At work I have an older red hand-truck that has been used hard and left abandoned when it lost too many parts to be useful. My heart went out to the poor thing, unused and hated because it had only one quarter of the bolts needed to keep the deck together and the other side was supported by one of those little metal clasps that you often times see holding a stack of punched paper together.

This past week I resolved to repair this poor hated thing that was left ignored in the supply room here at work. I brought it into my office and removed the only real bolt that was holding the deck together and it was loose. The bolt itself turned out to be a square carriage bolt 5/16-14. Getting the bolt off was a bear because while it was very loose people still tried in-vain to use the hand-truck to lift objects and so the threads of the bolt were all mashed flat and dug up beyond recognition. I was able to grab the nut and bolt with pliers and wrench the two apart freeing the deck from the main body of the frame. Replacing the bolts was easy after I found the right kind and size. I even went so far as to get lock washers and place them on while tightening the nuts onto the bolts with the deck in place.

Everything worked well and I was able to fix the deck, as well as the axle since on the left-side the cotter-pin that held the hub onto the axle fell off and was replaced with yet another one of those circular paper clasps. The only other thing I had to fix for this were replacement casters so people could use the hand-truck as a standard hand-truck or flip the handle around and turn it into a kind of cart. I ordered replacement casters from Amazon.com and they arrived a few days ago. I went back to Lowes and tried to size out the casters because they weren’t 5/16-14.

As I stood there, in front of the mass of fasteners that Lowes carries it struck me how stupid all of it was. I stood back and marveled at the inclusion of both “english” and “metric” system bolts each with their own thread counts which only made things more murky. I was gratified that Lowes carried a 7/16-14 supply of nuts and lock washers. The logical part of me railed silently against all of this. Why the hell are there still “english” measures when not even the English use the “english” system?!? It’s just us, daft stupid Americans who cling to the concept of an inch, which means NOTHING to ANYONE except dullard Americans who refuse to adapt to the better metric system! I also railed against the various thread counts. Why the hell make the same size bolt but cut in different thread counts? IT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. Why not just standardize on metric bolts and say 5 threads per centimeter and leave it at that! I’m sure there is a mechanical engineer who might come out of the woodwork to tell me why higher thread counts are important. I call bullshit. Why not standardize on one singular measurement system and within that, one standard thread count density?

While standing there in front of all the fasteners I silently exclaimed “This is why we can’t colonize space, we’d die for a lack of 7/16-14 bolts!”

I paid for my parts and assembled the rest of the pieces of the hand-truck together and that’s it. I will likely never need to buy nuts and bolts again for years since very few things in my life actively use nuts and bolts. Computer parts are different. But it doesn’t mean that I find the stupidity any less outrageous!