this is it it's finally here the LTT screwdriver
and truth is we didn't have to make it there are loads of perfectly good
screwdrivers but this one this one is the best everything from the
convenient bit storage to the perfectly tuned sound and feel of the ratchet
mechanism to the fact that it is naturally perfectly balanced as all
things should be is second to none and the handle is designed to be super
comfortable whether your hands resemble catcher's mitts or you buy your gloves
from the children's section but getting it to this point was an adventure and
even with my experience in product management a shockingly expensive
adventure i mean how can it take three years and hundreds of thousands of
dollars to make something so seemingly
basic i'm going to tell you
but first i gotta start paying for this thing with this segway to our sponsor
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months at simplemdm.com Linus
rather than reinventing the wheel the smart engineer finds the best existing
wheel and then refines it so right out of the gate megapro was an obvious
partner first of all their ratchet mechanism is fantastic and has been
proven reliable in the field for over 25 years second they own the patent on what
i believe is literally the best bit loader available for a ratcheting
screwdriver third and this wasn't a requirement but it was a huge bonus
their office is a 20-minute drive from ours making collaboration much easier
now the especially smart thing to do what megapro implored us to do would
have been to simply rebrand one of their existing drivers a little bit of LTT
logo there some LTT color here maybe some computer specific bits and we would
have been good to go unfortunately i'm a perfectionist control freak who hates
making money so instead we embarked on our three year journey that would have
us redesign nearly every single aspect
of megapro's existing product does this look anything alike to you
i mean they're both screwdrivers other than that the answer is
no for one thing megapro's ratchet works in
the opposite direction that you are screwing in and not being able to alter this would
have been a complete show stopper for me upon hearing that it should be pretty
simple to go ratchet right screw in right we green lit the project
more on that later though next we had to redesign the handle to be clear theirs
is great for automotive applications where you really want a giver up near
the top of the driver but it didn't provide the finer control that i expect
in a more general use driver also it's
a little more than i can handle if you catch my drift
at this point i was recruited design handled feels both when you have your
hand up at the top or when you have it choked up kind of like this i settled on
a three lobe design for the way it just kind of naturally follows the shape of
your hand and from there i got to do my favorite thing rapid prototyping my
philosophy is that there's no point in trying to make something perfect the
first time because you're just gonna get it wrong anyway so for my first attempt
i basically just made up dimensions and solidworks and threw it at the printer
this is truly terrible but that was kind of
the point one of the main reasons it's terrible is it's literally impossible to
mass manufacture we already knew at this stage that the
final parts were going to be injection molded basically shooting a bunch of hot
plastic into a metal cavity so there are a couple of important considerations
first no areas can be too thin at below about 80 thousandths of an inch our
molten plastic won't flow through the mold and even if it did our finished
part might be easy to break also
no areas can be too thick since the plastic can sag while cooling and look
pretty strange more importantly though the two halves
of the mold have to be able to come apart so in this first version of the
handle these scalloped areas here would have resulted in the mold completely
destroying apart seconds after it had been made
not not ideal anyway five versions later i landed on the
first handle that i liked aka the long
boy unfortunately this was one of our first major roadblocks Linus said it was
too big and i had already made this handle as small as i possibly could
without changing the megapro internals to make it smaller we'd have to get
pretty creative and spend a bunch of money one option was to decrease the
length of the zinc housing that connects the shaft to the handle but we're afraid
that would decrease how much torque you can transmit through the handle another
option was to decrease the number of bits to six
but we felt 12 was a necessity for tech work what we were willing to give up
though was the length of the bits by reducing them from 25 millimeters to 20
making a couple alterations to the zinc housing we were able to make our handle
nearly an inch shorter than mega pro's and create a handle that is awesome to
use no matter your hand size two versions later we arrived at version
seven which is the handle design you can buy now
i did create versions eight through twenty
but all of them are worse than number seven so uh
seven it is there was a small problem with our handle design though
how do you access the bit loader megapro has too little indents on the
sides of the handle but with our trilobular design that looks and feels
pretty gross to make the whole driver feel more cohesive then we hired whitebox designs
in vancouver to help us out they came up with a bunch of different ideas some
resembling things like our water bottle and some a bit more abstract around this
time it was becoming pretty clear that alex needed some help since balancing
doing an engineer's full-time job with writing an LTT video a week was becoming
unsustainable so we went engineer fishing and hooked ourselves a kyle
his first task was to perfect our end cap we liked white boxes little ribbed
ends but getting it correct was difficult since too large of a rib can
make using the screwdriver uncomfortable in your palm but having them too small
makes getting at the bits difficult after 3d printing a bunch that could be
interchanged quickly using magnets we found that this one was the best
all of this work led to the 3d printed prototype in my hand
looks strikingly similar to the finished product doesn't it so
given that this was high fives all around done in august of 2020 with the
launch scheduled for five months later how on earth did it take another two
years internally we call this kickstarter
syndrome up until that point every obstacle had
been overcome relatively quickly and we even had our manufacturing partner
locked in we felt basically invincible
and we were tempted to launch a pre-order campaign
but if we had done that we would have a heck of a lot of angry customers right
now because we either would have shipped a bad product or they would have waited
two years after submitting payment as it turns out going from pretty much ready
to mass production ready is a lot of work
to be clear some of it was still pretty straightforward we worked with
innovative tool and dye in delta to create our plastic molds and the process
for that was well i wouldn't say painless because we
did have to hand them over 200 000 us dollars but that was basically it we
gave them the money they gave us the molds and i gotta say until now i didn't
know much about plastic mold making other than that it's super expensive but
after seeing how it's done the price tag makes a bit more sense to me
we went with hardened steel molds instead of aluminum ones because they
last way longer and our intention is that we are going to make hundreds of
thousands maybe even millions of screwdrivers before those molds finally
kick the can the problem with hardened steel molds
though is that they're made of hardened steel they are extremely difficult to
machine to accomplish this then innovative tool
and die used edm
no not that kind electrical discharge
machining we're not going to have time to fully explain edm here this fantastic
video by applied science should handle that for us nicely but the tldr is that
they're using a carbon electrode in the shape of our screwdriver and then a
bunch of electricity to slowly zap away the steel
this process has to be incredibly precise because ultimately it will
determine not only the shape but even the texture
of the surface of the finished product we chose a satin finish for our handle
that looks great out of the box and wears out very evenly which is
technically called ch3nr
if you're a mold turbo nerd while the plastic molds were getting made we also
had to finalize the shaft you might have noticed that our original designs had
the knurling go all the way up to the base of the shaft but we added this
little ridge here and the reason for that was that we'd have as much material
as possible to hold the shaft onto the ratchet
we tried a lot of different materials for shafts these ones are aluminum which
were just too soft and felt kind of cheap
these ones are stainless steel these ones are high carbon steel and then we
also tried like different knurlings this one's straight which was kind of awful
for slipping between your fingers and what we ultimately settled on was 303
stainless steel for a good mix of durability and machine ability i just
want to mention here that we made sure to go fairly aggressive with the
knurling and most pc screws can be almost entirely tightened using the
shaft so you would use it kind of like this
one unfortunate thing that we learned during the testing of our prototype screwdrivers though was that the black
coating on the shaft was simply not durable enough it wasn't
for lack of trying the 40 micrometer black chrome plating treatment was the
closest we got but even that got stripped pretty quickly especially by
sharp things like heatsink fins so sadly aside from some early orders where we
are allowing people to buy the black one knowing that it's going to wear off
we're going to be primarily selling the screwdriver with a silver shaft so that
it doesn't look terrible in a year as a consolation though the silver shaft
is passivated by dipping it in a nitric bath to give it a nice protective oxide
coating because despite its name stainless steel isn't actually totally
stainless so this design choice was not about saving a buck it was about making
the most durable possible product also in the shaft is the strongest
magnet that we could get our hands on the minimum pull force that this is
rated for is 5 newtons but from our testing they've been anywhere between 7
to 11 newtons and this was to address one of my personal pet peeves where your
bit gets kind of stuck on the screw and then gets left behind when you pull out
and i can confidently say that that will be an extremely rare occurrence with our
driver i've had it happen a grand total of about five times in the last couple
of years while we're on the topic of materials let's give you a rundown on what the
entire screwdriver is made out of the main plastics so the handle the end cap
and the selector ring are all made out of a material called triax 1120. it's a
nylon rich abs blend that we don't know the exact composition of it's a trade
secret but what we do know is that it's as strong as freaking heck and offers a
great balance of chemical and abrasion resistance the internal plastics are also mostly
tri-x 1120 but the bit clips and the
little ninja star that's in between them as we like to call it are made out of
delrin for its excellent wear characteristics the last thing you want
is for these little holders to just start snapping off on you that would be
terrible now if you look really closely you can actually see a small color
mismatch between the triax and the delrin but we did our best with it and
i'm pretty sure that if i didn't just point it out no one would have ever
noticed but i did point it out because i would hate for you guys to think that
it's literally perfect speaking of flaws
i'm going to point out another one in the molds
i mean first of all we're incredibly impressed with the quality of the molds
from innovative tool and dye every injection molded part is going to have
parting lines where the two dies of the mold meet and they are
virtually undetectable on our handle like props guys kyle's been working as a
production engineer for 10 years and he's never seen molds this good before
but while on most of the molds we were able to hide the gate which is where the
plastic gets injected and there's a little sprue that needs to be broken off
like on the handle it's right here where it's going to be hidden by the selector
ring there was one we couldn't hide and that was on the selector ring itself on
the first batch we got it was super obvious like
look at this thing so we worked with the mold makers to
change the gate location and make it as small as possible leaving us with this
little tiny blemish again this is a very small flaw but i am pointing it out to
demonstrate how obsessive we were over the tiny details of this product they
really do matter and some of them matter a lot like the revisions that we made to
the ninja star originally between the two rows of bits there was supposed to
be a round plastic washer and this was to help hold the bits in place so they
couldn't accidentally slide into another position
unfortunately it limited compatibility to the 20 millimeter long bits that we
sell or to less common 16 millimeter bits from other vendors like this one by
this point we were completely committed to our shorty bits though not only do
they enable the excellent ergonomics of our handle but it turns out that the
shorter length enhances our already incredibly strong magnets so you don't
have to worry about dropping even very large ferrous screws
but then we also didn't want to lock people into a single vendor for
replacement bits even if it's us that
sucks i mean our bits are great they're black oxide coated s2 tool steel and
we're going to have a wide variety of different sets available right at launch
and furthermore we rationalized if you really wanted to buy your own bits you
could just angle grind five millimeters off a standard one but what we really
wanted was to find some way that we
could ensure that longer bits could still be accommodated and so the ninja
star was born you just take a pic turn it so that it lines up with in
between the bit holders and yeah it'll knock down the number of bits
that you can carry down to six but this ensures that you will always be able to
find something to store in your screwdriver handle even if you lose all
of these and i die and we go out of business
anyway we had all of this figured out and all of the plastic molds done by the
summer of 2021 hoping for a december launch
that's when things got really stupid the zinc ratchet molds were going to be
made in taiwan by the same factory that megapro has been using for 20 years
then suddenly they started becoming less responsive
by this point we had individually approved every component of the ratchet
mechanism from the factory and all we needed was a final assembled sample
before hitting go on production then
this mess arrived it's okay Linus i got it from here
this is hot garbage imagine waiting for
your final pre-production samples and then receiving a bucket of
disappointment to summarize the shop flops around like a wet noodle
uh the ratchet sounds like
three years short of a bad gearbox and the knurling is basically smooth
it's like we told them what to do
and they just didn't do it and then sent us this
and it wasn't it everything about this sample
was terrible you can even just tell by the knurling on the shaft like this
how could these both even be from the same factory well we can't get too much
into that because there are some legal things that we're still figuring out but
basically the factory that we were using was bought out by a large tool maker and
they were now prioritizing naturally their own tools
so long story short we got fed up with their terrible communication and delays
not to mention their terrible quality and we changed to a different factory in
china potentially losing our 130 000 us
dollar deposit in the process once we started getting in samples from
the chinese factory we had more problems the ratchet which previously had been
the one thing that hadn't gone wrong started to jam to show you why we're
gonna have to take a closer look at how our ratchet mechanism works
press fit into the rear of the shaft is the ratchet wheel there are then two
pawls that engage with it so you can see them right here if both of them are
engaged the shaft is locked but if you move one
of them up a little bit you can spin the shaft in one direction
to move the pawls out of the way there are two pieces of delrin that interact
with the selector ring and it turns out that this guy right here
was made five thousandth of an inch out of spec
five thousandth of an inch that's like the width of two hairs
but because it's a lever that error was multiplied across the mechanisms leading
to our jamming issues the bad news is that it took us over six
months of barking up various trees to figure out that this was the problem
the good news is that in that time we tweaked nearly every part of the
mechanism to tighten up tolerances increase reliability and to dramatically
improve the feel of the ratchet over megapro's already a tier design it not
only sounds amazing but we went out and
bought all of the screwdrivers that the haters have been telling us are
certainly better than their novice first attempt and by comparison ours has
extremely low back force making it really easy to get a screw started and
an excellent hand feel it also happens to be strong enough for
heavy automotive work with a minimum spec of 25 newton meters for torque
although we've actually tested them up to 30 newton meters and they still work
perfectly fine should be noted if you get to that point though whatever screw that you're
reefing on is probably a hollowed out circle while we were fixing the ratchet
mechanism another thing we played around with was the tolerance of this delrin
ring that holds the shaft in place we settled on a five thou gap between the
sleeve and the shaft finding that it was the best compromise between a solid
shaft feel while still allowing good ratchet movement there's a prototype
here that has a tighter collar ah i guess here we go oh
the feel of this is not good but
that's in the past today is now now is today you know what
whatever it doesn't matter let's go build a final one
and what better place to do it than here at ph molds in maple ridge british
columbia where our finished driver handles are currently being produced in
the machine right behind us let's take a closer look
oh this bad boy is heavy yep it all starts here in this non-descript paper
barrel full of our plastic material called triax mixed up with these black
pieces that are a die a pigment that are going to help us achieve the black color
that we want for our screwdriver handle you're going to vacuum these up into
this industrial dryer apparatus right here and once they've got all the
moisture sucked out of them they get crapped out into this bucket
that we then take i'm gonna actually leave the bucket there i don't know if it's just gonna dump a load into it but
it comes out of that bucket which then gets dumped into this hopper the plastic
pellets are gravity fed into the molding machine at which point things get
a little spicier you can actually see the piston right here that is driving
molten plastic into the mold but
how does it get molten the pellets go into what we call the
auger which is a hollowed out cylindrical tube that has an archimedes
screw in the middle that's actually tapered outward as you go along that way
what that does is it not only melts the
plastic into a molten state needed to actually inject it into the water
there's a heating element there's a heat element for sure that brings it up to
plus 250 something celsius and it's tapered that helps both with mixing and
creating enough pressure for the piston to actually come and grab it as wild as
this feels right now i have never actually seen in person
the mold that we you pay for that you
paid for yeah yeah i did that hunk of metal right
there is the whole mold assembly oh wow okay it's the whole assembly that you
actually pay for which is why mold costs can be actually really expensive unless
you have like a master die which is the outer bit and you just play for the you
just pay for the plates which is the cavity and the call you actually have to
pay for the entire assembly so they load the entire assembly with a massive 10
ton overhead crane so they load it in and and then they connect up all the
hoses and basically all it does is shoots opens ejects closes shoots open
and it's on automatic right now okay so we can see it go you can literally like
watch this thing whoa there's a part
oh it's hot yeah it's hot get gloves also somebody's screwdrivers might have
Linus fingerprints in it
there goes another one what's actually cool about this mold it has a core that
goes inside here a cavity that goes over there and then two slides
that go around the sides to form the whole part so what a mold is is it's
basically a negative of what you're trying to create right so inside when
the mold closes there's exactly this space here right to to actually shoot
exactly exactly right so this is called
the sprue and that's called the runner so these are unfortunately well they're
not they're not lost because what we do is we cut these off and we re-grind them
right to add to that pellet stuff that we just got earlier on but you can only
have so much percentage of regrind you have to have some virgin material going
in so what are we going to get away with like 10 20 it depends on the part but for most of
the out the out of components is 25 right so what we want to aim for is that
the screw and the runners are under 25 of the total shot so that way we have
basically no waste exactly we don't always get it but we try right
this mould is unfortunately not something that we call auto injection so
it does eject but it doesn't automatically cut the gate that has to
be manually trimmed most of our other molds
cut the gate away as they eject which is a very satisfying process if you
actually get to see it unfortunately we don't have that mould loaded right now so you're gonna have to
take my word for it but this is not so bad it's a single cut
it's that actual part is hidden so you'll never see it but you know watching this
video you get to get a sneak peek of the handle as it comes out of the machine
it's going to be about 40 seconds that's a probably about a 40 second cycle time
right you actually have to wait for the plastic to cool before you eject it you
can't just yolo shoot you have to wait for it to solidify a bit and then you
can push it out but once it covers the coolant pipes come in right yes that's
exactly you want the mold to be hot but not too hot that's where the coolant
comes in it goes
yi that's sick
brandon you're gonna have to bear with me for a second here this is a bit more
of a time sensitive operation than i initially anticipated
the first thing we got to do is we got to take the hot handles that's
critical because we're using a press fit to ensure that our ratchet mechanism
stays in place in the handle which means that we're taking advantage of the
cooling of the handle to ensure that this stays in place
all right we put our accent ring on then this is keyed so it only goes in one way
we put our ratchet assembly in place
we put these stoppers in the end of the shaft and boom
it automatically press fits the ratchet into the handle and then the other side
that i was already working on pops out these two go in here
and these guys get bit holders which are also going to be press fit one side
move it over here these are finished drivers
which get put into these reusable styrofoam
flats that will be forwarded to us for packaging
now one of the things we're looking for in qc is what they're calling gas marks
or also while we're at it any just random scratches on the finished part
you guys want a perfect pristine screwdriver that i haven't dropped right
yeah you do if we allow the parts to sit in the tray behind me for too long they
cool enough that we cannot use them
so quick qc looks good that explains why these guys weren't
moving out of the way for the camera or nothing they got screwdrivers to make
that also explains why we need gloves because the parts that we're handling in
this process are by their very nature
hot i'm still one part behind i'm not catching up it's almost like this is an
optimized process careful don't scratch it buddy here i'm not scratching them
kyle geez man relax kyle people are gonna get ah use the freaking guy oh my
word what are you doing come on man i'm falling behind i am
sweating so much right now brandon like i am
i am pouring sweat at the moment ow that
one's too hot okay
i give up help me help
i'm waving the white flag why what's wrong oh you want the operator yeah they
can come back okay we're done as you guys probably figured
out if we're in mass production we're probably taking orders it's going
to take us a little while to get caught up to the volume of orders we're
expecting so we're gonna have a wave system kind of like we had for backpack
but our production capacity for these is much higher so guys check out the page
we're gonna have it linked down below where you can get your place in line
i could not be more excited for you guys
to finally get your hands on this thing it's been like what three years yeah
it's not really customary on our videos but this was not a normal project so
herman from megapro and actually the whole team there deserve a huge thanks
here i mean he could have easily said these kids have no idea what they're
getting into they're not even tool makers and simply stopped returning our
calls but instead he took a personal interest in this project and made sure
that it could succeed also massive shout out to all of our own team aside from
the engineers like sarah who designed our awesome not to mention durable
packaging and our partners except for that factory in taiwan that
we're still trying to get our deposit back from those guys can eat one if you know what
i'm talking about we absolutely love the final result
though it was worth it we set out to build the best driver for building computers and in doing so ended up
building something that's amazing for just about any task so don't wait go
check it out lttstore.com and go check out our
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you guys enjoyed this video why don't i throw to uh the Labs video where we ran
through some of what the engineers are doing over there isn't that wild three years ago we had zero engineers and now
we're expanding our engineering team at kind of an alarming rate but we're not
gonna run out of money because you guys are gonna buy lots of screwdrivers