Machine designers and engineers often suffer the frustrations of costly downtime due to the failure of threaded assemblies. There cannot be many industrial machines that don't have something secured either on them, in them or to them by screws or nuts and bolts, any of which can fail from vibrational loosening. Why does this happen? Mostly because of an air gap between the threads which allows for side to side movement. It is widely reported that there is only 15 per cent metal-to-metal contact between the threads of a bolted assembly, and the air gap results in vibration loosening the threaded connections. When this happens outside of the maintenance cycle on industrial machinery, an entire manufacturing process can be brought to an expensive stop whilst troubleshooting to find the failure, with the potential for batches of goods in production to be spoiled during the manufacturing process.
All of this costs time and money, sometimes just because of a loose threaded fastener. Join the LOCTITE webinar, hosted by Henkel, to understand fully how this happens and how to prevent it with LOCTITE liquid threadlockers, by registering here: bit.ly/2E0tlsl. Users completing registration can also carry on to download the ebook to "Discover how to stop fastening loosening". In the meantime, MachineBuilding.net readers can see how to prevent a little fastener from becoming a big problem here: bit.ly/3aEuaD4.