Scoping research on materials & components

Initiatives Materials & Components
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Hello all! @AlexKimber is going to start scoping the topic of materials and components beyond electronic components.

@AlexKimber : people to keep in mind because they work on other components of the IOP standards / research topics:
@max_w and @kny5 when looking at materials related to manufacturing locations (related to the Open Know Where initiative)
@Jbutler-helpful at Helpful Engineering is looking also at OKW and generally at a framework for supply chain interoperability. And materials have a place in that
@schutton → intersections with skills?

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Thanks for posting this dear @BarbaraSchack. Definitively, there’s an intersection with the materials used in FabLabs related to the Fabacademy that serves as a reference of what kind of materials and machines are used. I’ll post a link to the report on materials at Fab Labs here.

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Thanks for the connections! I’m sure I’ll be reaching out to all of you with probing questions :smiley: If you need me in a hurry, studio@alexkimberdesign.co.uk, but I’ll be checking the forum here regularly too

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Very interested in this for mechanical components, even for simple mechanical fasteners. Language around fasteners is super confusing due to regional difference in describing the same thing.

An example of the pain to that needs solving

For example, take this little chap:

image

In the UK we would generally call this a grub screw, as it looks like a little grub burrowing into your engineering project. Living in America for a while I found it was generally called a set screw.

Confusingly a set screw in British English is not a type of screw, but a way a screw is used. Any screw, no matter the shape when is a set screw if the end of it pushes against something to “set” its place. Grub screws are used as set screws, but traditionally hex-bolts were used as set screws leading to British manufacturers to call something entirely different a set screw (even if it is most likely to be used not as a set screw):
image

Now there are numerous DIN, ISO, and ANSI standards for screws. Yet these overlap each other and tend to not be understood in common language.

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