Leyton Fasteners have built up a significant stock of fasteners which are not commonly in use today, including a British Standard range comprising; BSW, BSF and BA. Some of our industrial (trade) customers still use them to this day, however many have moved over to using the more common and readily available metric range, hence the stock mentioned above.
All of which is fine, until you take account of the vast number of older machines still in use today. Whilst machine tools have moved on significantly over the years, some industries still need and use much older machinery, some dating back over 60 years!
We receive lots of enquiries from people who have older equipment and machinery, which needs to be kept in running order, and are often able to satisfy their needs, directly, from our own stock.
A brief history of British Standard fasteners
The Whitworth thread was the world’s first national screw thread standard, devised and specified by Joseph Whitworth in 1841. Until then, the only standardisation was what little had been done by individual people and companies, with some companies’ in-house standards spreading a bit within their industries. Whitworth’s new standard specified a 55° thread angle and a thread depth of 0.640327p and a radius of 0.137329p, where p is the pitch. The thread pitch increases with diameter in steps.
The Whitworth thread system was later to be adopted as a British Standard to become British Standard Whitworth (BSW). An example of the use of the Whitworth thread are the Royal Navy‘s Crimean War gunboats and with the adoption of BSW by British railway lines, many of which had previously used their own standard both for threads and for bolt head and nut profiles, and improving manufacturing techniques, it came to dominate British manufacturing.
The British Standard Fine (BSF) has the same thread angle as the BSW, but has a finer thread pitch and smaller thread depth. This is more like the modern “mechanical” screw and was used for fine machinery and for steel bolts.
For help or advice, call or email 0151 355 8045 or sales@leytonfasteners.co.uk
