Friday, November 15, 2013

When You Would Use Copper Screws

By Bonnie Contreras


Not a lot of people know this, but copper screws are the simplest form of linear actuator, a motor, in fact. Traditional electric or gasoline motors generate rotary motion, linear actuators take that circular motion and turn it into linear, or straight motion. When you turn the head of a screw clockwise or counterclockwise, it drives the shaft of the screw forward along its linear axis.

The shaft of a screw has a single helical ridge, called a thread, wrapped around the cylinder. These threads cut a helical groove when driven into a softer material. Some screws are designed to fit inside a complementary helix, the internal thread, such as in a nut. Screws are commonly used to hold things together and to fix them into position.

A little-known use for a copper screw is as a contact screw in a tattoo machine. You can easily make these yourself in your garage or workshop because the metal is very soft. What you need is a length of thick wire, a die with the appropriate internal thread, a set of pliers, fine sandpaper that you get in a hobby shop, a vise and a small bottle of acidic gun bluing solution. The bluing solution, when used with iron metal, protects it from rust and corrosion. Here, it just makes your screw look pretty.

The soft, malleable reddish metal, roughly the same the color as an Irish Setter, has an atomic number of 29 and the chemical symbol, Cu. It readily conducts both heat and electricity. For this reason, it is used for the bottoms of sauce pans and frying pans and as the main constituent of electrical wiring. It is highly ductile, which makes it easy to shape in to whatever you want to make it.

When the Romans were in charge, the metal was mined in Cyprus. That is how it came to be named cyprium, and then cuprum. Hence, the chemical symbol, Cu. It has many uses in the human body, mainly as a constituent in the enzyme cytochrome. In sea animals such as crustaceans and molluscs, it forms part of the respiratory pigment called hemocyanin, which is blue. Humans do not use hemocynanin, but instead use the iron-based pigment, hemoglobin, to ferry oxygen and carbon dioxide into and out of the cells, respectively.

In humans, cuprum is mainly found in bone, muscle and liver. Because cupric compounds have a bacteriocidal action, meaning it kills germs, it is used in fungicides and in wood preservatives. This is also why it is used sometimes to line incubators for use in tissue culture in the laboratory.

A copper screw is used in a tattoo machine. They are pretty little machines that are very good for screwing into wood, particularly if it is likely to be exposed to the elements, where iron or steel would turn to rust. Cuprum is also used to coat steel. Sometimes zinc, nickel, brass or cadmium is used instead.

So, copper screws are interesting little motorific devices. The native metal kills germs and looks pretty. They are rather soft, so you need to be careful where you use them. You would not want to use them to hold a commercial airliner together, for instance.




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