- 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 catchers 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 segue to our sponsor.
- [Kyle] Oh my goodness, it's got a sponsor spot.
- Of course, it's got a sponsor spot.
Why wouldn't it have a sponsor spot?
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(upbeat electronic music)
- Rather than reinventing the wheel,
the smart engineer finds the best existing wheel
and then refines it.
So right outta 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've 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've 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 screw drivers.
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've been a complete showstopper 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 to give her 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 a handle
that feels both when you have your hand up at the top
or when you have a choked up kind of like this.
I settled on a three lobed 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 in 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 on this first version of the handle,
these scalloped areas here would've resulted
in the mold completely destroying our part
seconds after it had been made.
Not ideal.
Anyway, five versions later,
I landed on the first handle that I liked, AKA the Longboi.
Unfortunately, this was one of our first major road blocks.
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 were 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 are able to make our handle nearly an inch shorter
than Megapro'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 20
(plastic handles clanking on table top and floor)
- But all of them are worse than number seven,
so seven it is.
- There was a small problem with our handle design though.
How do you access the bit loader?
Megapro has two little indents on the sides of the handle,
but with our tri-lobular design,
that looks and feels pretty gross.
To make the whole driver feel more cohesive then,
we hired White Box Design 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 a 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've shipped a bad product,
or if they would've 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 Die in Delta
to create our plastic molds,
and the process for that was,
well, I wouldn't say painless,
cause 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're extremely difficult to machine.
To accomplish this then Innovative Tool and Die used EDM.
(electronic dance music)
- No, not that kind.
Electrical discharge machining.
We're not gonna 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 outta the box and wears out very evenly,
which is technically called C-H-30-N-R-R-A-U-M-320,
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 so 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 machinability.
I just wanna 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.
(ratcheting mechanism engaging)
- 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 heat sink 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 gonna 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 us 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 five Newtons, but from our testing,
they've been anywhere between seven 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's 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 fricking heck
and offers a great balance of chemical
and abrasion resistance.
The internal plastics are also mostly Triax 1120,
but the big 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've 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 Die.
Every injection molded part is gonna 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 gonna 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 that 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 Ferris screws.
But then, we also didn't wanna 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 gonna 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 pick, turn it so that it lines up
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,
and 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've 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 shaft flops around like a wet noodle,
the ratchet sounds like three years short of a bad gear box,
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 was real.
- 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 5000th of an inch out of spec.
5000th 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 color.
Ah yes, 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.
- Ye!
- Whoa, this bad boy's heavy!
- [Kyle] 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 dye,
a pigment, that are gonna help us achieve
the black color that we want for our screwdriver handle.
You're gonna 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?
(fingers snapping)
- 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 mold.
- So there's a heating element?
- There's a heating 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 paid for. - Made
- That you paid for? - Yeah.
That, yeah, I did have to do that.
- It's, 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 a mold cost can be actually really expensive.
Unless you have like a master die,
which is the outer bits and you just pay for the plates,
which is the cavity and the core,
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, opens, ejects, and it's on automatic right now.
- Okay. So, so we can see it go.
- You can literally like watch this thing.
- Oh, whoa! - There's a part.
- Hey! There's a part!
Ooh, it's hot.
- Yeah. It's hot. Get gloves.
- Woo!
- 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 actually shoot.
- Exactly.
- Exactly. Right.
So this is called a sprue and that's called a runner.
So these are unfortunately,
well, they're not lost, cause 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 re-grind.
- Yes, yes.
- You have to have some virgin material going in.
So what are we gonna get away with?
Like 10, 20%?
- So, it depends on the part. - Got it.
- But for most of the outer components, it's 25%.
- Got it.
- So what we want to aim for is that the sprue
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 mold is unfortunately not something
that we call auto injection.
So it does eject,
but it doesn't automatically cut the gate.
- Right.
- 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 mold 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.
- Yeah.
- 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 gonna be about 40 seconds.
That's probably about a 40 second cycle time.
- [Linus] 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 comes out.
- That's where 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.
There it goes!
Ye! That's sick!
- [Linus] That's awesome.
- Yeah. 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 gotta do is
we gotta 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 once I,
da, da, da, da, da, da, da da,
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 (clearing throat) 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.
- [Kyle] Careful, don't scratch it buddy!
- Here, I'm not scratching them, Kyle!
- [Kyle] Geez man!
- Relax Kyle.
- [Kyle] People are going to get these.
(Linus yelping)
- [Kyle] Use the freaking guide!
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 pouring sweat at the moment.
Ow! That one's too hot.
Okay. I give up!
Help me! Help!
I'm waving the white flag.
- [Kyle] Why, what's wrong?
Oh, you want the operator to come back?
- Yeah, 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 gonna 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.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
why don't I throw to the lab's 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 outta money,
because you guys are gonna buy lots of screwdrivers.