Making Cool Fasteners to Set Off Your Projects and Products

I like cool and offbeat fasteners. Call it a fetish, but I got hooked on weird fasteners working on cars. They can be very decorative and aesthetically pleasing. Take this shopmade example for a folding knife that I saw recently on the awesome HSM Shopmade Tooling thread:

The “bolt” looks great on the knife, doesn’t it? The tool would be a real nuisance to make manually, but very straightforward with CNC. I’ll have to try something like this at some point. It needs to wait for my CNC lathe to be finished though.

A thought:  you’ll notice that the bolt head has only indents and the tool has the protrusions that engage the indents?  That’s a good idea.  That way, if you manage to break or bend protrusions, you can try to make another tool and still get your bolt out.  If they’re on the bolt, you might wind up having to drill it out if you are trying to engage protrusions with a tool that has holes.

Here is another extremely cool fastener I came across recently:

Engraved Grip Screws for Colt 1911…

They’re made by Altamont Corp who recently became a customer of our G-Wizard software.  They’re a really neat company with a great product line.