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.

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.

We say the same thing in Brazil, but in portuguese: “A direita oprime, a esquerda liberta.”

Agreed. If the screw moves left or right, it fell out of its hole, lol. I guess “clockwise” is hard to rhyme.

It works for screws, but as a kid, I was never sure if the clock on the wall should be visualized attached to the ceiling or on the floor when saying “clockwise”. So I was always a bit hessitant on that.

If you mime tightening a bolt, your thumb moves to the right. And vise versa.

Imagine it like a car steering wheel.

You’d say turning the wheel to the right turns the car right.

Think of it like this. Like your hand is holding on the top of the steering wheel.

The starting point is on the top.

I always think about the direction that the top of the circle turns to apply left or right rotation, though I usually use muscle memory.

If it was a wheel, which way would it roll if you turned it like that?

It’s the top part. So if you imagine a little dot at the top (12h) position it would move to the right/clockwise or left/anti-clockwise

Use right hand thumb rule. There is no right, there is no left, there is no clockwise or anticlockwise. All of them depend on the way you looks. Rught hand thumb rule fixes it for humans

Well, this was a life-changing comment.

Can you elaborate? I googled the right hand rule, but I’m not seeing how it applies to screws.

I’m indian and learns right hand screw rule in high school physics

I’ve heard the right hand rule regarding magnetism and current direction (because it’s useful to illustrate correlation between vectors), but never about screws. Now that I think of it, it makes perfect sense there too, only that you have to imagine a thumb pointing down most of the time…

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

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

Don’t think about it in 3d space.

If it were a wheel which way would it roll?

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.

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?

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.

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’m German, and I’ve never heard that before. I’d be seriously weirded out by someone saying that or teaching it to their kids

So … shouldn’t German screws now turn to the left?

I guess I’m an idiot because I don’t understand lmao

I know how to turn a wrench. Knowing the direction is the difficult part. Especially on toilets.

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.

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.

reverse threads are also found on things like bicycles and cars which have parts that spin counter clockwise

Please tell Tongshen, who manufactures the popular TSDZ2 motor. The pedal keeps coming loose because they don’t do this. I keep a key on me to tighten it when it starts to loosen.

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