Why our Screwdriver took 3 YEARS

this is it it's finally here the ltt screwdriver and truth is we didn't have to make it there are loads of perfectly good screwdrivers but this one this one is the best everything from the convenient bit storage to the perfectly tuned sound and feel of the ratchet mechanism to the fact that it is naturally perfectly balanced as all things should be is second to none and the handle is designed to be super comfortable whether your hands resemble catcher's mitts or you buy your gloves from the children's section but getting it to this point was an adventure and even with my experience in product management a shockingly expensive adventure i mean how can it take three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to make something so seemingly basic i'm going to tell you but first i gotta start paying for this thing with this segway to our sponsor of course it's called a sponsor spot why wouldn't it have a sponsor spot simple mdm simple mdm offers ridiculously simple apple device management for it enrolling your company's apple devices and keeping them up to date doesn't have to be frustrating get 50 off your first three months at simplemdm.com linus [Music] rather than reinventing the wheel the smart engineer finds the best existing wheel and then refines it so right out of the gate megapro was an obvious partner first of all their ratchet mechanism is fantastic and has been proven reliable in the field for over 25 years second they own the patent on what i believe is literally the best bit loader available for a ratcheting screwdriver third and this wasn't a requirement but it was a huge bonus their office is a 20-minute drive from ours making collaboration much easier now the especially smart thing to do what megapro implored us to do would have been to simply rebrand one of their existing drivers a little bit of ltt logo there some ltt color here maybe some computer specific bits and we would have been good to go unfortunately i'm a perfectionist control freak who hates making money so instead we embarked on our three year journey that would have us redesign nearly every single aspect of megapro's existing product does this look anything alike to you i mean they're both screwdrivers other than that the answer is no for one thing megapro's ratchet works in the opposite direction that you are screwing in and not being able to alter this would have been a complete show stopper for me upon hearing that it should be pretty simple to go ratchet right screw in right we green lit the project more on that later though next we had to redesign the handle to be clear theirs is great for automotive applications where you really want a giver up near the top of the driver but it didn't provide the finer control that i expect in a more general use driver also it's a little more than i can handle if you catch my drift at this point i was recruited design handled feels both when you have your hand up at the top or when you have it choked up kind of like this i settled on a three lobe design for the way it just kind of naturally follows the shape of your hand and from there i got to do my favorite thing rapid prototyping my philosophy is that there's no point in trying to make something perfect the first time because you're just gonna get it wrong anyway so for my first attempt i basically just made up dimensions and solidworks and threw it at the printer this is truly terrible but that was kind of the point one of the main reasons it's terrible is it's literally impossible to mass manufacture we already knew at this stage that the final parts were going to be injection molded basically shooting a bunch of hot plastic into a metal cavity so there are a couple of important considerations first no areas can be too thin at below about 80 thousandths of an inch our molten plastic won't flow through the mold and even if it did our finished part might be easy to break also no areas can be too thick since the plastic can sag while cooling and look pretty strange more importantly though the two halves of the mold have to be able to come apart so in this first version of the handle these scalloped areas here would have resulted in the mold completely destroying apart seconds after it had been made not not ideal anyway five versions later i landed on the first handle that i liked aka the long boy unfortunately this was one of our first major roadblocks linus said it was too big and i had already made this handle as small as i possibly could without changing the megapro internals to make it smaller we'd have to get pretty creative and spend a bunch of money one option was to decrease the length of the zinc housing that connects the shaft to the handle but we're afraid that would decrease how much torque you can transmit through the handle another option was to decrease the number of bits to six but we felt 12 was a necessity for tech work what we were willing to give up though was the length of the bits by reducing them from 25 millimeters to 20 making a couple alterations to the zinc housing we were able to make our handle nearly an inch shorter than mega pro's and create a handle that is awesome to use no matter your hand size two versions later we arrived at version seven which is the handle design you can buy now i did create versions eight through twenty but all of them are worse than number seven so uh seven it is there was a small problem with our handle design though how do you access the bit loader megapro has too little indents on the sides of the handle but with our trilobular design that looks and feels pretty gross to make the whole driver feel more cohesive then we hired whitebox designs in vancouver to help us out they came up with a bunch of different ideas some resembling things like our water bottle and some a bit more abstract around this time it was becoming pretty clear that alex needed some help since balancing doing an engineer's full-time job with writing an ltt video a week was becoming unsustainable so we went engineer fishing and hooked ourselves a kyle his first task was to perfect our end cap we liked white boxes little ribbed ends but getting it correct was difficult since too large of a rib can make using the screwdriver uncomfortable in your palm but having them too small makes getting at the bits difficult after 3d printing a bunch that could be interchanged quickly using magnets we found that this one was the best all of this work led to the 3d printed prototype in my hand looks strikingly similar to the finished product doesn't it so given that this was high fives all around done in august of 2020 with the launch scheduled for five months later how on earth did it take another two years internally we call this kickstarter syndrome up until that point every obstacle had been overcome relatively quickly and we even had our manufacturing partner locked in we felt basically invincible and we were tempted to launch a pre-order campaign but if we had done that we would have a heck of a lot of angry customers right now because we either would have shipped a bad product or they would have waited two years after submitting payment as it turns out going from pretty much ready to mass production ready is a lot of work to be clear some of it was still pretty straightforward we worked with innovative tool and dye in delta to create our plastic molds and the process for that was well i wouldn't say painless because we did have to hand them over 200 000 us dollars but that was basically it we gave them the money they gave us the molds and i gotta say until now i didn't know much about plastic mold making other than that it's super expensive but after seeing how it's done the price tag makes a bit more sense to me we went with hardened steel molds instead of aluminum ones because they last way longer and our intention is that we are going to make hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of screwdrivers before those molds finally kick the can the problem with hardened steel molds though is that they're made of hardened steel they are extremely difficult to machine to accomplish this then innovative tool and die used edm no not that kind electrical discharge machining we're not going to have time to fully explain edm here this fantastic video by applied science should handle that for us nicely but the tldr is that they're using a carbon electrode in the shape of our screwdriver and then a bunch of electricity to slowly zap away the steel this process has to be incredibly precise because ultimately it will determine not only the shape but even the texture of the surface of the finished product we chose a satin finish for our handle that looks great out of the box and wears out very evenly which is technically called ch3nr if you're a mold turbo nerd while the plastic molds were getting made we also had to finalize the shaft you might have noticed that our original designs had the knurling go all the way up to the base of the shaft but we added this little ridge here and the reason for that was that we'd have as much material as possible to hold the shaft onto the ratchet we tried a lot of different materials for shafts these ones are aluminum which were just too soft and felt kind of cheap these ones are stainless steel these ones are high carbon steel and then we also tried like different knurlings this one's straight which was kind of awful for slipping between your fingers and what we ultimately settled on was 303 stainless steel for a good mix of durability and machine ability i just want to mention here that we made sure to go fairly aggressive with the knurling and most pc screws can be almost entirely tightened using the shaft so you would use it kind of like this one unfortunate thing that we learned during the testing of our prototype screwdrivers though was that the black coating on the shaft was simply not durable enough it wasn't for lack of trying the 40 micrometer black chrome plating treatment was the closest we got but even that got stripped pretty quickly especially by sharp things like heatsink fins so sadly aside from some early orders where we are allowing people to buy the black one knowing that it's going to wear off we're going to be primarily selling the screwdriver with a silver shaft so that it doesn't look terrible in a year as a consolation though the silver shaft is passivated by dipping it in a nitric bath to give it a nice protective oxide coating because despite its name stainless steel isn't actually totally stainless so this design choice was not about saving a buck it was about making the most durable possible product also in the shaft is the strongest magnet that we could get our hands on the minimum pull force that this is rated for is 5 newtons but from our testing they've been anywhere between 7 to 11 newtons and this was to address one of my personal pet peeves where your bit gets kind of stuck on the screw and then gets left behind when you pull out and i can confidently say that that will be an extremely rare occurrence with our driver i've had it happen a grand total of about five times in the last couple of years while we're on the topic of materials let's give you a rundown on what the entire screwdriver is made out of the main plastics so the handle the end cap and the selector ring are all made out of a material called triax 1120. it's a nylon rich abs blend that we don't know the exact composition of it's a trade secret but what we do know is that it's as strong as freaking heck and offers a great balance of chemical and abrasion resistance the internal plastics are also mostly tri-x 1120 but the bit clips and the little ninja star that's in between them as we like to call it are made out of delrin for its excellent wear characteristics the last thing you want is for these little holders to just start snapping off on you that would be terrible now if you look really closely you can actually see a small color mismatch between the triax and the delrin but we did our best with it and i'm pretty sure that if i didn't just point it out no one would have ever noticed but i did point it out because i would hate for you guys to think that it's literally perfect speaking of flaws i'm going to point out another one in the molds i mean first of all we're incredibly impressed with the quality of the molds from innovative tool and dye every injection molded part is going to have parting lines where the two dies of the mold meet and they are virtually undetectable on our handle like props guys kyle's been working as a production engineer for 10 years and he's never seen molds this good before but while on most of the molds we were able to hide the gate which is where the plastic gets injected and there's a little sprue that needs to be broken off like on the handle it's right here where it's going to be hidden by the selector ring there was one we couldn't hide and that was on the selector ring itself on the first batch we got it was super obvious like look at this thing so we worked with the mold makers to change the gate location and make it as small as possible leaving us with this little tiny blemish again this is a very small flaw but i am pointing it out to demonstrate how obsessive we were over the tiny details of this product they really do matter and some of them matter a lot like the revisions that we made to the ninja star originally between the two rows of bits there was supposed to be a round plastic washer and this was to help hold the bits in place so they couldn't accidentally slide into another position unfortunately it limited compatibility to the 20 millimeter long bits that we sell or to less common 16 millimeter bits from other vendors like this one by this point we were completely committed to our shorty bits though not only do they enable the excellent ergonomics of our handle but it turns out that the shorter length enhances our already incredibly strong magnets so you don't have to worry about dropping even very large ferrous screws but then we also didn't want to lock people into a single vendor for replacement bits even if it's us that sucks i mean our bits are great they're black oxide coated s2 tool steel and we're going to have a wide variety of different sets available right at launch and furthermore we rationalized if you really wanted to buy your own bits you could just angle grind five millimeters off a standard one but what we really wanted was to find some way that we could ensure that longer bits could still be accommodated and so the ninja star was born you just take a pic turn it so that it lines up with in between the bit holders and yeah it'll knock down the number of bits that you can carry down to six but this ensures that you will always be able to find something to store in your screwdriver handle even if you lose all of these and i die and we go out of business anyway we had all of this figured out and all of the plastic molds done by the summer of 2021 hoping for a december launch that's when things got really stupid the zinc ratchet molds were going to be made in taiwan by the same factory that megapro has been using for 20 years then suddenly they started becoming less responsive by this point we had individually approved every component of the ratchet mechanism from the factory and all we needed was a final assembled sample before hitting go on production then this mess arrived it's okay linus i got it from here this is hot garbage imagine waiting for your final pre-production samples and then receiving a bucket of disappointment to summarize the shop flops around like a wet noodle uh the ratchet sounds like three years short of a bad gearbox and the knurling is basically smooth it's like we told them what to do and they just didn't do it and then sent us this and it wasn't it everything about this sample was terrible you can even just tell by the knurling on the shaft like this how could these both even be from the same factory well we can't get too much into that because there are some legal things that we're still figuring out but basically the factory that we were using was bought out by a large tool maker and they were now prioritizing naturally their own tools so long story short we got fed up with their terrible communication and delays not to mention their terrible quality and we changed to a different factory in china potentially losing our 130 000 us dollar deposit in the process once we started getting in samples from the chinese factory we had more problems the ratchet which previously had been the one thing that hadn't gone wrong started to jam to show you why we're gonna have to take a closer look at how our ratchet mechanism works press fit into the rear of the shaft is the ratchet wheel there are then two pawls that engage with it so you can see them right here if both of them are engaged the shaft is locked but if you move one of them up a little bit you can spin the shaft in one direction to move the pawls out of the way there are two pieces of delrin that interact with the selector ring and it turns out that this guy right here was made five thousandth of an inch out of spec five thousandth of an inch that's like the width of two hairs but because it's a lever that error was multiplied across the mechanisms leading to our jamming issues the bad news is that it took us over six months of barking up various trees to figure out that this was the problem the good news is that in that time we tweaked nearly every part of the mechanism to tighten up tolerances increase reliability and to dramatically improve the feel of the ratchet over megapro's already a tier design it not only sounds amazing but we went out and bought all of the screwdrivers that the haters have been telling us are certainly better than their novice first attempt and by comparison ours has extremely low back force making it really easy to get a screw started and an excellent hand feel it also happens to be strong enough for heavy automotive work with a minimum spec of 25 newton meters for torque although we've actually tested them up to 30 newton meters and they still work perfectly fine should be noted if you get to that point though whatever screw that you're reefing on is probably a hollowed out circle while we were fixing the ratchet mechanism another thing we played around with was the tolerance of this delrin ring that holds the shaft in place we settled on a five thou gap between the sleeve and the shaft finding that it was the best compromise between a solid shaft feel while still allowing good ratchet movement there's a prototype here that has a tighter collar ah i guess here we go oh the feel of this is not good but that's in the past today is now now is today you know what whatever it doesn't matter let's go build a final one and what better place to do it than here at ph molds in maple ridge british columbia where our finished driver handles are currently being produced in the machine right behind us let's take a closer look oh this bad boy is heavy yep it all starts here in this non-descript paper barrel full of our plastic material called triax mixed up with these black pieces that are a die a pigment that are going to help us achieve the black color that we want for our screwdriver handle you're going to vacuum these up into this industrial dryer apparatus right here and once they've got all the moisture sucked out of them they get crapped out into this bucket that we then take i'm gonna actually leave the bucket there i don't know if it's just gonna dump a load into it but it comes out of that bucket which then gets dumped into this hopper the plastic pellets are gravity fed into the molding machine at which point things get a little spicier you can actually see the piston right here that is driving molten plastic into the mold but how does it get molten the pellets go into what we call the auger which is a hollowed out cylindrical tube that has an archimedes screw in the middle that's actually tapered outward as you go along that way what that does is it not only melts the plastic into a molten state needed to actually inject it into the water there's a heating element there's a heat element for sure that brings it up to plus 250 something celsius and it's tapered that helps both with mixing and creating enough pressure for the piston to actually come and grab it as wild as this feels right now i have never actually seen in person the mold that we you pay for that you paid for yeah yeah i did that hunk of metal right there is the whole mold assembly oh wow okay it's the whole assembly that you actually pay for which is why mold costs can be actually really expensive unless you have like a master die which is the outer bit and you just play for the you just pay for the plates which is the cavity and the call you actually have to pay for the entire assembly so they load the entire assembly with a massive 10 ton overhead crane so they load it in and and then they connect up all the hoses and basically all it does is shoots opens ejects closes shoots open and it's on automatic right now okay so we can see it go you can literally like watch this thing whoa there's a part oh it's hot yeah it's hot get gloves also somebody's screwdrivers might have linus fingerprints in it there goes another one what's actually cool about this mold it has a core that goes inside here a cavity that goes over there and then two slides that go around the sides to form the whole part so what a mold is is it's basically a negative of what you're trying to create right so inside when the mold closes there's exactly this space here right to to actually shoot exactly exactly right so this is called the sprue and that's called the runner so these are unfortunately well they're not they're not lost because what we do is we cut these off and we re-grind them right to add to that pellet stuff that we just got earlier on but you can only have so much percentage of regrind you have to have some virgin material going in so what are we going to get away with like 10 20 it depends on the part but for most of the out the out of components is 25 right so what we want to aim for is that the screw and the runners are under 25 of the total shot so that way we have basically no waste exactly we don't always get it but we try right this mould is unfortunately not something that we call auto injection so it does eject but it doesn't automatically cut the gate that has to be manually trimmed most of our other molds cut the gate away as they eject which is a very satisfying process if you actually get to see it unfortunately we don't have that mould loaded right now so you're gonna have to take my word for it but this is not so bad it's a single cut it's that actual part is hidden so you'll never see it but you know watching this video you get to get a sneak peek of the handle as it comes out of the machine it's going to be about 40 seconds that's a probably about a 40 second cycle time right you actually have to wait for the plastic to cool before you eject it you can't just yolo shoot you have to wait for it to solidify a bit and then you can push it out but once it covers the coolant pipes come in right yes that's exactly you want the mold to be hot but not too hot that's where the coolant comes in it goes yi that's sick brandon you're gonna have to bear with me for a second here this is a bit more of a time sensitive operation than i initially anticipated the first thing we got to do is we got to take the hot handles that's critical because we're using a press fit to ensure that our ratchet mechanism stays in place in the handle which means that we're taking advantage of the cooling of the handle to ensure that this stays in place all right we put our accent ring on then this is keyed so it only goes in one way we put our ratchet assembly in place we put these stoppers in the end of the shaft and boom it automatically press fits the ratchet into the handle and then the other side that i was already working on pops out these two go in here and these guys get bit holders which are also going to be press fit one side move it over here these are finished drivers which get put into these reusable styrofoam flats that will be forwarded to us for packaging now one of the things we're looking for in qc is what they're calling gas marks or also while we're at it any just random scratches on the finished part you guys want a perfect pristine screwdriver that i haven't dropped right yeah you do if we allow the parts to sit in the tray behind me for too long they cool enough that we cannot use them so quick qc looks good that explains why these guys weren't moving out of the way for the camera or nothing they got screwdrivers to make that also explains why we need gloves because the parts that we're handling in this process are by their very nature hot i'm still one part behind i'm not catching up it's almost like this is an optimized process careful don't scratch it buddy here i'm not scratching them kyle geez man relax kyle people are gonna get ah use the freaking guy oh my word what are you doing come on man i'm falling behind i am sweating so much right now brandon like i am i am pouring sweat at the moment ow that one's too hot okay i give up help me help i'm waving the white flag why what's wrong oh you want the operator yeah they can come back okay we're done as you guys probably figured out if we're in mass production we're probably taking orders it's going to take us a little while to get caught up to the volume of orders we're expecting so we're gonna have a wave system kind of like we had for backpack but our production capacity for these is much higher so guys check out the page we're gonna have it linked down below where you can get your place in line i could not be more excited for you guys to finally get your hands on this thing it's been like what three years yeah it's not really customary on our videos but this was not a normal project so herman from megapro and actually the whole team there deserve a huge thanks here i mean he could have easily said these kids have no idea what they're getting into they're not even tool makers and simply stopped returning our calls but instead he took a personal interest in this project and made sure that it could succeed also massive shout out to all of our own team aside from the engineers like sarah who designed our awesome not to mention durable packaging and our partners except for that factory in taiwan that we're still trying to get our deposit back from those guys can eat one if you know what i'm talking about we absolutely love the final result though it was worth it we set out to build the best driver for building computers and in doing so ended up building something that's amazing for just about any task so don't wait go check it out lttstore.com and go check out 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there isn't that wild three years ago we had zero engineers and now we're expanding our engineering team at kind of an alarming rate but we're not gonna run out of money because you guys are gonna buy lots of screwdrivers

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,223,690

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Id: 2K5Gqp1cEcM

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022