Simple Screw Counter
28 Feb 2026I have wasted a significant chunk of my life counting out small numbers of parts into bags and posting them to people.
It's not that I'm complaining about the popularity of my precision clock kits, but it does feel like the time could be better spent. I'm apparently such an anxious person that until recently I wasn't even comfortable listening to the radio or a podcast while I work. The risk of making a mistake, posting the wrong number of parts to someone, was too great.
But the process is kind of zen, so during the long hours of manually counting out nuts and bolts I started to dream about automation.
Here's a video demo of today's creations:
Nut Dispenser
By far the quickest win here. Nuts are tedious to pick up with your fingers, and during the endless toil I dreamed up a gun that could shoot out six nuts at a time.
The laser-cut acrylic sheets are pegged together with scrap PLA filament. I laser-cut the holes at 1.6mm diameter, with the kerf of the laser that ends up being about 1.7mm, and the standard filament is 1.75mm diameter. The conical kerf means it starts easily and then jams to a press fit. I last demonstrated this technique on the Portable Probability Panel.
The pivot for the trigger is a random bit of metal I had to hand. Possibly, we could have used filament here too, it probably would have been fine.
I should have made the hopper bigger, but even this is enough to hold over a hundred nuts. I might add a few more layers, or maybe cut it all out again bigger – but it's already good enough that it doesn't really matter.
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