Once again, Gizmodo missed the point…
Gizmodo is good at some of the things it does…snarky posts about technology. Not a whole lot of technical detail, but usually cutting edge and sometimes off the beaten path. More often than I’d like, though, they pick up some cool new product or technology and miss why it’s really so cool, other than being new and shiny.
For example, a few days ago, they posted about SmartBolts. The indicator on the head changes color based on the tension within the bolt, allowing users to precisely tighten the bolt to the appropriate level.
What did Gizmodo say?
It’s not hard to under or over-tighten a bolt when you are building a cabinet, let alone installing hardware into the human body. Luckily, some clever engineers came up with the idea of SmartBolts.
Wrong Giz…if you want to control your tightness, just use a torque wrench. This is not a solution for those people that don’t have a torque wrench, though. The cool part about these things is that because they measure tension in the bolt instead of the torque applied to the bead of the bolt. According to their literature SmartBolts give as much as 30% accuracy over the control obtained with a torque wrench!
Anyway, I know what I’m getting when I read Giz, or Engadget or anything like that, but every once in a while I’m glad I actually look a bit deeper into what they post. It’s just that sometimes I wish they did too.