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?
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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.
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Clockwise and counter-clockwise makes sense.
But when you say “right” it’s not clear which side of the circle is being referenced. If the top of the circle is moving to the right, the bottom is moving left at the same time. So the saying only makes sense when you specify that you’re talking about the top of the circle.
you have to have never seen a steering wheel to not understand which side of the circle is being referenced. it’s always the top. who would even reference anything else and why.
“turn it right”
“which part???”
“the middle of course, you absolute alien”
I think we can all understand how it functions but that doesn’t make it “correct.” It’s spinning around a circle. Exactly half of its moving right as the other half moves left. That’s why we have the terms clockwise and counter-clockwise. If left and right were actually reasonable for something spinning in a circle this wouldn’t exist.
yes it would. we always have redundancy, especially in speech. also we’re not robots, technicality doesn’t matter, how we communicate does. do you get confused when people say something like “that’s all behind us now” meaning the past? do you literally turn around and argue that there’s nothing really behind you and they should have said in the past instead?
I don’t get confused by any of this. Stop pretending like everyone else is stupid. If you’re looking at the hands of a clock, they aren’t moving right when they’re moving clockwise half of the time. The applies to everything moving around a circle. Left and right are only useful if you’re looking at a specific segment of it. Clockwise is what we use for rotations everywhere else. For example, look at this wiki page that says this: “Rotation or rotational motion is the circular movement of an object around a central line, known as an axis of rotation. A plane figure can rotate in either a clockwise or counterclockwise sense around a perpendicular axis intersecting anywhere inside or outside the figure at a center of rotation.” Right is literally never even used in that page, and left is only used once. The terms don’t make sense for rotations. We can make up rules for how they can be considered for rotations, but they fundamentally are not words used to describe rotations. Do you get confused when people say there are more useful words to describe a function?
Imagine it as if it were a track you were driving around, which way would you turn the wheel?
It’s getting so convoluted at this point just knowing clockwise/anticlockwise is infinitely easier.
If a steering wheel has you this perplexed then I beg you to never ever drive a vehicle.
Am I going clockwise or anticlockwise round the track?
If you’re gripping the bottom of the wheel you move your hands left to make the car turn right. Which is kind of the whole problem here. Rotation around a centre doesn’t happen right or left. That’s the whole reason why the words “clockwise” and “anticlockwise” exist. Translation = right, left, up, down, forward, back. Rotation = clockwise, anticlockwise.
If I ask you to turn the car left and you give me this speech I would eject from the car.
Yes, and I would be devastated to see you go.
It doesn’t matter where you hold the wheel. When you’re turning right, you’re always doing the right movement for tightening a screw, no matter the hand position. That’s the point.
A clockwise rotation turns a car to the right (in forward gear) and tightens a nut (right hand threaded). But this is not a rotation to the right. It’s a clockwise rotation. You can’t rotate “to the right”. That’s the point.
So you’re explaining rotation, in terms of a smaller imaginary rotation, which engages with imaginary traction wheels, which engage with the work to be turned?
If that works for you, great, but it is complicated.
No im trying to illustrate the parallels between how you turn the wheel, how the car turns in response to that , and how they are all related. You turn left you will make the exact same rotational movement, with both the vehicle, and the steering wheel.
It’s as simple as, “What direction do you turn the wheel to make the car go left?” I just stacked on top “and also it makes the car itself do that same exact circular movement” so you don’t just dismiss this as some kind of arbitrary convention.
Oh, I see.
Car steering wheels work that way because of the convention. Change the side that the steering column’s pinion meets the rack and the wheel would work the opposite way. From the mathematical perspective, there’s two ways to continuously map an arc of the steering wheel to an arc of the wheels, and since they aren’t in the same plane neither is “wrong”.
One of them is “wrong” and would kill many people
i know you can make the wheel work the opposite way, jesus christ. the circle motion the path of the car makes when you turn left is the same as when you turn the wheel to the conventional left. imagine, instead you steered “left” by a joystick. the car would still draw the same circular path the same fucking way, because turning left makes an anticlockwise circle, every time, in every situation.
Ah, so the car isn’t even important. You’re one of the people imagining standing on the screw. As long as you have a convention about which way is “up” on it, that does work.
What the fuck are you talking about.
You’re either rotating the fastener to the right or the left.
It doesn’t matter what side you’re talking about, because you’re not moving one side of the fastener, you’re rotating the whole thing one direction or the other.
Clockwise just means something is rotating to the right.
If I ask you to turn around to the right, are you going to ask me what side of you I’m referencing?
Here is clockwise. One arrow is going to the right and one to the left.
The whole thing is rotating to the right, that’s what clockwise means. Clocks rotate to the right. One arrow is not pointing left, it’s pointing in the direction of rotation, which is to the right.
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If you follow that arrow around to the next with your hand, which direction is your hand moving?
That is indicating clockwise rotation, or a rotation to the right. We’re talking about circles here
No, because humans have a pretty clear forward direction. Screws don’t. You say turn a screw to the right, do you mean make the top of the screw move right or the bottom move right?
Most people assume the top, but not all, and the language is ambiguous.
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Don’t think about it in 3d space.
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.
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)
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.
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