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this is it it's finally here the LTT screwdriver

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and truth is we didn't have to make it there are loads of perfectly good

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screwdrivers but this one this one is the best everything from the

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convenient bit storage to the perfectly tuned sound and feel of the ratchet

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mechanism to the fact that it is naturally perfectly balanced as all

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things should be is second to none and the handle is designed to be super

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comfortable whether your hands resemble catcher's mitts or you buy your gloves

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from the children's section but getting it to this point was an adventure and

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even with my experience in product management a shockingly expensive

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adventure i mean how can it take three years and hundreds of thousands of

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dollars to make something so seemingly

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basic i'm going to tell you

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but first i gotta start paying for this thing with this segway to our sponsor

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of course it's called a sponsor spot why wouldn't it have a sponsor spot

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simple mdm simple mdm offers ridiculously simple apple device

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management for it enrolling your company's apple devices and keeping them

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up to date doesn't have to be frustrating get 50 off your first three

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months at simplemdm.com Linus

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rather than reinventing the wheel the smart engineer finds the best existing

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wheel and then refines it so right out of the gate megapro was an obvious

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partner first of all their ratchet mechanism is fantastic and has been

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proven reliable in the field for over 25 years second they own the patent on what

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i believe is literally the best bit loader available for a ratcheting

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screwdriver third and this wasn't a requirement but it was a huge bonus

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their office is a 20-minute drive from ours making collaboration much easier

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now the especially smart thing to do what megapro implored us to do would

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have been to simply rebrand one of their existing drivers a little bit of LTT

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logo there some LTT color here maybe some computer specific bits and we would

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have been good to go unfortunately i'm a perfectionist control freak who hates

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making money so instead we embarked on our three year journey that would have

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us redesign nearly every single aspect

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of megapro's existing product does this look anything alike to you

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i mean they're both screwdrivers other than that the answer is

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no for one thing megapro's ratchet works in

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the opposite direction that you are screwing in and not being able to alter this would

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have been a complete show stopper for me upon hearing that it should be pretty

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simple to go ratchet right screw in right we green lit the project

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more on that later though next we had to redesign the handle to be clear theirs

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is great for automotive applications where you really want a giver up near

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the top of the driver but it didn't provide the finer control that i expect

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in a more general use driver also it's

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a little more than i can handle if you catch my drift

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at this point i was recruited design handled feels both when you have your

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hand up at the top or when you have it choked up kind of like this i settled on

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a three lobe design for the way it just kind of naturally follows the shape of

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your hand and from there i got to do my favorite thing rapid prototyping my

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philosophy is that there's no point in trying to make something perfect the

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first time because you're just gonna get it wrong anyway so for my first attempt

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i basically just made up dimensions and solidworks and threw it at the printer

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this is truly terrible but that was kind of

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the point one of the main reasons it's terrible is it's literally impossible to

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mass manufacture we already knew at this stage that the

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final parts were going to be injection molded basically shooting a bunch of hot

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plastic into a metal cavity so there are a couple of important considerations

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first no areas can be too thin at below about 80 thousandths of an inch our

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molten plastic won't flow through the mold and even if it did our finished

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part might be easy to break also

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no areas can be too thick since the plastic can sag while cooling and look

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pretty strange more importantly though the two halves

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of the mold have to be able to come apart so in this first version of the

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handle these scalloped areas here would have resulted in the mold completely

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destroying apart seconds after it had been made

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not not ideal anyway five versions later i landed on the

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first handle that i liked aka the long

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boy unfortunately this was one of our first major roadblocks Linus said it was

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too big and i had already made this handle as small as i possibly could

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without changing the megapro internals to make it smaller we'd have to get

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pretty creative and spend a bunch of money one option was to decrease the

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length of the zinc housing that connects the shaft to the handle but we're afraid

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that would decrease how much torque you can transmit through the handle another

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option was to decrease the number of bits to six

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but we felt 12 was a necessity for tech work what we were willing to give up

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though was the length of the bits by reducing them from 25 millimeters to 20

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making a couple alterations to the zinc housing we were able to make our handle

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nearly an inch shorter than mega pro's and create a handle that is awesome to

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use no matter your hand size two versions later we arrived at version

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seven which is the handle design you can buy now

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i did create versions eight through twenty

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but all of them are worse than number seven so uh

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seven it is there was a small problem with our handle design though

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how do you access the bit loader megapro has too little indents on the

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sides of the handle but with our trilobular design that looks and feels

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pretty gross to make the whole driver feel more cohesive then we hired whitebox designs

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in vancouver to help us out they came up with a bunch of different ideas some

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resembling things like our water bottle and some a bit more abstract around this

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time it was becoming pretty clear that alex needed some help since balancing

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doing an engineer's full-time job with writing an LTT video a week was becoming

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unsustainable so we went engineer fishing and hooked ourselves a kyle

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his first task was to perfect our end cap we liked white boxes little ribbed

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ends but getting it correct was difficult since too large of a rib can

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make using the screwdriver uncomfortable in your palm but having them too small

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makes getting at the bits difficult after 3d printing a bunch that could be

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interchanged quickly using magnets we found that this one was the best

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all of this work led to the 3d printed prototype in my hand

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looks strikingly similar to the finished product doesn't it so

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given that this was high fives all around done in august of 2020 with the

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launch scheduled for five months later how on earth did it take another two

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years internally we call this kickstarter

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syndrome up until that point every obstacle had

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been overcome relatively quickly and we even had our manufacturing partner

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locked in we felt basically invincible

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and we were tempted to launch a pre-order campaign

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but if we had done that we would have a heck of a lot of angry customers right

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now because we either would have shipped a bad product or they would have waited

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two years after submitting payment as it turns out going from pretty much ready

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to mass production ready is a lot of work

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to be clear some of it was still pretty straightforward we worked with

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innovative tool and dye in delta to create our plastic molds and the process

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for that was well i wouldn't say painless because we

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did have to hand them over 200 000 us dollars but that was basically it we

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gave them the money they gave us the molds and i gotta say until now i didn't

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know much about plastic mold making other than that it's super expensive but

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after seeing how it's done the price tag makes a bit more sense to me

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we went with hardened steel molds instead of aluminum ones because they

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last way longer and our intention is that we are going to make hundreds of

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thousands maybe even millions of screwdrivers before those molds finally

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kick the can the problem with hardened steel molds

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though is that they're made of hardened steel they are extremely difficult to

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machine to accomplish this then innovative tool

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and die used edm

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no not that kind electrical discharge

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machining we're not going to have time to fully explain edm here this fantastic

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video by applied science should handle that for us nicely but the tldr is that

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they're using a carbon electrode in the shape of our screwdriver and then a

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bunch of electricity to slowly zap away the steel

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this process has to be incredibly precise because ultimately it will

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determine not only the shape but even the texture

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of the surface of the finished product we chose a satin finish for our handle

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that looks great out of the box and wears out very evenly which is

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technically called ch3nr

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if you're a mold turbo nerd while the plastic molds were getting made we also

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had to finalize the shaft you might have noticed that our original designs had

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the knurling go all the way up to the base of the shaft but we added this

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little ridge here and the reason for that was that we'd have as much material

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as possible to hold the shaft onto the ratchet

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we tried a lot of different materials for shafts these ones are aluminum which

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were just too soft and felt kind of cheap

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these ones are stainless steel these ones are high carbon steel and then we

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also tried like different knurlings this one's straight which was kind of awful

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for slipping between your fingers and what we ultimately settled on was 303

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stainless steel for a good mix of durability and machine ability i just

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want to mention here that we made sure to go fairly aggressive with the

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knurling and most pc screws can be almost entirely tightened using the

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shaft so you would use it kind of like this

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one unfortunate thing that we learned during the testing of our prototype screwdrivers though was that the black

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coating on the shaft was simply not durable enough it wasn't

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for lack of trying the 40 micrometer black chrome plating treatment was the

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closest we got but even that got stripped pretty quickly especially by

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sharp things like heatsink fins so sadly aside from some early orders where we

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are allowing people to buy the black one knowing that it's going to wear off

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we're going to be primarily selling the screwdriver with a silver shaft so that

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it doesn't look terrible in a year as a consolation though the silver shaft

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is passivated by dipping it in a nitric bath to give it a nice protective oxide

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coating because despite its name stainless steel isn't actually totally

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stainless so this design choice was not about saving a buck it was about making

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the most durable possible product also in the shaft is the strongest

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magnet that we could get our hands on the minimum pull force that this is

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rated for is 5 newtons but from our testing they've been anywhere between 7

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to 11 newtons and this was to address one of my personal pet peeves where your

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bit gets kind of stuck on the screw and then gets left behind when you pull out

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and i can confidently say that that will be an extremely rare occurrence with our

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driver i've had it happen a grand total of about five times in the last couple

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of years while we're on the topic of materials let's give you a rundown on what the

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entire screwdriver is made out of the main plastics so the handle the end cap

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and the selector ring are all made out of a material called triax 1120. it's a

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nylon rich abs blend that we don't know the exact composition of it's a trade

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secret but what we do know is that it's as strong as freaking heck and offers a

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great balance of chemical and abrasion resistance the internal plastics are also mostly

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tri-x 1120 but the bit clips and the

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little ninja star that's in between them as we like to call it are made out of

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delrin for its excellent wear characteristics the last thing you want

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is for these little holders to just start snapping off on you that would be

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terrible now if you look really closely you can actually see a small color

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mismatch between the triax and the delrin but we did our best with it and

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i'm pretty sure that if i didn't just point it out no one would have ever

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noticed but i did point it out because i would hate for you guys to think that

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it's literally perfect speaking of flaws

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i'm going to point out another one in the molds

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i mean first of all we're incredibly impressed with the quality of the molds

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from innovative tool and dye every injection molded part is going to have

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parting lines where the two dies of the mold meet and they are

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virtually undetectable on our handle like props guys kyle's been working as a

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production engineer for 10 years and he's never seen molds this good before

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but while on most of the molds we were able to hide the gate which is where the

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plastic gets injected and there's a little sprue that needs to be broken off

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like on the handle it's right here where it's going to be hidden by the selector

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ring there was one we couldn't hide and that was on the selector ring itself on

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the first batch we got it was super obvious like

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look at this thing so we worked with the mold makers to

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change the gate location and make it as small as possible leaving us with this

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little tiny blemish again this is a very small flaw but i am pointing it out to

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demonstrate how obsessive we were over the tiny details of this product they

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really do matter and some of them matter a lot like the revisions that we made to

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the ninja star originally between the two rows of bits there was supposed to

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be a round plastic washer and this was to help hold the bits in place so they

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couldn't accidentally slide into another position

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unfortunately it limited compatibility to the 20 millimeter long bits that we

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sell or to less common 16 millimeter bits from other vendors like this one by

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this point we were completely committed to our shorty bits though not only do

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they enable the excellent ergonomics of our handle but it turns out that the

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shorter length enhances our already incredibly strong magnets so you don't

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have to worry about dropping even very large ferrous screws

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but then we also didn't want to lock people into a single vendor for

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replacement bits even if it's us that

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sucks i mean our bits are great they're black oxide coated s2 tool steel and

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we're going to have a wide variety of different sets available right at launch

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and furthermore we rationalized if you really wanted to buy your own bits you

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could just angle grind five millimeters off a standard one but what we really

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wanted was to find some way that we

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could ensure that longer bits could still be accommodated and so the ninja

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star was born you just take a pic turn it so that it lines up with in

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between the bit holders and yeah it'll knock down the number of bits

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that you can carry down to six but this ensures that you will always be able to

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find something to store in your screwdriver handle even if you lose all

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of these and i die and we go out of business

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anyway we had all of this figured out and all of the plastic molds done by the

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summer of 2021 hoping for a december launch

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that's when things got really stupid the zinc ratchet molds were going to be

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made in taiwan by the same factory that megapro has been using for 20 years

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then suddenly they started becoming less responsive

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by this point we had individually approved every component of the ratchet

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mechanism from the factory and all we needed was a final assembled sample

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before hitting go on production then

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this mess arrived it's okay Linus i got it from here

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this is hot garbage imagine waiting for

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your final pre-production samples and then receiving a bucket of

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disappointment to summarize the shop flops around like a wet noodle

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uh the ratchet sounds like

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three years short of a bad gearbox and the knurling is basically smooth

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it's like we told them what to do

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and they just didn't do it and then sent us this

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and it wasn't it everything about this sample

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was terrible you can even just tell by the knurling on the shaft like this

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how could these both even be from the same factory well we can't get too much

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into that because there are some legal things that we're still figuring out but

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basically the factory that we were using was bought out by a large tool maker and

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they were now prioritizing naturally their own tools

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so long story short we got fed up with their terrible communication and delays

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not to mention their terrible quality and we changed to a different factory in

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china potentially losing our 130 000 us

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dollar deposit in the process once we started getting in samples from

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the chinese factory we had more problems the ratchet which previously had been

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the one thing that hadn't gone wrong started to jam to show you why we're

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gonna have to take a closer look at how our ratchet mechanism works

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press fit into the rear of the shaft is the ratchet wheel there are then two

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pawls that engage with it so you can see them right here if both of them are

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engaged the shaft is locked but if you move one

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of them up a little bit you can spin the shaft in one direction

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to move the pawls out of the way there are two pieces of delrin that interact

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with the selector ring and it turns out that this guy right here

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was made five thousandth of an inch out of spec

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five thousandth of an inch that's like the width of two hairs

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but because it's a lever that error was multiplied across the mechanisms leading

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to our jamming issues the bad news is that it took us over six

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months of barking up various trees to figure out that this was the problem

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the good news is that in that time we tweaked nearly every part of the

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mechanism to tighten up tolerances increase reliability and to dramatically

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improve the feel of the ratchet over megapro's already a tier design it not

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only sounds amazing but we went out and

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bought all of the screwdrivers that the haters have been telling us are

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certainly better than their novice first attempt and by comparison ours has

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extremely low back force making it really easy to get a screw started and

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an excellent hand feel it also happens to be strong enough for

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heavy automotive work with a minimum spec of 25 newton meters for torque

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although we've actually tested them up to 30 newton meters and they still work

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perfectly fine should be noted if you get to that point though whatever screw that you're

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reefing on is probably a hollowed out circle while we were fixing the ratchet

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mechanism another thing we played around with was the tolerance of this delrin

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ring that holds the shaft in place we settled on a five thou gap between the

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sleeve and the shaft finding that it was the best compromise between a solid

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shaft feel while still allowing good ratchet movement there's a prototype

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here that has a tighter collar ah i guess here we go oh

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the feel of this is not good but

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that's in the past today is now now is today you know what

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whatever it doesn't matter let's go build a final one

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and what better place to do it than here at ph molds in maple ridge british

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columbia where our finished driver handles are currently being produced in

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the machine right behind us let's take a closer look

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oh this bad boy is heavy yep it all starts here in this non-descript paper

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barrel full of our plastic material called triax mixed up with these black

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pieces that are a die a pigment that are going to help us achieve the black color

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that we want for our screwdriver handle you're going to vacuum these up into

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this industrial dryer apparatus right here and once they've got all the

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moisture sucked out of them they get crapped out into this bucket

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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

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it comes out of that bucket which then gets dumped into this hopper the plastic

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pellets are gravity fed into the molding machine at which point things get

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a little spicier you can actually see the piston right here that is driving

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molten plastic into the mold but

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how does it get molten the pellets go into what we call the

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auger which is a hollowed out cylindrical tube that has an archimedes

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screw in the middle that's actually tapered outward as you go along that way

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what that does is it not only melts the

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plastic into a molten state needed to actually inject it into the water

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there's a heating element there's a heat element for sure that brings it up to

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plus 250 something celsius and it's tapered that helps both with mixing and

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creating enough pressure for the piston to actually come and grab it as wild as

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this feels right now i have never actually seen in person

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the mold that we you pay for that you

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paid for yeah yeah i did that hunk of metal right

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there is the whole mold assembly oh wow okay it's the whole assembly that you

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actually pay for which is why mold costs can be actually really expensive unless

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you have like a master die which is the outer bit and you just play for the you

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just pay for the plates which is the cavity and the call you actually have to

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pay for the entire assembly so they load the entire assembly with a massive 10

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ton overhead crane so they load it in and and then they connect up all the

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hoses and basically all it does is shoots opens ejects closes shoots open

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and it's on automatic right now okay so we can see it go you can literally like

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watch this thing whoa there's a part

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oh it's hot yeah it's hot get gloves also somebody's screwdrivers might have

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Linus fingerprints in it

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there goes another one what's actually cool about this mold it has a core that

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goes inside here a cavity that goes over there and then two slides

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that go around the sides to form the whole part so what a mold is is it's

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basically a negative of what you're trying to create right so inside when

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the mold closes there's exactly this space here right to to actually shoot

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exactly exactly right so this is called

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the sprue and that's called the runner so these are unfortunately well they're

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not they're not lost because what we do is we cut these off and we re-grind them

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right to add to that pellet stuff that we just got earlier on but you can only

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have so much percentage of regrind you have to have some virgin material going

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in so what are we going to get away with like 10 20 it depends on the part but for most of

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the out the out of components is 25 right so what we want to aim for is that

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the screw and the runners are under 25 of the total shot so that way we have

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basically no waste exactly we don't always get it but we try right

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this mould is unfortunately not something that we call auto injection so

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it does eject but it doesn't automatically cut the gate that has to

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be manually trimmed most of our other molds

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cut the gate away as they eject which is a very satisfying process if you

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actually get to see it unfortunately we don't have that mould loaded right now so you're gonna have to

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take my word for it but this is not so bad it's a single cut

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it's that actual part is hidden so you'll never see it but you know watching this

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00:23:39,120 --> 00:23:44,320
video you get to get a sneak peek of the handle as it comes out of the machine

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it's going to be about 40 seconds that's a probably about a 40 second cycle time

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right you actually have to wait for the plastic to cool before you eject it you

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can't just yolo shoot you have to wait for it to solidify a bit and then you

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can push it out but once it covers the coolant pipes come in right yes that's

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exactly you want the mold to be hot but not too hot that's where the coolant

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comes in it goes

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yi that's sick

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brandon you're gonna have to bear with me for a second here this is a bit more

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of a time sensitive operation than i initially anticipated

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the first thing we got to do is we got to take the hot handles that's

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critical because we're using a press fit to ensure that our ratchet mechanism

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stays in place in the handle which means that we're taking advantage of the

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cooling of the handle to ensure that this stays in place

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all right we put our accent ring on then this is keyed so it only goes in one way

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we put our ratchet assembly in place

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we put these stoppers in the end of the shaft and boom

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it automatically press fits the ratchet into the handle and then the other side

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00:24:54,000 --> 00:25:01,760
that i was already working on pops out these two go in here

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00:24:58,960 --> 00:25:07,120
and these guys get bit holders which are also going to be press fit one side

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00:25:05,679 --> 00:25:11,120
move it over here these are finished drivers

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which get put into these reusable styrofoam

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00:25:12,400 --> 00:25:18,000
flats that will be forwarded to us for packaging

356
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now one of the things we're looking for in qc is what they're calling gas marks

357
00:25:21,360 --> 00:25:28,640
or also while we're at it any just random scratches on the finished part

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you guys want a perfect pristine screwdriver that i haven't dropped right

359
00:25:31,039 --> 00:25:39,600
yeah you do if we allow the parts to sit in the tray behind me for too long they

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00:25:36,080 --> 00:25:42,400
cool enough that we cannot use them

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00:25:39,600 --> 00:25:46,559
so quick qc looks good that explains why these guys weren't

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00:25:44,080 --> 00:25:51,600
moving out of the way for the camera or nothing they got screwdrivers to make

363
00:25:49,520 --> 00:25:54,559
that also explains why we need gloves because the parts that we're handling in

364
00:25:53,200 --> 00:25:57,360
this process are by their very nature

365
00:25:56,400 --> 00:26:03,440
hot i'm still one part behind i'm not catching up it's almost like this is an

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optimized process careful don't scratch it buddy here i'm not scratching them

367
00:26:05,039 --> 00:26:14,240
kyle geez man relax kyle people are gonna get ah use the freaking guy oh my

368
00:26:11,760 --> 00:26:18,799
word what are you doing come on man i'm falling behind i am

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00:26:17,679 --> 00:26:27,200
sweating so much right now brandon like i am

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00:26:22,960 --> 00:26:29,840
i am pouring sweat at the moment ow that

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00:26:27,200 --> 00:26:33,120
one's too hot okay

372
00:26:30,720 --> 00:26:36,720
i give up help me help

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00:26:34,640 --> 00:26:40,480
i'm waving the white flag why what's wrong oh you want the operator yeah they

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can come back okay we're done as you guys probably figured

375
00:26:43,039 --> 00:26:49,039
out if we're in mass production we're probably taking orders it's going

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00:26:47,039 --> 00:26:51,919
to take us a little while to get caught up to the volume of orders we're

377
00:26:50,240 --> 00:26:57,039
expecting so we're gonna have a wave system kind of like we had for backpack

378
00:26:54,159 --> 00:27:00,400
but our production capacity for these is much higher so guys check out the page

379
00:26:58,960 --> 00:27:03,919
we're gonna have it linked down below where you can get your place in line

380
00:27:02,640 --> 00:27:08,400
i could not be more excited for you guys

381
00:27:06,400 --> 00:27:13,039
to finally get your hands on this thing it's been like what three years yeah

382
00:27:11,279 --> 00:27:17,279
it's not really customary on our videos but this was not a normal project so

383
00:27:15,520 --> 00:27:23,200
herman from megapro and actually the whole team there deserve a huge thanks

384
00:27:20,320 --> 00:27:26,320
here i mean he could have easily said these kids have no idea what they're

385
00:27:24,960 --> 00:27:30,480
getting into they're not even tool makers and simply stopped returning our

386
00:27:28,080 --> 00:27:34,720
calls but instead he took a personal interest in this project and made sure

387
00:27:32,159 --> 00:27:38,720
that it could succeed also massive shout out to all of our own team aside from

388
00:27:36,720 --> 00:27:43,520
the engineers like sarah who designed our awesome not to mention durable

389
00:27:41,039 --> 00:27:46,080
packaging and our partners except for that factory in taiwan that

390
00:27:45,039 --> 00:27:51,039
we're still trying to get our deposit back from those guys can eat one if you know what

391
00:27:48,960 --> 00:27:54,559
i'm talking about we absolutely love the final result

392
00:27:52,880 --> 00:27:58,880
though it was worth it we set out to build the best driver for building computers and in doing so ended up

393
00:27:57,520 --> 00:28:03,720
building something that's amazing for just about any task so don't wait go

394
00:28:02,240 --> 00:28:08,399
check it out lttstore.com and go check out our

395
00:28:06,080 --> 00:28:12,399
sponsor squarespace if you're building your brand online in 2022 you should

396
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407
00:28:54,000 --> 00:28:59,360
you guys enjoyed this video why don't i throw to uh the Labs video where we ran

408
00:28:58,159 --> 00:29:05,679
through some of what the engineers are doing over there isn't that wild three years ago we had zero engineers and now

409
00:29:03,919 --> 00:29:09,279
we're expanding our engineering team at kind of an alarming rate but we're not

410
00:29:07,600 --> 00:29:13,080
gonna run out of money because you guys are gonna buy lots of screwdrivers