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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I do not know of one in hungarian.
The Spanish version is my favourite: la derecha oprime y la izquierda libera (the right oppresses and the left liberates)
That’s awesome.
BASED
I had never heard that before. Is that a region or country-specific thing?
Definitely not a common phrase. I’ve never heard of it (from Spain) and I just asked about 10 others from other countries and only one has. We usually would just say clockwise or counterclockwise
Isn’t everything in Spanish?
Oh wow that one is really good :D
I think I saw that on reddit 2years ago, thank you for reminding me how’s the actual saying (I ~have adopted ever since I saw it, lol)
¡Gracias por la lección de español de hoy!
Holy shit, fucking hell, now this is some goddamn wordplay!
I’m stealing this like the fucking British Museum.
I’m using this in every language I speak from now on!
I like this one more.
We have that in Gujarati “navde nokhu satde sajjad”
Google translated it as “Nine days and seven days are tight”.
Does that sound like a good translation to you?
No it’s more like “lose like nine and tight like seven”. It works because of the way Gujarati numerals are structured.
That’s interesting, thank you. I didn’t know anything about Gujarati, this is a cool opportunity to learn!
“La derecha oprime y la izquierda libera”
The right oppresses, the left liberates
We say the same thing in Brazil, but in portuguese: “A direita oprime, a esquerda liberta.”
La derecha oprime y la izquierda libera
I just knew that would be Spanish, without being able to speak more than a few words. It works far better than our effort and is both a sardonic and satirical political comment.
Well played Spanish if that really is the equivalent in common usage. Our effort sounds like it was invented by a young child whilst responding to a BBC quiz.
I’ve never heard this, But it’s great
I love Spanish, damn that’s a good way to say it.
Never heard of that. When attending a trade school there was never the necessity of a mnemotechnic to know in which direction turn the tool.
As other mentioned this kind of phrase is useless if you are in the opposite side of the thing you want to tighten/loose.
What I always heard is “la regla del destornillador” (the screwdriver rule), as a substitute for the right hand rule.
People on the other side don’t deserve a mnemonic.
Never heard it in Polish but we generally don’t need a mnemonic to remember which side is left and which is right (except in politics).
Probably a result of turning wrenches since I was first able, but that rule, to me, feels akin to “up the stairs take you up, down the stairs take you down”.
Filing your staircase mnemonic in my mind right next to this banger for the Great Lakes.
Not for screwing/unscrewing but in France we have a satire mnemonic for remembering right and left:
The right hand is the one with the thumb pointing left.
Works only if you look at the back of your hands, and obviously not useful. We use it mainly to mock someone who mix right and left
What’s the phrase in French?
La main droite, c’est celle qui a le pouce à gauche
Not sure about the thumb one but for screws with only have:
- Visser : sens des aiguilles d’une montre (clockwise)
- Dévisser : sens contraire des aiguilles d’une montre (anti clockwise)
We got that one in Germany as well
Dad? Is that you ?
Are there lots of French who can’t easily tell left from right? I feel like one of the few sad Americans who can’t. Would love to know why. I always chalked it up to a lack of coordination.
I’d say as many as in other countries
In English we’ll say, “Your other <right/left>”, depending on which direction the person is messing up.
I think that one is universal
It ain’t.
“Lefty Loosey righty tighty”
One arrow points up to the left, one points down to the left.
It’s about direction of rotation, does the wrench turn left or turn right, there isn’t the same notion of up and down / in and out because that portion happens when the bolt or nut turns. Also, anything rotation is moving the opposite direction on the other side of the rotation, so if you have to tighten a screw that turns towards you it’s the opposite
Nope. Polish doesn’t have one.
Neither does Czech.
Neither does Russian. We only share right-hand rule from physics.
Nothing in Slovak either. Slavs got srewed.
I never could remember until I was well in my 20s nd heard the righty tighty thing in HIMYM of all places
sad squatting in adidas noises
There’s always a time to learn good thing from others.
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.
Edit:
- Some people don’t understand how I can see a problem. That’s cool, but don’t be a dick. We all look at the world through different lenses.
- This is when I was a kid “helping” my grandfather in the garage. I’m older now and understand that “righty tighty” references the top of the rotation.
- Some people rotate their perspective 90° and imagine themselves standing on the screw. Therefore when your face rotates to the right the screw is tightened. I hadn’t ever thought of that. But I had imagined rotating my perspective 90° the other direction –the top of my head as a screwdriver. In that case, “lefty tighty”
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 mean is the wrench handle moving left from the 12 o’clock position or left from the 6 o’clock position. You would not believe how many people struggle with lefty righty because of start location.
I defer to clockwise and counter-clockwise (anti-clockwise in UK). Except for new gen that never learned analog clock stuggles with this concept also.
Then they encounter a Left Hand thread and the universe implodes
Shit, a standard thread feels natural to me, but a left hand thread still fucks my life up sometimes — trying to notice what’s going on before I strip it.
My grill can connect to those camping propane tanks, but it’s threaded opposite… gets me every time
I have left-hand threaded fittings on a few things and always say to myself aloud “This is reverse-threaded” before I attempt to turn them then still fuck up first turn. It doesn’t stop me from fucking it up the first time - it just helps me remember why.
When I train new people on this equipment I tell them to say it aloud, show them, still fuck up the first turn, then they laugh.
Then I have them do it in front of me including saying it aloud - and they fuck up the first turn…
When you’ve been doing something unconsciously for decades it’s really hard to break.
I think it was old Chryslers had opposite lugnuts, I can only imagine how many stripped threads happened
So where do you put the rest of your helices on a cylinder or cone, in 2D? In Flatland a screw or bolt becomes a circle with a short hair. The whole point of “leftie loosy” is to try to help with reality as we perceive it.
Try it the next time you are underneath a car wielding a socket spanner with a taped on extension thingie that you jury rigged whilst trying to shift a hex nut at 45 degrees to reality that you cannot see, with oil dripping in your eye. Obviously the oil is a mix of the 30 year old native stuff loosened up with the WD40 that might break the rust lock.
I suggest you do think abut things in 3D and don’t forget the other dimension (time). That WD40 needs time to break the rust lock.
“Leftie loosy” isn’t for keyboard worriers - its for engineers and technicians, plumbers, and the rest and obviously for DiYers.
When you are knackered and pissed off and you need to shift a fucking nut or bolt or whatever, you need incantations to get you back on track.
I assure you I’m only thinking of it in two dimensions.
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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.
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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?
You aee assuming a top orientation moving to the right. Give somebody a wrench handle at the bottom of nut and tell them left to loosen, you will see how most take it literally and move handle to the left side of their body. they think in terms of their left and their right, not the screws right left from a starting location at top, or if from 4 oclock position to the “left of” 4 oclock as if you were facing the 4.
Here is clockwise. One arrow is going to the right and one to the left.
I tend to agree but you could argue that from a perspective in the center of the rotation you’re turning to the right. Imagine standing in the center of those arrows.
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
Is the direction of rotation in the room with us right now?
The bottom arrow is, definitionally, pointing left.
What happens if you look at it from the other side?
If I ask you to turn around to the right, are you going to ask me what side of you I’m referencing?
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.
The “front” or “forward” direction of a screw is clearly the face of the fastener itself, be it a hex head, Phillips, or Slotted screw. Picking a side of a face as the front doesn’t make any sense. The whole thing needs to rotate one direction or another, and it will either rotate to the right to tighten, or the left to loosen.
If I ask you what the front of a clock is, are you going to tell me it’s the top curve near the ceiling? No it’s the face of the clock, and the hands rotate around it to the right.
The “front” or “forward” direction of a screw is clearly the face of the fastener itself, be it a hex head, Phillips, or Slotted screw.
Correct.
Picking a side of a face as the front doesn’t make any sense.
Right. Nobody is talking about the under side of the fastener. Just looking it the face of the fastener, as one does when driving into something.
The whole thing needs to rotate one direction or another,
Wrong. A rotating circle rotates in all directions, including right and left, up and down, at the same time. If you attach an arrow perpendicular to the circle, pointing in the direction of rotation, then (if rotating clockwise) the arrow will point right at 0°, down at 90°, left at 180°, and up at 270°
and it will either rotate to the right to tighten, or the left to loosen.
You’re talking about the TOP of the rotation. The bottom of the rotation is moving the opposite direction. Just like the right and left sides move in opposite directions.
Think about a wrench hanging off a fastener, handle pointing to six o’clock. To tighten it (clockwise), does the handle move toward your left or right?
No it’s the face of the clock, and the hands rotate around it to the right.
From nine o’clock to three oclock it rotates to the right. From three to nine it rotates to the left.
The rule for the top of the rotation is “righty tighty”. For the bottom of rotation the rule is “lefty tighty”.
The “righty tighty” saying doesn’t specify which side of the rotation it’s referencing, which as a kid helping my grandfather in the garage was confusing.
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Slightly, anyway. If you’re both standing over the thing it can potentially be agreed on. If you’re all over the place working on some big machine you need to use some language, and I’m not aware of a standard way to do it.
Yes, it’s always the top side of the circle in this context, or you can think about how clock hands do go in a specific direction, because they’re a radius, not a circumference. There, now it’s cleared up for you.
The clock hands move right when at the top but left when at the bottom.
In Australia, it’s the other way around and the clock will try to eat you or at least sting you to death.
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.
Yes! That concept makes way more sense.
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.
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.
If I ask you to turn the car left and you give me this speech I would eject from the car.
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”.
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.
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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”
Because people get confused when there is no space for the wrench at the top, and they put the handle at the bottom and try to move the wrench left or right, not referencing the top of bolt.
Because they aren’t using the saying as a clokwise/counter clockwise reminder but as a flat out instruction.
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?
I used to feel the same way. If you’re talking about the direction you’re moving your hand, it assumes your hand is above, not below.
Had a similar hangup with less than/greater than symbols.
If it were a wheel which way would it roll?
If you’re looking head on to the screw/nut/whatever then we’re talking about the top of the screw/but/whatever.
You can also imagine if the nut was actually a wheel. Which way would you spin it to make it roll left or right.
Confused the hell out of me at a young age. That’s how I came around to thinking of it
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.
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)
I agree but there is a intuitive way once you are holding it. I remember looking at a car wheel and the signal lever not understanding how do people decided that up on the lever means right. Yeah it’s connected to the wheel rotation but why turning the wheel clockwise means turning right? When I actually sat on the driver seat there was an instinct.For most people It’s more logical to look at the “top” of the circle and corelate it’s movement with turning left/right.
A thing that annoyed me is when table top games use a non determinist way to define player order. It always depends on the observer.alIf you just say “then the you pass your turn to the left”, what left? From my perspective; from the top down perspective translating it to counterclockwise? From the tables perspective which is the opposite?
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
Yes, that verbiage makes way more sense.
I remember when my grandpa was like why not just keep going? I was pulling the ratchet end of the wrench off the bolt at the bottom… I said but that side is left and he laughed and said its just to get you started and told me the clock thing. Dont ever ask me to put a nut on a bolt I will cross thread it every time.
A nice thought until you run into a left handed thread…
It’s works most of them time unless you’re in a specialty trade making spindle, gears, and such that must be threaded backwards to avoid the wheel undoing itself.
Yep, 80% of the time it works every time!
The point is, if you fix things, you WILL run into left handed threads at some point. I’ve found them in washers, vacuums, blenders, bikes, and cars. Left handed threads aren’t the most common thing, but they are out there waiting to screw with your mind and ruin your day…
Or you work with gas cylinders.
I don’t understand this one, please Airgas
I heard from a gas guy that this is to ensure that only connectors made for gas usage are used and people don’t build crazy contraptions with plumber gear for flammable gases… Kinda makes sense.
Reverse threads on gas cylinders are (as far as I know) only used for flammables.
I was sure there was a reason, I just never worked in the field long enough to learn or ask why
Thanks 🫡
They’re made that way so you don’t accidentally connect a gas cylinder to a water line.
Fucking facists keeping me from tap en flambé; like they know what is safe.
Or when you’re screwing in a screw from behind/under something while lying upside down using a ratchet with an angled extender and you aren’t sure which way is actually left/right where the screw is.
Got that tee shirt too!
And you feel so incredibly dense every time you run into it and you can’t figure out what’s going on. The crank on my kids bike was out of whack the other week and I kept tightening it down and it kept coming back loose. I was turning the crank one way to tighten it which was pushing it against the lock nut but it needed to turn the other way to be pushed against the bearing before I tighten the lock nut down. If it was all right-handed it would have been clear what I was doing.
… and you hope you don’t forget until the next time you have to do it…
Spindles and shafting are places you can find left handed threads. And it depends on the direction of rotation like that bike crank. Can’t have things coming lose due to the way bike cranks turn, so they a left handed thread to stay tight.
It took me a long to time learn that when dealing with such things that I need to stop, look, and think about how things are assembled and why.
Gas valves famously use the opposite direction
I can easily imagine: “right is right left gets you / it left”
But not every language has the double meanings of right and left.
One mnemonic is to imagine yourself opening a jar.
Your door is a jar.
Is it a jar of jam or jelly?
I use the right hand rule - ball up your fist with your thumb sticking out, and turning in the direction of your fingers curling will result in the screw going the rest your thumb points.
Right hand for right-handed threads and left hand for left-handed. If unsure, it’s most likely right-handed.
The assumption in this whole post is that it’s right-thread, since left is so uncommon.
Most common example would be a bicycle, I think - your pedals tighten on “in the same direction the wheel turns” as you look at them. So your left pedal has left-hand thread, and goes on and comes off backwards.
The effect of precession also means that you can tighten the pedals on finger tight and a good long ride will make them absolutely solid - need to bounce up and down on a spanner to loosen them.
Oh God I hate those sneaky left-thread bastards lol.
Me learning this about electromagnetism: huh, neat.
Me learning this about something I actually use in day to day life: 🤯
It’s especially helpful when you’re looking at screws (or nuts!) from the back or any other weird frame of reference.
