Fastener Manufacturing: Hand-Cut Screws to ABB Robots

A car is held together by thousands of screws, bolts and nuts, and so is a lot of the furniture in your home. Fastener manufacturing turns coils of wire into those parts at high speed, yet much of the handling around the forming machines is still done by people. This post covers how screws were made by hand and on the first screw machines, how cold heading and thread rolling took over, what fastener makers are showing this autumn, and where ABB robots such as the IRB 1200, the Robotic Item Picker and the IRB 460 palletizer could work around the presses.

Screws, bolts, nuts and washers standing on a reflective surface. Photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How screws went from hand files to automatic machines

For centuries a metal screw was a craft item. A smith forged the blank, cut or filed the thread and sawed the slot by hand, so no two screws were quite alike. In 1760 Job and William Wyatt of Staffordshire patented a machine that guided a cutter with a leadscrew and cut the slot with a rotary file. Their wood screw factory struggled at first, but under new owners it was making 16,000 screws a day with 30 workers by the 1780s. Henry Maudslay's screw-cutting lathes of around 1797 and 1800 then made accurate machine screws much cheaper.

A Brown and Sharpe No. 1 wire feed screw machine, a hand operated turret lathe. Photo: Three-quarter-ten / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Standard threads and automatic machines came next. Joseph Whitworth proposed the first standard screw thread around 1841, so a bolt from one maker could fit a nut from another. American turret lathes in the 1840s and automatic screw machines in the 1870s brought unit costs down again. One of those machines survives in a museum: Charles Vander Woerd's automatic screw machine, built around 1871 to 1876 for the American Watch Company in Waltham, Massachusetts. Its description says one operator could look after six of them, for a combined 50,000 to 60,000 watch screws a day.

Charles Vander Woerd's automatic screw making machine, built around 1871 to 1876 for the American Watch Company. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Cutting a thread turns part of the bar into chips, so the industry moved to forming instead. Cold heading presses a short length of wire into a head with one or more blows, and thread rolling squeezes the thread into the shank between hardened dies. Builders such as National Machinery of Tiffin, Ohio, and later Sacma in Italy made headers that turn a coil of wire into finished blanks. The plants around those machines still needed many hands. Operators set dies, carried bins between heading, rolling, heat treatment and plating, and sorted and packed parts, much as in the screw machine shops of the Second World War.

Heavy automatic screw machines at the Harley-Davidson motorcycle factory, photographed for the US War Department. Photo: Harley-Davidson Motor Co. / National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What fastener plants are automating today

Modern forming machines are fast and connected, so most of the manual work now sits between them. Ahead of Fastener Fair Global in Stuttgart, the Sacma Group told Fastener + Fixing Magazine on October 7, 2026 that it will show combined thread rolling machines with built-in pointing and chamfering stations. Its new combined headers are quicker to change over, and a new electrical cabinet cuts their energy use by 25%. The group's Tecnolift brand will present a solution for designing a dark factory, along with bin tilting units, vibrating hoppers and container handling.

Moshe Beril at work in a screw factory in Israel, with a bin full of screws. Photo: Moshe Dangur / PikiWiki Israel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Inspection is moving too. In September, Fastener + Fixing reported that ibg Prüfcomputer and Dimac have combined eddy current testing with Dimac's MCV4 automatic inspection and sorting machine. The system is aimed at automotive fasteners, which increasingly replace spot welds in electric car bodies and must each be checked after heat treatment. Operators teach it acceptable limits with 20 to 30 known good parts. Sorting every part this way leaves a steady stream of good and rejected pieces that someone, or something, has to box, label and move.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker, a vision guided robot that picks mixed items out of bins. Photo: ABB

We found no published ABB project in a fastener plant, so the following is a possibility. A compact IRB 1200 or IRB 1300 could load blanks into secondary machines for drilling, tapping or washing. ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses vision to take mixed items out of bins, which would suit sampling and the kitting of special parts. An IRB 360 FlexPicker running PickMaster could drop small packs into cartons, and an IRB 460 or IRB 660 could stack the full boxes on pallets. Integrators usually lay out and test cells like these in RobotStudio before anything is bolted down.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, launched in 2025, a compact arm for machine tending and small parts. Photo: ABB

Where fastener manufacturing is heading

In the factory, the gaps between machines are the obvious target. Today a header may run unattended while a full bin waits for a forklift. Bin lifters, mobile robots such as ABB's Flexley Mover and robot cells placed between heading, rolling, heat treatment and packing could move parts without anyone carrying them. Aerospace and electric car customers want traceable lots, so each container may have to carry its data along. Sacma's warm forming machines for aerospace sleeves and pins also show that materials are getting harder to work, which makes repeatable handling more important.

An ABB four axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

At home, fasteners arrive in hardware store packs and flat-pack furniture boxes, and those packs mostly come from counting and weighing machines. Mixed kits, where a robot picks different screws, dowels and hinges into one bag, are a likelier job for vision picking, and our post on robotic kitting shows how such cells work. Car buyers felt the stakes of one small part this month: on October 2, autoevolution reported a second recall of the Rivian R2, this time over a battery fastener that had not been tightened properly.

M4 hexagon bolts arranged on a mirror, the kind of small part a header makes by the million. Photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Money comes first in this trade. Fasteners sell for very little each, so a robot cell has to pay for itself through long runs or by covering jobs that are hard to staff. Headers are loud and oily, and guarding must keep people away from moving dies while still allowing quick changeovers, which is where safety functions such as SafeMove help. A plant without its own robot programmer can set up simple tasks with Wizard easy programming on the FlexPendant, covered in our guide to no code robot control, but someone on site still has to keep the cells running.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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