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
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linus
[Music]
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
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ltt to get 10 off your first purchase if
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