I've made a terrible mistake

A righty tighty will always be a lefty loosey. What you got there is a "torquey teary". Ease up on installation there Magilla.

Yeah this caption doesn't make any sense
- Had to scroll a while to find you guys. Thanks for noticing!
Not to be confused with a "Torquay Teary" when your family trip to Cornwall goes badly
Yeah, I saw this and thought more like ‘head fally offy’ or ‘screw spinny spinny’.

synchronicity

I heard someone saying something along the lines of "a bolt is tightened until the thread breaks and then half a turn back"

Some really take that as an advice

Pretty sure I heard AvE say "tighten it 'til you hear the crack, then back it off a quarter turn" in one of his videos ;'D
- I’m personally a fan of “that bolt has ugga’ed its last dugga.”
- Another one we said in my old shop was "Tighten till it loosens, then back off half a turn"
- Torque to yield, then back a quarter turn.
It’s a quarter twist before snapping of.

Man living in a 120 year old house means it’s always wall roulette any time you want to hang anything. Is that a brick, or is it fake mortar with the consistency of hummus. Who knows let’s find out

I assume Humous is hummus?
- Oops yup wrong kind of hummus
- It's a transliteration of an Arabic word, you can spell it with different vowel combinations.
Surprise, it's "C": a forgotten piece of romex on a 20A breaker.
- No, it's "D": The cable that goes to your lights in the kitchen two rooms farther but some idiot decided to run it through the walls taking the scenic route.

Helicoil thread repair kits. Allowing me to escape the expensive consequences of my mistakes for years and counting.

The F150 used to come standard with a set
- Probably for the damn plugs in those...

An old army buddy of mine once said with the purest rage: "It don't matter which way I fuckin turn it! It ALWAYS COMES BACK TO LEFT!!" after hearing righty-tighty lefty-loosy for probably the thousandth time whilst givin er in the wrong direction once again..

He got out of the army as a heavy tank mechanic and went into concrete. I don't even think he owns any tools at all these days.. That's been thirty damn years ago and I'm still fuckin with him about it every now and again..

My favorite part of concrete is the lack of threads
- Lots of things are better without Threads, including the fediverse
- Cries in Precast
I have never used righty tighty, lefty loosey in practice. It will always, always be an imaginary milk jug.

I'll try "Whats a torque spec?" for $500 Alex

I discovered with much annoyance that torque spec can break old bolts, and old is a relative statement, the truck was from the 90s.
- Had a 10mm deep socket the other day with a 1/4" socket size. Couldn't find a 3/8", so I found an old adapter and when loosening the 5th bolt on my intake manifold, got the old "hmm... that shit is moving to free to fast"
  
  Thankfully a small screwdriver could poke the 1/4" adapter piece stuck in the socket out, so I can live to make the same mistake another day.
And the answer is something easily ignored but vastly important.
- Two ugga-duggas is close enough to spec, it'll be fine.
- 100 inch pounds is as hard as I can right?
Where do y'all find this elusive "Torque Spec"?

Even if I could afford a $100 click wrench. Where am I gonna lookup random bolt on whatever the hell I'm repairing?
- Usually depends on the size of the screw

Damnit, I'm becoming a dad.

I've found myself watching long youtube videos of people's DIY projects lately. It's happening...

In the world of gears and screws, they say, Lies a whimsical dance, a playful array. Righty tighty, lefty loosey, they decree, A rhyme of mechanics, a playful spree.

With a twist to the right, oh, the magic it weaves, Securing the bond, as it deftly achieves. Righty tighty, a clockwise turn to bind, A snug little twist, a connection defined.

Yet the left beckons with its whimsical call, A twist to the left, a loosening sprawl. Lefty loosey, a counter-clockwise flow, Unraveling secrets, it willingly shows.

Righty tighty, lefty loosey, they sway, A duet of motion, in their mechanical ballet. Twisting and turning, they whisper in song, A symphony of movement, where they both belong.

So heed their advice in your mechanical groove, Righty tighty, lefty loosey, a mantra to prove, In the dance of mechanics, they hold the key, A delightful rhyme, a whimsical decree.

Was looking for a picture but I had a bolt for the valve cover on a pickup stretch to about an extra quarter inch while I was trying to get it to torque. One of those times where trusting my gut that things didn't quite feel right saved my ass.

It's gone full circle

And it just came out a head.

I've got a better one for you: a certain piece of 11kV switchgear has little M10 steel bolts attaching the cable box cover. If you turn them too quickly with the cover under tension the steel heats up through friction and welds the fucking screw into the thread.

The latest version uses M13 and I think the problem has been mitigated a bit, but I'm sure it can still happen, and there's a metric shit ton of the old stuff out in the wild.

All full of SF6 as well, which is a very cool (I really want to inhale some and sound like Darth Vader) but also really bad greenhouse gas (20x worse than CO2), and with so much out there inevitably some of it leaks (with a 20 year time delay from a leak to the gas reaching the upper atmosphere), but we can't be having switchgear taking up more space and commercial enterprise profits diminishing to cover it so we just continue our global exponential growth in use of the stuff.

Lefty loosey is fine, it's righty loosey that's the issue

Yeah they messed up the meme

We want German tight (gutentight), not Russian tight (brokenov)!

I picked a whole bouquet of oopsie daises