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?
Photo credit: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Giy8OrYJTjw/Tfm9Ne5o5hI/AAAAAAAAAB4/c7uBLwjkl9c/s1600/scan0002.jpg
“La derecha oprime y la izquierda libera” The right oppresses, the left liberates
I love Spanish, damn that’s a good way to say it.
La derecha oprime y la izquierda libera
I just knew that would be Spanish, without being able to speak more than a few words. It works far better than our effort and is both a sardonic and satirical political comment.
Well played Spanish if that really is the equivalent in common usage. Our effort sounds like it was invented by a young child whilst responding to a BBC quiz.
I’ve never heard this, But it’s great
Never heard of that. When attending a trade school there was never the necessity of a mnemotechnic to know in which direction turn the tool.
As other mentioned this kind of phrase is useless if you are in the opposite side of the thing you want to tighten/loose.
What I always heard is “la regla del destornillador” (the screwdriver rule), as a substitute for the right hand rule.
The German version as actually survived its original time frame: “So lang das Deutsche Reich besteht, wird Schraube fest nach rechts gedreht” - “As long as the German Reich exists, a screw is tightened by turning right”
yeah, this one is only for inside voice. I won’t be teaching it to anyone anymore.
I’m German, and I’ve never heard that before. I’d be seriously weirded out by someone saying that or teaching it to their kids
I have to admit that this is rather old. So old, in fact, that it does not refer to the Third Reich but the Kaiserreich.
That’s better but not that by much. A few years ago Germany raided some very rich and very well-armed wackos who wanted to bring back the Kaiserreich.
Just like a number of very rich and well armed wackos want to bring back Trump in the US.
German conspiracy wackos and American ones have a lot in common.
During COVID their bullshit ven diagram was a flat circle.
I don’t think anyone thought it was about the third reich
Probably someone did. Not all English-speakers know about the first two, even though they’re implied by “third”.
Yup this was me. I knew it was the third, but it never occurred to me to ask what the other 2 were
TBH I knew about the Kaiserreich, but I had to look up the first one myself. It was the Holy Roman Empire. (Which wasn’t really much of a reich, but the Nazis weren’t noted for their attention to historical accuracy)
I daresay that 99% of “English-speakers” never wasted a thought on why the Third Reich actually was the third.
And honestly, it could be that 90% wouldn’t know what the HRE was or who the Kaiser was once you told them. It’s just not a thing that usually comes up in everyday life.
Never underestimate the incompetence of people, especially in the US, with regards to history. Just look how they are basically trying to recreate Germany’s 1933 at the moment.
So … shouldn’t German screws now turn to the left?
See!!! This is why communism is bad!! Since you’ve started turning everything to the left, it’s all come apart!!
Nar. A statement and its converse are not equivalent.
Never heard of this. We say ‘auf links, rechts zu’ and simply order the words alphabetically
DROL: Dicht Rechts, Open Links.
I think I just prefer Links Los, which implies that the other way tightens.
Dutch, BTW.
The Spanish version is my favourite: la derecha oprime y la izquierda libera (the right oppresses and the left liberates)
Oh wow that one is really good :D
BASED
Holy shit, fucking hell, now this is some goddamn wordplay!
I’m stealing this like the fucking British Museum.
I’m using this in every language I speak from now on!
¡Gracias por la lección de español de hoy!
I think I saw that on reddit 2years ago, thank you for reminding me how’s the actual saying (I ~have adopted ever since I saw it, lol)
I had never heard that before. Is that a region or country-specific thing?
Definitely not a common phrase. I’ve never heard of it (from Spain) and I just asked about 10 others from other countries and only one has. We usually would just say clockwise or counterclockwise
Isn’t everything in Spanish?
I don’t speak Spanish, but is there a reason this works well as a mnemonic? Like is there a reason you can’t misremember it as la izquierda oprime y la derecha libera? Because the English phrase works by alliteration.
Edit: i guess if you think of it in terms of politics that helps
That’s awesome.
Gas valves famously use the opposite direction
Propane, but I’m pretty sure natural gas uses regular NPT.
The right oppresses, the left liberates
Lmao
Ah yes the famed spaniard mao
I can’t think of an equivalent phrase in Bulgarian for that, but it’s known that [most] threads tighten when turning clockwise… and if you don’t know what direction the clock goes, what are you even doing with screws or bolts…
And again there are special cases even outside of threads - for example in plumbing there are some valves that are open when the handle is parallel to the pipe and closed when the handle is perpendicular - and it might just happen that the closing motion happens counterclockwise.
reverse threads are also found on things like bicycles and cars which have parts that spin counter clockwise
Yep, I’m familiar with those - on almost any bycicle the left pedal would tighten to the crank counterclockwise.
Except for the stupid friggin discount stationary bike my wife bought. That must be the exception you’re referring to…
did it keep falling apart? That’s amazing
That’s why it’s discounted…
I’m Norwegian. I never learned a rule in my language and always just went by instinct. Until ~3rd year of university in physics where someone told me tha the right-hand-rule applies to screws. Now I use that everywhere for screws in strange positions.
Can you elaborate? I googled the right hand rule, but I’m not seeing how it applies to screws.
Grab around a screw with your right hand and extend your thumb (like a thumbs up). Then rotating the screw in the direction which your fingers are pointing will result in the screw moving in the direction your thumb is pointing.
Thumbs up for lifting the screw upwards, thumbs down for screwing the screw downwards. And you can move your hand around to figure out screwing directions for any tricky spots.
Beware the left handed screws, they’re around but rare. My last encounter was inside a vacuum cleaner motor assembly.
Propane and propane accessories also use left-handed threading. It can be really weird to get used to after a lifetime of righty tighty.
Great explanation, thanks
I’ve heard the right hand rule regarding magnetism and current direction (because it’s useful to illustrate correlation between vectors), but never about screws. Now that I think of it, it makes perfect sense there too, only that you have to imagine a thumb pointing down most of the time…
You know this has always confused the fuck out of me. You are going around a circle, how is there left and right? There is up-and-left, down-and-left, either way is left. If I am starting on the right of the circle (assuming I’m looking at it) which way is right? Up or down?
Imagine it like a car steering wheel.
You’d say turning the wheel to the right turns the car right.
Think of it like this. Like your hand is holding on the top of the steering wheel.
ok but what is behind this picture? I see fur and old matted flesh? a paw with no nails or an old dogs snout?!?!
It’s better to not ask questions sometimes.
backs away slowly
This has always annoyed me too. I know why it works, but it’s clockwise and counter-(or anti-)clockwise. If you were turning from the bottom, left and right are mixed up. Maybe it’s just too hard to come up with a phrase using those terms?
Clockwise=lockwise
The starting point is on the top.
Clockwise = Righty
Or imagine a bottle cap instead of a screw… Muscle memory kicks in.
Thank you! Clockwise looking down at a bottlecap makes sense!
I always think about the direction that the top of the circle turns to apply left or right rotation, though I usually use muscle memory.
If it was a wheel, which way would it roll if you turned it like that?
It’s the top part. So if you imagine a little dot at the top (12h) position it would move to the right/clockwise or left/anti-clockwise
Yeah, but once you get one quarter of a rotation through your dot is now moving left.
In austrian german dialect, “Mit da Ua, draht ma zua.” which in standard german would be “Mit der Uhr, dreht man zu.” and in english “With the clock, turn it closed.” or something like that.
Neat. Would be engineering related lol
In English, there’s also “clockwise-lockwise”. It makes more sense than talking about left and right.
I’m gonna try this with my son, he knows with way clocks go better than his left and right.
Interesting. I learned it as “Wie die Ua, so gehts zua”
Da scheißt di au!
A nice thought until you run into a left handed thread…
It’s works most of them time unless you’re in a specialty trade making spindle, gears, and such that must be threaded backwards to avoid the wheel undoing itself.
Or you work with gas cylinders.
I don’t understand this one, please Airgas
Reverse threads on gas cylinders are (as far as I know) only used for flammables.
I was sure there was a reason, I just never worked in the field long enough to learn or ask why
Thanks 🫡
They’re made that way so you don’t accidentally connect a gas cylinder to a water line.
Fucking facists keeping me from tap en flambé; like they know what is safe.
I heard from a gas guy that this is to ensure that only connectors made for gas usage are used and people don’t build crazy contraptions with plumber gear for flammable gases… Kinda makes sense.
Yep, 80% of the time it works every time!
The point is, if you fix things, you WILL run into left handed threads at some point. I’ve found them in washers, vacuums, blenders, bikes, and cars. Left handed threads aren’t the most common thing, but they are out there waiting to screw with your mind and ruin your day…
Or when you’re screwing in a screw from behind/under something while lying upside down using a ratchet with an angled extender and you aren’t sure which way is actually left/right where the screw is.
Got that tee shirt too!
And you feel so incredibly dense every time you run into it and you can’t figure out what’s going on. The crank on my kids bike was out of whack the other week and I kept tightening it down and it kept coming back loose. I was turning the crank one way to tighten it which was pushing it against the lock nut but it needed to turn the other way to be pushed against the bearing before I tighten the lock nut down. If it was all right-handed it would have been clear what I was doing.
… and you hope you don’t forget until the next time you have to do it…
Spindles and shafting are places you can find left handed threads. And it depends on the direction of rotation like that bike crank. Can’t have things coming lose due to the way bike cranks turn, so they a left handed thread to stay tight.
It took me a long to time learn that when dealing with such things that I need to stop, look, and think about how things are assembled and why.
Finnish doesn’t have one. We just learn it by instinct and use the time saved to warm up the sauna.
Or we pretend to be opening a Koskenkorva bottle in whatever orientation the bolt is in.
with proper application of sisu, it will open in both directions
Same for Denmark. Except instead of warming up the sauna, it creates time for another Tuborg.
“warm up the sauna”
I get slapped when I try that sort of thing on with Sauna.
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:
- Some people don’t understand how I can see a problem. That’s cool, but don’t be a dick. We all look at the world through different lenses.
- This is when I was a kid “helping” my grandfather in the garage. I’m older now and understand that “righty tighty” references the top of the rotation.
- Some people rotate their perspective 90° and imagine themselves standing on the screw. Therefore when your face rotates to the right the screw is tightened. I hadn’t ever thought of that. But I had imagined rotating my perspective 90° the other direction –the top of my head as a screwdriver. In that case, “lefty tighty”
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.
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 assure you I’m only thinking of it in two dimensions.
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.
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.
If it were a wheel which way would it roll?
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.
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)
“Eins og kókflaska” or “Same as a Coca Cola bottle”, not universal in Iceland though
Uuuh, upwards? :D
Just like the screws ;D
I never really got that one, because “left” vs “right” only works when you are looking at the top of the screw. At the bottom, left tightens, and right loosens. So the one I remember is “clockwise to close”.
Edit: the image on the post is actually a good example. If I’m off the screen to the right holding the spanner, then from my perspective, “left” would tighten.
I’ve always thought this too. I understand clockwise/anticlockwise and the direction being defined from the top - but it’s a circle - no matter which way you turn, it spends 50% of the time going either direction. The phrase works with screwdrivers (especially ratcheting ones), but not so much spanners or Hex Keys IMO.
I always railed against this. I’m using clockwise-lockwise from now on.
Agreed. If the screw moves left or right, it fell out of its hole, lol. I guess “clockwise” is hard to rhyme.
It works for screws, but as a kid, I was never sure if the clock on the wall should be visualized attached to the ceiling or on the floor when saying “clockwise”. So I was always a bit hessitant on that.
I explained here, but that’s why I prefer using the right-hand-rule. Sometimes thinking about clockwise in strange frame of references hurts my little brain.
If you mime tightening a bolt, your thumb moves to the right. And vise versa.
Left or right-handed?
Both. Odd that you would ask without trying it yourself.
With my left hand, my thumb starts facing right, and then sort of goes down and towards the left.
Am i weird if i tighten bolts by moving my fingers up/down intsead of side to side?
Nah I do the same till it’s loose, it’s faster to rotate with minimal rotation. But once it get harder then I do slower but larger rotations with thumb starting from left side and goes towards right for like 120°.
