Home Depot 1/4" Lag Screw

[Bob La Londe]

I have had a lot of problem with Hillman screws and fasteners breaking easily. HD has a lot of Hillman product on the shelf.

[Leon]

Precicely, you can generally rest assured that if their fasteners claim to be hardened or graded they will be good, if not, it will be iffy.

[Red Green]

Swingman wrote in news:ZMidnVQ6K- jdcrXWnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

Now they have some thing where the the commercial mocks the WTF? blanket about how the feet are not covered. This "better" one is closed at the bottom. So basically this mutated WTF blanket is a kids indoor sleeping bag with arms.

[Stormin Mormon]

I had a similiar experience, with a Home Cheepo bolt. Problem was, I was trying to atach the lower bracket of an alternator, on my van. The bolt sheared off. I had not torqued it very much. 3/8 drive wrench, no extender bar, and not even much muscle power. Not with any real torque. I decided to leave it there, and eventually junked the van.

[Stormin Mormon]

A squirt of vaseline or grease in the hole helps, a lot. I have some old plastic syringes I keep filled with generic vaseline "petroleum jelly" for threading in lags in moments like this.

[Stormin Mormon]

So true. I've got a couple of such stores near me. But they are hard to find, and often go out of business for lack of customer support.

[Stormin Mormon]

Ah dunno. Prolly one uh dem nawthun boy sayins.

[Stormin Mormon]

WTF, World Trade Foundation. Replaced WTC in 1991.

[Doug Winterburn]

In the little town I live in, it's "Fred's Bolts Nuts & Tools". Any threaded fastener you want and more of high quality.

[Leon]

I find it less trouble to just use the correct sized pilot hole.

[The Daring Dufas]

Sounds like a store that sell adult........never mind.

TDD

[George]

Someone who forgot they weren't "talking" to their teenage friends with some form of instant messaging..

[J. Clarke]

Be careful using Grade 8. They're strong but they're also brittle. Don't use them for applications where there are likely to be shock loads.

[Existential Angst]

You mean, like, my BFFs?

[Existential Angst]

I thought proly was short for proberbly.

[dpb]

I don't recall who it was but McFeely's was bought by somebody and is now run as a subsidiary...I think the expanded product line outside the original focus on square-head and related wood screw products and the range of grades stems from that change; it was after that the catalogs started to grow in size.

--

[George]

Unfortunately folks decided it was a good thing not to have manufacturing and good jobs in the US so things are made in China.

Location of manufacture doesn't tell the whole story. As long as things have been manufactured the buyer could specify they wanted a cheaper version of something. Big box places maintain their profit by beating suppliers to death (and driving them off shore) by demanding the lowest possible price. Often that means the lowest possible quality.

There is no rocket science involved in making typical commodity fasteners such as lag bolts. A manufacturer can easily make sure they have the correct metal chemistry and use correct hardening methods. But that costs money. Big box simply wants something that looks like a lag bolt. A buyer can also specify they want an item that complies with whatever standards are involved such as SAE. That costs more.

[JustTom]

Same here, and TS sells their hardware by the pound. It's always where I go first. I just bought a boatload of grade 2 & 5 carriage bolts, nuts, washers, etc. for around $8 ($1.99/lb). The grade 8 are a little more expensive if you need them, but not unreasonable.

I was at Lowes later for something else, so just did a quick double check to see how far off they were. Grade 1 bolts alone were nearly $15.

8 (1/2 x4) = $8.80 ($1.10 each). 4 (1/2 x6) = $6.00 ($1.50 each).

The irony is that I'm using a plan I found at Lowes.

[J. Clarke]

"Real hardware store" is too fuzzy a concept to be useful. OLD hardware store would be a better bet--one that has been around since before HD--at least that's a well defined term. OTOH, does Rocky's Ace, founded 1926, really stock better fasteners than HD? They do stock a wider range of specialty fasteners, that I'll grant them, but are their packaged fasteners really any better?

Most localities in the US have within reasonable driving distance a Fastenal. In any metropolitan area there should be a section in the Yellow Pages for "fasteners" or "screws" or "bolts". Near the water in any city with a harbor there will be marine hardware places that have a good stock of corrosion resistant fasteners--alas the packages come with a picture of a boat on them so they'll cost twice as much as the same fastener without the picture of a boat. Near any major airport there will be an aircraft hardware place--they'll have fasteners made to military specification that are very high quality, but they won't be cheap.

[Existential Angst]

My understanding is that large Mormon families buy vaseline by the pallet. Generic, of course.