. You turn left you will make the exact same rotational movement, with both the vehicle, and the steering wheel.
It’s as simple as, “What direction do you turn the wheel to make the car go left?” I just stacked on top “and also it makes the car itself do that same exact circular movement” so you don’t just dismiss this as some kind of arbitrary convention.
Oh, I see.
Car steering wheels work that way because of the convention. Change the side that the steering column’s pinion meets the rack and the wheel would work the opposite way. From the mathematical perspective, there’s two ways to continuously map an arc of the steering wheel to an arc of the wheels, and since they aren’t in the same plane neither is “wrong”.
i know you can make the wheel work the opposite way, jesus christ. the circle motion the path of the car makes when you turn left is the same as when you turn the wheel to the conventional left. imagine, instead you steered “left” by a joystick. the car would still draw the same circular path the same fucking way, because turning left makes an anticlockwise circle, every time, in every situation.
Ah, so the car isn’t even important. You’re one of the people imagining standing on the screw. As long as you have a convention about which way is “up” on it, that does work.
One of them is “wrong” and would kill many people
If this is truly something that doesn’t make sense to you, you may want to consider being tested for Autism if you have not already. This phrase is not something neurotypical people struggle with.
And I say that as someone who is not clinically autistic, but who is real fuckin’ close to it. No judgment, I’m not trying to make you feel bad or anything, it is just an observation.
I didn’t mean to unleash this torrent of comments on you, sorry.
What the fuck are you talking about.
You’re either rotating the fastener to the right or the left.
It doesn’t matter what side you’re talking about, because you’re not moving one side of the fastener, you’re rotating the whole thing one direction or the other.
Clockwise just means something is rotating to the right.
If I ask you to turn around to the right, are you going to ask me what side of you I’m referencing?
Here is clockwise. One arrow is going to the right and one to the left.
I tend to agree but you could argue that from a perspective in the center of the rotation you’re turning to the right. Imagine standing in the center of those arrows.
What happens if you look at it from the other side?
The whole thing is rotating to the right, that’s what clockwise means. Clocks rotate to the right. One arrow is not pointing left, it’s pointing in the direction of rotation, which is to the right.
The bottom arrow is, definitionally, pointing left.
You think this arrow is pointing to the right, when it is clearly pointing up and to the left? Fascinating.
If you follow that arrow around to the next with your hand, which direction is your hand moving?
That is indicating clockwise rotation, or a rotation to the right. We’re talking about circles here
If I start at the beginning of the arrow and follow it, it’s moving left.
If clockwise was the same thing as right, we wouldn’t use that term.
Wrist is going left.
Is the direction of rotation in the room with us right now?
No, because humans have a pretty clear forward direction. Screws don’t. You say turn a screw to the right, do you mean make the top of the screw move right or the bottom move right?
Most people assume the top, but not all, and the language is ambiguous.
Slightly, anyway. If you’re both standing over the thing it can potentially be agreed on. If you’re all over the place working on some big machine you need to use some language, and I’m not aware of a standard way to do it.
The “front” or “forward” direction of a screw is clearly the face of the fastener itself, be it a hex head, Phillips, or Slotted screw. Picking a side of a face as the front doesn’t make any sense. The whole thing needs to rotate one direction or another, and it will either rotate to the right to tighten, or the left to loosen.
If I ask you what the front of a clock is, are you going to tell me it’s the top curve near the ceiling? No it’s the face of the clock, and the hands rotate around it to the right.
Correct.
Right. Nobody is talking about the under side of the fastener. Just looking it the face of the fastener, as one does when driving into something.
Wrong. A rotating circle rotates in all directions, including right and left, up and down, at the same time. If you attach an arrow perpendicular to the circle, pointing in the direction of rotation, then (if rotating clockwise) the arrow will point right at 0°, down at 90°, left at 180°, and up at 270°
You’re talking about the TOP of the rotation. The bottom of the rotation is moving the opposite direction. Just like the right and left sides move in opposite directions.
Think about a wrench hanging off a fastener, handle pointing to six o’clock. To tighten it (clockwise), does the handle move toward your left or right?
From nine o’clock to three oclock it rotates to the right. From three to nine it rotates to the left.
The rule for the top of the rotation is “righty tighty”. For the bottom of rotation the rule is “lefty tighty”.
The “righty tighty” saying doesn’t specify which side of the rotation it’s referencing, which as a kid helping my grandfather in the garage was confusing.
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You aee assuming a top orientation moving to the right. Give somebody a wrench handle at the bottom of nut and tell them left to loosen, you will see how most take it literally and move handle to the left side of their body. they think in terms of their left and their right, not the screws right left from a starting location at top, or if from 4 oclock position to the “left of” 4 oclock as if you were facing the 4.
If you’re looking head on to the screw/nut/whatever then we’re talking about the top of the screw/but/whatever.
You can also imagine if the nut was actually a wheel. Which way would you spin it to make it roll left or right.
Confused the hell out of me at a young age. That’s how I came around to thinking of it
Don’t think about it in 3d space.
They mean is the wrench handle moving left from the 12 o’clock position or left from the 6 o’clock position. You would not believe how many people struggle with lefty righty because of start location.
I defer to clockwise and counter-clockwise (anti-clockwise in UK). Except for new gen that never learned analog clock stuggles with this concept also.
Then they encounter a Left Hand thread and the universe implodes
Shit, a standard thread feels natural to me, but a left hand thread still fucks my life up sometimes — trying to notice what’s going on before I strip it.
My grill can connect to those camping propane tanks, but it’s threaded opposite… gets me every time
I have left-hand threaded fittings on a few things and always say to myself aloud “This is reverse-threaded” before I attempt to turn them then still fuck up first turn. It doesn’t stop me from fucking it up the first time - it just helps me remember why.
When I train new people on this equipment I tell them to say it aloud, show them, still fuck up the first turn, then they laugh.
Then I have them do it in front of me including saying it aloud - and they fuck up the first turn…
When you’ve been doing something unconsciously for decades it’s really hard to break.
I think it was old Chryslers had opposite lugnuts, I can only imagine how many stripped threads happened
I love how half the people in this thread are under-thinking it and don’t seem to understand they’re doing so. I wonder whether it’s a bit.
I assure you I’m only thinking of it in two dimensions.
So where do you put the rest of your helices on a cylinder or cone, in 2D? In Flatland a screw or bolt becomes a circle with a short hair. The whole point of “leftie loosy” is to try to help with reality as we perceive it.
Try it the next time you are underneath a car wielding a socket spanner with a taped on extension thingie that you jury rigged whilst trying to shift a hex nut at 45 degrees to reality that you cannot see, with oil dripping in your eye. Obviously the oil is a mix of the 30 year old native stuff loosened up with the WD40 that might break the rust lock.
I suggest you do think abut things in 3D and don’t forget the other dimension (time). That WD40 needs time to break the rust lock.
“Leftie loosy” isn’t for keyboard worriers - its for engineers and technicians, plumbers, and the rest and obviously for DiYers.
When you are knackered and pissed off and you need to shift a fucking nut or bolt or whatever, you need incantations to get you back on track.
I agree but there is a intuitive way once you are holding it. I remember looking at a car wheel and the signal lever not understanding how do people decided that up on the lever means right. Yeah it’s connected to the wheel rotation but why turning the wheel clockwise means turning right? When I actually sat on the driver seat there was an instinct.For most people It’s more logical to look at the “top” of the circle and corelate it’s movement with turning left/right.
A thing that annoyed me is when table top games use a non determinist way to define player order. It always depends on the observer.alIf you just say “then the you pass your turn to the left”, what left? From my perspective; from the top down perspective translating it to counterclockwise? From the tables perspective which is the opposite?
I used to feel the same way. If you’re talking about the direction you’re moving your hand, it assumes your hand is above, not below.
Had a similar hangup with less than/greater than symbols.
If it were a wheel which way would it roll?
I remember when my grandpa was like why not just keep going? I was pulling the ratchet end of the wrench off the bolt at the bottom… I said but that side is left and he laughed and said its just to get you started and told me the clock thing. Dont ever ask me to put a nut on a bolt I will cross thread it every time.
SAME!
Even “clockwise/counter-clockwise” is a bit vague if you’re not both on the same side of the thing, since something turning clockwise from one perspective turns counter seen from the opposite side.
They are not a circle unless you have some really odd bolts or screws! I suppose a bolt looks like a circle in “Flatland” but we live in 3D space with time as a fourth dimension that we can directly perceive.
A screw or bolt and the rest are, roughly speaking, a cylinder with a helical thread on it. They also have a “head” or similar which acts a stopper. You can model all of them as a bolt. We use a spanner, wrench, fingers, screw drivers, drill drivers, scissors, whatever to do the tightening or loosening. You can model all those tools as a spanner (wrench). We need some final mental contortions to make this slightly rigorous: The spanner (wrench) is always considered as being at 12:00 on an imaginary clock and we have to assume that our bolt moves away from us for “tighten” and towards us for “loosen” and I suppose we should also require that we are looking at the “face” of the notional clock and not its obverse!
Now it should be obvious how the rule works. Turn the spanner to the right and you tighten the bolt, turn it to the left and you loosen it.
OK that lot is not very helpful when you are under a sink or in a roofing void performing strange contortions. Try holding up one of your hands and pretend you are holding a bolt or the head of a screw. Clockwise turns will tighten and anti clockwise will loosen. You might use “leftie loosey …” to bootstrap: “clockwise tighten”. It becomes even more interesting when you are trying to work out which way to turn a bolt or whatever when you can only feel it and when tightening actually moves it towards you.
Think about a bolt running through a wheel with the head towards us, say on a very simplified bicycle. Move the bike to the right, and hence the wheels turn clockwise. Friction should cause the bolt to tighten. If you change the design and put the bolt in on the other side and now forwards for the bike is to the left then you will loosen the bolt and that will be dangerous. Now change the design to a bolt with a nut and washers etc and it rapidly gets complicated!
Also, please note that some bolts have reverse threads to the norm. On a garden strimmer the tightening knob that holds the spool on is often a reverse threaded bolt. That’s for similar reasons to the bicycle wheel thing I mentioned earlier.
I’ve just spent ages and a lot of words to try and persuade you that this has bugger all to do with autism. I think that your error was really to do with not thinking too deeply about the real issue and focusing on the wrong thing. We all do that, extremely often, regardless of where we are on the spectrum.
I hope that you see that considerations with regarding helical threads on a cylinder or a tapering cone (but not circles) can be quite complicated and that’s why sometimes we all need some silly rules to get us through the every day ordeal of dealing with them.
Now, would you like a chat about circles … 8)