Adam Savage's Hardware Logjam Sorting Challenge!
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- čas přidán 12. 05. 2023
- Adam finally tackles his shop's logjam pile: the accumulation of random hardware that's too valuable to throw away but not important enough to sort in the moment. And he makes this task a sorting challenge, attempting to parse and identify every bolt and screw without the aid of any measurement guide. Hang out this Adam and let's see how well he does!
Shot by Adam Savage
Music by Jinglepunks
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Intro bumper by Abe Dieckman
Thanks for watching! - Věda a technologie
My wife calls bins and trays like these my “raccoon boxes” due to me looking like said critter looking for food in a trash bin.
😂😂😂 That's the perfect description!
😂😂😂 nice one.
LOL Stealing this! :)
😂😂😂
My new name for bolt bins
I love the editing gag when Adam exits the shot on one side, then appears on the oposite side, as if he can teleport
It’s such a simple thing but it gets me every time!
I always just assume he's walked behind the camera at some point.
I’m going to put that under every video and refuse to answer questions for the timecode.
As if he can... teleport. Right. As if he can...
Logjam is the place you only ever find 3 bolts of size needed when you need 4 bolts…
4 bolts, 4 washers, 3 nuts.
I worked at a hardware store for 8 years and could tell the size of bolts/screws by size but I used to trick the new guys by putting them up to my nose and taking a big whiff and pretending I could tell them by smell…
That's brilliant ha
I used to do exactly that with lighting gel colours! 😂
Hey, new guy, get me the henway!
Where is it?
It's over there. Hurry, get the henway!
I don't... what's a henway?
About 10 pounds. 😆
Adams favorite state of being is shop organization. All the skills and work he does are just methods to generate shop clutter so he can organize later. I get it. I’ve sorted through large piles of mixed nuts and bolts while my family looked on incredulous - the other half about strained an eyeball when told that I enjoyed the repetitive low effort process.
Apparently I have a lot to say today - has anyone ever had really high quality steel screws, bolts, nuts etc? They look different, feel different, and are kind of beautiful in their own way. I know I’m coming off as a psycho here but I just took apart a 42U sky blue server rack from the early 90s and the hardware on that thing was like aerospace level. Really nice to see. Lol
I think the microscope you have on the desk could also help with this sorting
@@stevengiannopoulos2469 sort by size and then thread size lol
Go metric......it cuts down you inventory big time.
“Too valuable to throw away and not valuable enough to throw away.”
You just described most of my stock.
0:35 *”not quite valuable enough to sort……..”
Random hardware is always put into the sort later bin. The problem is that very few people end up getting around to actually sorting it later. The extra hardware supplied in assembly kits are the sorce of a great deal of it.
I find it useful (especially when prototyping) to have a container on my desk for all the parts I tried and decided not to use. By not taking the time to return them to their proper location, I tend to stay in the flow. It's also useful because I can often find a part I need right there instead of turning to the storage racks where the "fresh" parts are kept. The container is labeled "Go-Backs," which I think it the term I hear the clerks use at the grocery store. When looking to procrastinate, I start returning "go-backs" to their proper locations.
Since every shop generates a logjam, I like just thinning the logjam down and getting the sortable stuff out of there, not necessarily eliminating it altogether. Sometimes that technique shows me when I need to add a new classification to my storage boxes. I also find that I keep compartments in my storage boxes for semi-sorted fasteners, such as oddball 1/4-20 screws, which cuts down on the compartments holding only one fastener, but lets me thin the clutter further.
I did this at my shop; we're talking about 30 years of crap. I did the best I could and realized my time was more valuable at a certain point. I put the dregs in boxes, posted a curb alert on Craigslist, and a man came to snag it up happily. I felt so liberated.
For someone living in Europe it keeps on amazing me that the US still uses the imperial system. Having to describe measurements using maths instead of ascending numbers even confuses a brilliant builder like Adam quite often.
Not Imperial. US Customary.
It’s weird enough for lengths and such, but colonial screw sizes are just wild.
@@mm9773 Indeed. It says enough that sorting two trays of bolts is a challenge, even for Adam. Sorting two trays of metric bolts wouldn't even be worth a video ;)
@@TheGreatAtario Thanks for the correction, you're right. I had to google the difference.
I have some 6 penny and 9 penny nails that need your attention
The stuggle is real, I have logjam hardware tray directly under my hardware sorting bins. Currently doing some Adam-style shop infrastructure to keep all the big wood working tools in one place and on wheels. Interesting to implement first-order retrievability and ergonomics/functionality over engineering and aesthetics. Definitely learned this lesson here.
Isn’t his math wrong at the end. He missed 34 out of 329. He asked Alexa for the wrong percentage?? Or did I miss something
He said all the math he does on the channel is wrong, and he was right about that. The sorting was actually 90% accurate, which to me is a surprising result because it's so close to his answer.
Exactly! If he did 295 right, and 34 wrong, then 100% are 329, and thus 295 are approximately 89.7%. So his first assessment of "A shade under 90%" was far more correct than he thought later. 😁
The relief for a bad hardware log jam is more carbon fibre in your diet! :P
I used to work in the hi-speed fiber optic data “pipes”. We had all of the daily fiber jokes. Cereal box mock ups and all that jazz.
Sounds like something this old tony would say
I just did this sorting and found that an earlier primary sort really speeds things up. When you've got machine screws/bolts to sort, find all the ones that are obviously the same and check just one of them. For washers, I sort only by imperial sizes and just leave a bolt in each washer bin that serves as a go/no-go reference.
I'm about to do this, I was thinking of gluing a bolt to the nut box, a nut to the bolt box. Then a bolt to the washer box. If it fits, it ships kinda thing. I wanna say it will make putting away old bolts (weight saving the engineers clearly was to dumb to imagine) and finding the ones I need easier. We will see
I have a baking tray exactly like this beside me.
I'm gonna watch you sort junk while I don't.
Hi Adam!
Great video as always. I have some good news, you have to divide by the total number of items. If you had 295 correct and 34 wrong your accuracy is 1-(34/(295+34))=89.7%
So congratulations on getting 90 percent accurate!
Just hold the bolt/screw you know the thread of next to the one you dont, and see if they mesh butted right next to each other. If the threads dont interlock its a different thread.
Thinking about my own logjam, also on a rainy day, and just began re-watching this. Adam just labelled a cup to sort into 2:12 with sharpie on the outside, but here's a trick: write the label on the INSIDE at the rim, and it's easier to read, since it is angled UP towards your eyes, not down towards the bench. For bonus points, repeat the label many times around the rim (3 or 4 works well) so that you can read it from ANY direction.
I keep a working stock of drywall screws in coffee cups labelled this way with their lengths, super easy to find or put away a few screws and get the sizes right every time.
I love the "Flag" idea for marking small bins, but I'm going to try making it from Gaffer tape and stick it on the front edge leaning in. It won't be in the way (too much), and it will work on the "back-row" of of my Sortimo(esque) Stanley bins.
Logjam! Now I know what to call all my little piles! I've experienced this exact phenomenon for years! Thanks, Adam!
Dad's toolshop was never sorted. We have a mountain of a logjam in there. Seeing how long he's taking on his little-bitty pile is making me consider just taking it all to the metal recycle. Om mah gosh.
"What happened to all dad's stuff?"
"Weirdest thing.... monster dust devil came through and... yeah."
I forbid that!
I will male and produce a real-time logjam sorting video soon to prevent any such tragedy!
I'm wincing looking at Adam sort his puny pile.
No offense, but I'm more of the Gatlin gun style of sorting.
Hardware is $$$$ these days, and there is a way to sort through 5 gallon buckets full.
i have a sorting box full of mixed stuff like this just labeled “bolts , nuts and stuff” lol
Another nice benefit of this. A) you get stuff sorted, but B) if you suffer from "procrastinitis", you are gamifying this... which is a great strategy.
Possibles is what my dad always called stuff like this. But also I love this video with the music and Adam just barely audible in the background talking about his sorting.
My favorite wire cutter/crimped/bolt cutter, has all the gauge markings on it. When in doubt it measures up great. 👍🏻🤓
Adam, your match percentage was better than you thought. If you got 295 right and 34 wrong, you don't want to divide by 295, you want to divide by (34+295) so you're figuring the percentage out of ALL the bolts. In that scenario, you were 89.7% correct (295/329) or 10.3% wrong (34/329)
its nice knowing someone else thought the same as me
Then there is me. "Yup, that's a bolt"
Last week, i threw away everything less than 10 pieces. That was about 70 pounds of nuts, bolts, and screws, and what i keep is twice as much. I do this every 2 years, and i am amazed at how it's possible.
17:13 my Alexa picked up the question and in perfect synchronization gave me the same exact answer minus the btw part. It was kind of cool, yet bizarre :D
For labels, I like the Brother tape machines. There are many types and sizes and color combinations of labels you can get, including some that are super flexible and designed to be used on cables. I use those all over.
I have a hunter's mentality, I like to hunt for the right bolt in a giant pile compared to instantly finding the right bolt.
The logjam tin, in an old Christmas biscuit tin, is a fixture of many a British man's shed. My dad has two - one is a screw logjam, and one is a nut and bolt logjam. It is the first port of call when planning a project that needs hardware. If we cannot find a matched set of what we need, then a new pack of hardware in the correct size is added to the shopping list. When we don't use an entire packet of said hardware, it is 'sorted' into the appropriate logjam for the next time we need odd or small numbers of a particular size of hardware.
I have the beginnings of such permanent logjams in a kitchen drawer (for lack of a better place for it, at present), stored in coughdrop tins. I also have a similar logjam for another hobby, in the form of a button tin. Half the joy of these logjams is searching through them for the treasures you know have to be in there somewhere, because that's where you recall sorting it to the last time you used it.
Very enjoyable video, Adam, makes my autisic heart happy.
I realize your math skills in the U.S. "Imperial" world must be superior to us in the "metric" world du to all the "fractions" you must keep in your mind!
Greetings from Sweden
Btw your videos are super entertaining and educational to watch!
🌻
This is because fractions are sizes in the form of a math problem.
You know how to party, eh?
I'm an older fixer/maker and for years I limited my "log jam" to one tub, and would stop and sort when it got full. Then, some health problems collapsed the system, and while I kept fixing/making, I did less sorting and organizing.
Years pass, and I had about 300 pounds of log-jam. I sat and sorted for hours, and found the mix of metric/SAE, diameters, grades, pitch, length, etc. overwhelming, and not that productive in terms of sorted hardware.
I stopped and consulted the actuarial tables on life expectancy for someone my age and disposition, and concluded my time was better spent otherwise.
I recycled the log-jam, and started doing what I should have started doing 60 years ago.
I sort it as I produce it now. My heirs will thank me for it.
In the early '90, I was asked to help sort a logjam - a shed-sized room full of the assorted bolts, washers, nuts and fixings used in the maintenance and overhaul of F-111 TF-30 engines.
None of them new and clean, so de-greaser was the cologne du jour...
After a week, we had managed to sort approximately 10% of the logjam - no idea if the project was ever finished...
Bolts with heads are easy. Put them head side down on a table head sides together to match them up. Metric heads are a different thickness. To make it even more fun there is fine and course thread.
This video increased my appreciation for the metric system 😀
I've sorted a lot of random hardware. I don't go about it how how Adam does. His hardware looks better than the junk I've dealt with though. His nuts and bolts are not mixed up with nails and staples.
Realizing I just sat here watching Adam play with his nuts. 😂 (and bolts)
There is such a thing as scrap in a shop. Like large amounts of fasteners or other offcuts that would cost you time to identify, catalog, and distribute. They're cheap, time is not.
Every guy has a drawer of oddball fasteners that rarely gets sorted but I imagined Adam's to be an overflowing wheelbarrow
This is so wild! I have just started sorting out a plastic bin cabinet of my 45 year collection of random hardware. Going through the same process! Distilling things down to a manageable few ziplock bags of things I might actually use
It's important that you don't confuse this with Logjammin', a Jackie Treehorn production starring
Karl Hungus.
Good morning! Saturday with Adam just feels right.
I have too much logjam in my garage and watched this video hoping to find out where you put all these odd bolts after sorting! Need a part 2 please 🤣🤣.
Ahh, Adam is using his eye-chrometer!!
This would be a great opportunity if there is some kid in the neighborhood (or house) who wants to start learning about mechanics.
Start by having them make a bolt checker. With some flatbar, drills, and taps, there is so much that can be taught. From deciding how to lay out the holes and why that decision works. Then laying out, marking, drilling tapping. Bolt sizes, thread sizes, nomenclature, thread profiles... the list of USEFUL stuff just goes on and on. How to determine the drill size without a chart. Too much stuff to list, but let them use the bolt checker for awhile, then take it away and let them eyeball it for awhile.
At the end, the yout will have a good understanding of fasteners and you will have your fasteners sorted.
This video might be peak level ADHD Adam, I have ever seen. Love it
My respect for Adam has increased much. I couldn’t do that.
In sorting through my logjam, I tend to use a two stage sort technique. I first sort by fastener type, such as sheet metal screws, hex bolts, or washers, and extracting as many of them as I can identify. This it often guided by how I organize my fasteners. I then make the second step of sorting the culled set by size, typically with my storage boxes there where I can drop fasteners into their places. I find this makes overall sorting faster, as it seems to cut down the number of times I handle stuff. Trying to generate too many sub-containers of fasteners at a time seems to slow things down and take more time and space.
At the Rural King stores we have in the Midwest they have rigs with a set of either nuts or bolts in either imperial or metric for the inexperienced mass (of which I am a member) can check what size their threaded hardware are.
I can’t believe my eyes! That’s some serious dedication 👍
One of my classes in technical school was fasteners and hydraulic fittings. We did something similar to this as a test.
I'm definitely building a rolling rack like that for quarter size sheet pans! All the junk laying around in paper bowls and cups and boxes can be much more visible in the sheet pans.
_New Achievement Unlocked:_ *-Watched Adam sort hundreds of bolts* .
This one goes right next to:
- Watched Adam watch paint dry; and - Watched Adam sort dozens of springs.
Sorting out all those bolts, you must be nuts.
We see what you did there.
when my grand kids come over they always want to play in my shop. this is what i make them do and they love it.
I love a USB microscope and the Orb replica just randomly sitting on the workbench.
Zen. One of my favorite things is to go out in the garage and sort through a junk box lot picked up at a swap meet. I have a back pile that will take years to go through.
Well... organization is important and Adam had fun... so it's all good!
I always liked to go to the antique engine shows and find the guy with the container of mixed bolts. I'd buy several and save them for the NFL or NASCAR events. While sitting there watching TV, I'm just a sorting away. Built up quite a nice stock of hardware for a few bucks.
Sometimes, I feel like my entire shop is one big logjam
As someone who was potty trained at gun point, the Zen of this very much appeals to me. The Sun would be rising and setting behind me as I gloried in reassigning cups and contents and time for me stood still.
Just two weeks ago i ordered 2 kg of mixed nuts and bolts and washers between M3 and M6 (there were some smaller ones). I sorted them also by eye and then tested them with a bolt. I got a really good rate, but some of them where english, so i got them wrong. Btw. I found them by searching for "mixed bolts" in german, because i heard adam talk about searching for "lots".
In my younger day worked in a plating plant and did millions of nuts bolts and screws. The fork truck drive liked to speed and would dump kegs of screws and mix them together and let us spend days separating them. the worst was if the head size was the same and it was an 1/8 or 1/16 of an inch different in length.
18:32 - I would have bought the editor a drink if he'd made Adam disappear right at that point.
Totally been there done that… Add in springs, brackets, cotton pins, electrical connectors, ball bearings, tapered thread fittings, etc etc etc… LoL
With my FRC Team I don't even both to check my eyeball measuring anymore, but we only really use a few sizes. I can get 10-24 and 10-32 nuts sorted by eye though.
I used to be able to identify nuts and bolts be feel. I worked at a bike shop and handled those parts every day.
Logjam a.k.a. "That kitchen drawer" or "That chair" everyone has
'Dale, you have a lot of work to do today", "Yes Dear", "Dale, what is the hold up", "Honey, I am watching Adam Savage sort bolts and nuts",
It's not only a cool shop game, it's every day for a hardware store clerk, and any of them that have any real experience will hit it at a really high percentage. I remember an old timer I worked with who could identify everything on sight, and he had in stock some incredibly ancient and rare things like #3 flat-head slotted wood screws in BRASS. I hate to say that I corrected Adam's 3/8-13 out loud as he said it. These things get ingrained in your head when you work hardware for a decade.
Watching this video. I am reminded that back in around 1967. Popular Mechanics had a tool in the magazine what had various scales on it so you could figure out thread pitch and diameters of screws and other items. Mine disappeared a long time ago. It would be nice if someone would come out with a modern version or has someone?
1:12 hey Adam! Show us your teleporter 😂
Thanks for including the timecode instead of just mentioning it.
my process is different, first I do it in the winter when I have nothing else to do, and I usually try not to have that much of it at once.
Then i'll dump it onto a tray and divide by machine, bolt, washers of any kind, sheet metal, etc each screw family and nuts
Then from there i'll dump it back into the tray and use a magnet on it. Remove the stainless, real brass, aluminum into new piles. Then i'll grab something easy like nuts and divide them by eye. Using a bolt or a thread checker device, check each nut. Metric goes into the metric box type doesn't matter.
Then the bolts, because I have less of those. Then the screws. And if I can't figure it out, i'll take out a flat gauge, so like 12/24 is only on one of my gauges. Then if I can't figure it out, I toss it.
I do the same for solid brass, and stainless and have boxes for those. Washers are divided by the hole they fit, lock etc goes into that drawer, non metallic washers has its own drawer. Then the do whats like knobs goes into a drawer of its own. Rivets and other stuff has a home also. But I like breaking it down into hardware types before I sort things out. And that magnet really works well. Use an electromagnet or a bench cleaner. Whatever is left is the good stuff.
Metric & SAE are easy if you can see the top of the bolt. I went to MMI in Orlando in 89 and have been in the financial situation that forced me to fix stuff. I'm lucky enough that I can read instructions and make it work. Fixing seems easier when you do it, you get the "What is the deal? This is way easier than made out to be.
You are calibrating your eye-crometer when you clear logjam.
I just spent 5 hours this afternoon sorting a logjamof Nuts, Bolts, Screws, Washers, Scroll pins, cotter pins, nails, and assorted small electronic components.
In my line of work, a "log jam" refers to something that repeatedly impleads the creative process in some way.
Example: unorganized materials, chronically misplaced parts, project files not properly labeled & categorized.
I have a single one of those boxes, it's called my garage workshop.
I also have two overspill sheds.
I like working from large to small.... the big parts are easier to see and pick from the pile. I call it "getting rid of the noise" ....
Adam: "Logjam is the name for all the stuff in your shop that is too valuable to throw away and not quite valuable enough to sort to where it's supposed to go." Me: "Oh, like the stuff that covers every surface in my work room!"
Back in my youth I could this with nuts and bolts but not screws. Now I just don't care enough. Lol
@18:00 Adam channels (and all of ours) inner Tina Belcher. It was amazing.
"it's Metric" ahhahaha just loving your videos! thank you
Adam my dad had a tool box with nuts bolts and washers just thrown in and when he needed a bolt or a nut he would sort through it and try every one till he found what he needed. I still have it and do the same thing.
You just described every dad in America
Yep we all have them. Coffee cans are real popular too lol
Not efficient, but sensible. Plus you get to go hunting every time you need something, and finding the right thing feels good.
What is really satisfying is you are looking for a nut and bolt and find them on the first go.
Masking tape is ok for short term labels, but I prefer 'permanent' labels. Sometimes they are available in the office supply section @ Wally World.
Stumbled across this video a few days after doing a similar job in my shop. I have an old vice that I plan to incorporate in a new carpentry workbench and it needs four bolts to hold internal face plates/liners. The threads are not standard metric sizes but by chance I had four and only four of the exact thread size bolts I needed. I feel so vindicated.
Ive been working my way through several boxes of unsorted fasteners. Several times ive been tempted to chuck the whole lot and buy assortments from bolt depot. Still working on it. The thread screws and bolts are nearly done. The big challenge will be the the sheet metal screws.
Who did the edit, and how long did it take them? Kudos to that person!
Great stuff, as always.
I've got some paint drying I should keep an eye on, gotta bail...
I noticed Adam didn't do the most obvious logjam clearance strategy. Clear the big logs out first. Easy to see, small stuff hides under, have to constantly move around, and after the big logs are out the next biggest become the biggest, and are easy to see, etc. I see Adam's strategy was to start with the stuff he thinks there is a lot of. Flaw in that strategy is as you take them out there's not a lot left, and they hide among what's left. Then you go to the next size that you see most of, and so on until you get back sorting again through all of them for the size you started with. That cycle can repeat several times. Starting with the large to small you just go through once, and you don't have a lot of logs to overturn to find the size of your focus. Pretty sure the strategy he uses comes from the strategy he uses when he hunts through the pile looking for a particular size. Pushing the logs aside is usual so he doesn't notice how inefficient it is when sorting.
The apprentice's I work with, like to play the game of putting different size nails, screws, bolts, etc, all the same f..king box!
I just have 1 kilo yogurt buckets for this. I put them on a pastry board (because it has that lip) at an angle and i put a tray on my lap and just throw them as i go into the buckets. Works really fast, can be done mindlessly as you watch something. I usually put Lord of the Rings (extended) and have at it. Protip, wear one size small surgical gloves. Makes grabbing stuff much easier + you don't get dirty + your hands will exfoliate after.
Thank you.
The EYE-crometer is strong with this one!
So my alexa device heard Adam and then proceeded to say the exact same thing, including the mention of having a notification 😂
M3 and #4-40 are way too similar looking for comfort. They're something like 2.85 vs 3.0mm in diameter, and 0.6 vs 0.5mm thread pitch. Very difficult to discern by eye. I had a contaminated bag of mostly metric but some imperial hardware had snuck into it. Had to use a pass gauge to sort the M3 screws from #4-40 reasonably reliably, but just gave up on sorting the mixed nuts, those went into the bin.
One man gathers what another man spills
7/16-14 hardware:
"Am I a joke to you?"