Talk:Bolted joint

Dispute given spring analogy
I believe the illustrated explanation is oversimplified. It is true that a bolted joint is surprisingly counterintuitive, but I think this is just wrong. As I learned it, the tensioned bolt and the compressed material act as parallel springs. Given that, the third picture is incorrect; applying a compressive force to the joint will necessarily compress it. The joint will, however, resist the compression based on the sum of the effective spring constant of the bolt and the plates. Once the bolt has no tension in it, the joint would continue to compress, then resisting with an effective spring constant just from the plates.

The more interesting case is when the joint is in tension. As I understand it, the same idea holds (since we are assuming linear elasticity. That is, the joint will have an effective spring constant of the sum of the spring constant of the bolt and of the plates. The unintuitive "magic" of a bolted joint, then, is that if the joint is designed such that the spring constant of the plates is much greater than that of the bolt, any tensile load is carried by the joint more than by the bolt by the ratio of their spring constants. Obviously all of the tensile load in the joint is carried by the bolt, but compared to the joint at rest, the bolt gets very little additional load as the joint is loaded in tension.

Two things come out of this: First, because the bolt holds the joint together, giving you friction against shear, you get tensile strength "for free". Second, I think (although I need to check my Stress Analysis notes) that the nature of the loading on the bolt means that a correctly-designed joint will have particularly good fatigue behavior, because the average stress on the bolt is high, but the amplitude of variation is low. &mdash;BenFrantzDale 16:50, September 12, 2005 (UTC)


 * I mostly agree with the above comments, the illustration is over simplified (see below). But, also, there are two concepts being mixed in the comments above;
 * Concept 1) As long as the preload isn't exceeded by the external load, the bolt doesn't see any of the external load. This is a typical concept used in bolted joint design. It's a simplifying assumption based on kmember being much, much greater than kbolt. The illustration is intended to show this concept.
 * Concept 2) The external load seen by the bolt is a function of km and kb. This concept is rarely used because it km is usually unknown. The illustration in not intended to show this concept.
 * So, I think it's wrong to apply concept 2 criteria to an illustration of concept one.


 * With regards to the illustration, I agree it is over simplified (there should be two compressed springs representing the grey members, with Q trying to separate them, instead of a single spring. This would show them in parallel with the bolt). Or, I could re-work the illustration along the lines of the spring scale / block analogy in Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design, or at http://www.boltscience.com/pages/basics3.htm. Let me know your preference.


 * Also, the section could be expanded to include; concept 2), greater pre-loads reducing fatigue loading and compressed gaskets where neither concept holds. --Duk 18:22, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
 * With regard to Concept 1, the way it was explained to me is this: the prload greatly exceeds the external load, but the bolt relaxes somewhat (probably due to creep) slightly, so at the instant you tighten the bolt, that's the highest load the bolt will ever see because, as a rule of thumb, that relaxation is roughly the same as the maximum external load. Thus, even though the external load is small compared with the preload, the bolt doesn't stop acting elastically. The counterintuitive thing is that once it's preloaded, the plates act as though they are holding the joint together with a spring constant higher than that of the bolt. The class notes I have have a diagram that I don't remember from Shigley, but are in the page you linked. &mdash;BenFrantzDale 20:27, 15 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Image has been updated--Duk 19:50, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Looks good. The page could do with a joint diagram when you or someone else has a chance . At least for me, what makes the zeroth-order model confusing is its approximation. For me, the first-order linear model shown by a joint diagram isn't too counterintuitive. &mdash;BenFrantzDale 03:22, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Circular (self) Reference
"Bolt Banging" re-directs back to this same page. So what is it?

Fretting failure mode
The screw article made a reference to a bolted joint failing due to fretting, but its description was very poor, so I deleted it, however I'm making note of it here so that someone could add a good description of it to this page. Wizard191 (talk) 19:42, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Additional citations
Why, what, where, and how does this article need additional citations for verification? Hyacinth (talk) 23:40, 12 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The "thoery", end of "setting the torque", "failure modes", and "Measurement of frictional torque of threads in bolt" sections all need refs. Wizard191 (talk) 14:47, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Overhead image of cap screw requested
It would be great if we had a diagram, similar to Image:Bolted joint.svg, of a cap screw from "above", ie, not a vertical cutaway but horizontal and showing only the head. Like the one in this image:. Hyacinth (talk) 23:43, 12 May 2010 (UTC)


 * See Screw for images like that. This articles about the joints, so images of the just the screw are outside of the article scope. Wizard191 (talk) 14:47, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Crush washers
The info about crush washer is incorrect. A crush washer is a washer made of a softer material used to seal liquid in a threaded plug. They are commonly found in auto oil pans. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.104.67.222 (talk) 19:27, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

External links modified
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Cap-screw
At the moment, cap-screw redirects here to bolted joint. But this article currently never uses the word "cap" except for "capscrew" in the "See also" section.

In order to comply with the Redirect guideline, should this article say a few more words about "cap-screw" (perhaps it did at one time, but those words were deleted?). Or should that phrase redirect to some other article -- perhaps the same place that cap screw redirects to? --DavidCary (talk) 03:09, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I've redirected it to screw. Or we could just delete it - there's no need for the hyphenated form. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:50, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Name change to "Threaded joint"
This page does not only describe how bolted joints work but screwed joints as well. It is more accurate to call the page threaded joint because both bolts and screws have threads. Pittsburgcarlos (talk) 03:38, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose per commonname, also that the joint type described here isn't threaded, it's bolted.  There are illustrations here of joints with studs and with screws, rather than bolts, but those are in the context (admittedly not very clearly presented) of a contrast to a bolted joint. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:14, 8 March 2024 (UTC)