Nut (hardware)

Article summary

socket head screw A nut is a type of fastener with a threaded hole. Nuts are almost always used in conjunction with a mating bolt to fasten multiple parts together. The two partners are kept together by a combination of their threads' friction with slight elastic deformation, a slight stretching of the bolt, and compression of the parts to be held together. In applications where vibration or rotation may work a nut loose, various locking mechanisms may be employed: lock washers, jam nuts, eccentric double nuts, specialist adhesive thread-locking fluid such as Loctite, safety pins (split pins) or lockwire in conjunction with castellated nuts, nylon inserts (nyloc nut), or slightly oval-shaped threads. Square nuts, as well as bolt heads, were the first shape made and used to be the most common largely because they were much easier to manufacture, especially by hand. While rare today due to the reasons stated below for the preference of hexagonal nuts, they are occasionally used in some situations when a maximum amount of torque and grip is needed for a given size: the greater length of each side allows a spanner to be applied with a larger surface area and more leverage at the nut.…

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