Today on Felthry Makes Polls For Things No One Cares About: Screw sizes!
@Motodrachen ¼-20 wins in the naming department though. "quarter twenty" rolls off the tongues a lot better than M6. Especially if you have cause to use M6-0.75, so you have to specify the thread spacing.
@Motodrachen Also: Yay we're winning. Mostly, anyway. There are two M8 fasteners and a couple M5 fasteners just because that's the size of the predrilled holes in some things. Oh, and there's two M12 fasteners too, because mounting huge capacitors needs huge nuts.
Standoffs are varyingly #2-56, #4-40, and M3, though. In fact, there's even some M3 nylon screws jammed into #4-40 threaded standoffs >.>
@Motodrachen "mounting huge capacitors needs huge nuts" sounds way more lewd than it really should
@packbat When you need to control distance, you generally use a lead screw or ball screw, not a conventional machine screw. Honestly, thread pitch affects pretty much nothing in our experience, other than how many times you have to turn the thing to screw it all the way in.
@Felthry makes sense! My engineering education was unfortunately lacking when it came to fasteners, so. :P
@packbat They don't really teach this stuff, we've learned a lot more from actually doing things than we have from classes
@Felthry *nods*
Makes sense. Education tends to focus on general principles.
@Felthry I'll take a 1/4-20 out of those, but my real jam is 6-32.
@starkatt Screw terminals get big when you're dealing with a hundred amperes. These are all sizes we've used recently.
@Felthry I voted for M6-1.00 because it seems like a reasonable size and also moving exactly 1 mm per rotation is probably useful sometimes