1. G e e k
of the month
December 2006
w w w . p o p s c i . c o m
100best innovations
top tech 2006
Best
Of
what’s
new
awards
5 Megapixels in a Phone Game Master Portable 3-D Scanner
Honda’s Zippy New Jet The $130 Laptop A Hand Vac with Real Power
oftheyear
What’s #1?
DIY Disco Floor
253 mph, 1,001 Horses,
$1.2 Million
2. POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
Dr.Nailvs. theMonster
Could thwarting the devastating effects of hurricanes and e
credited with reinventing the little spike of steel that
holds together most of the world’s houses.
THE OVERLOOKED IMPORTANCE OF THE NAIL
For more than two centuries, nails have been the fastener
of choice for wood-frame structures. But for all that is rid-
ing on nails, they have been the focus of precious little
R&D. Nails have evolved into a grab-whatever’s-cheapest
commodity, taken for granted by contractors and engineers.
Sutt should know. The man now known to his col-
leagues as “Dr. Nail” grew up the son of an architect-
contractor in suburban Connecticut, where he spent his
weekends at job sites, framing houses from the age of 14.
As a young adult, he worked as a carpenter, then started his
own construction business. “I wasn’t a very successful con-
tractor,” says the 38-year-old Sutt, “mostly because I liked
to hand-nail everything. One day I was nailing off a top
plate over a door. I looked at my swollen hands, and I
couldn’t see my knuckles. So I decided to go back to school.”
To finance his engineering degree, Sutt took a research-
assistant position at Clemson’s Wind Load Test Facility,
THE HEAD 25 percent wider
than normal nails to prevent
plywood from ripping off
THE STEEL Novel carbon-steel alloy is
20 percent stronger in earthquakes
THE TWIST Fills in the space that the
barbs open up to hold the nail in place
SATOSHI;FACINGPAGE:JOHNB.CARNETT
I
N 1995 A CLEMSON UNIVERSITY graduate student
named Ed Sutt took off for a spur-of-the-moment trip
to the Caribbean. But beaches and rum drinks
weren’t on the agenda for this civil engineer. Hurri-
cane Marilyn had just torn through St. Thomas, and
Sutt was part of a team examining how and why 80 per-
cent of the island’s homes and businesses had collapsed in
the storm’s 95mph winds.
“The destruction was so complete in places that it was
almost surreal,” Sutt recalls. “There were troops in the
streets and military helicopters hovering overhead.” As
Sutt moved through the wreckage of roofless and toppled-
over houses, he was struck by the sense that much of the
destruction could have been avoided. “In house after
house,” he says, “I noticed that it wasn’t the wood that had
failed—it was the nails that held the wood together.”
At the time, Sutt couldn’t have predicted that this
realization would spark a journey through earthquakes,
wind tunnels and head-to-head battles with giant wall-
wrecking machines. Or that 11 years, dozens of hurri-
canes and thousands of prototypes later, he would be
b e s t o f w h a t ’ s n e w 2 0 0 6
dino 13091 1/30/07 4:01 PM Page 1
3. POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE
HOME TECH
nd earthquakes be as simple as designing a better nail?
BY TOM CLYNES
PAGING DR. NAIL
Ed Sutt admires the
HurriQuake in Bos-
titch’s Rhode Island
manufacturing plant.
THE BARBS Hold the shaft firmly
in the frame to prevent pullout
SATOSHI;FACINGPAGE:JOHNB.CARNETT
which had received a grant from the Federal Emergency
Management Agency to study the relationship between
wind velocity and the failure of wood-frame structures.
The position turned out to be a good fit, since it allowed
Sutt to combine engineering with his practical knowledge.
“We hand-built these mobile weather stations that
measure wind speed and barometric pressure,” he says.
“Then we would race out in front of hurricanes and drop
them in the storm’s path. After it was over, we came back
to see if we could make a correlation between real wind
speed and when a house starts coming apart.”
When he integrated the results of the fieldwork with his
laboratory experiments, Sutt discovered that the most effec-
tive way to strengthen a house was to improve its fasteners,
especially the nails that hold the roof and wall sheathing to
the frame. “I began to see that the engineers and building-
code writers had been missing the point. Everyone had
always just accepted that a nail is a nail. No one was focus-
ing on what we could do to make the connection better.”
In 2000, with his Ph.D. in hand, Sutt sent his résumé to
Stanley Works. His timing couldn’t have been better. The
POPSCI INNOVATOR
GRAND AWARD WINNER
innovation
of the year
dino 13091 1/30/07 4:02 PM Page 2
4. POPULAR SCIENCE DECEMBER 2006
HOME TECH
company had recently begun to increase its investment in
fastener engineering, and it called Sutt in for an interview,
during which the young engineer shared his vision of a
new way to think about research. “In the past,” Sutt says,
“fastener companies had focused on how to manufacture
nails. I wanted to look at how structures perform based on
the nails that are used.”
Sutt signed on as a fastener engineer at Stanley’s sub-
sidiary Bostitch and settled into a new lab at the company’s
headquarters complex in Rhode Island. Then he began
concentrating on the mission that he had seemingly spent
his entire life preparing for: designing a better nail.
REINVENTING THE STEEL
During the HurriQuake nail’s six years of development, 14
major hurricanes and tropical storms destroyed hundreds
of thousands of houses in the U.S. and inflicted an esti-
mated $166 billion in damages. The U.S. hasn’t had a
major earthquake since parts of the Los Angeles area were
leveled in the Northridge quake of 1994, but around the
world, thousands of people have lost homes and family
members as wooden structures collapsed.
Although there are no precise statistics, Sutt’s research
indicated that nail failure accounted for a substantial per-
centage of the destruction in these catastrophes. And
when nails fail, it’s for one of three reasons. Either the nail
rips its head through the sheathing, its shank pulls out of
the frame, or its midsection snaps under the lateral loads
that rock a house during high winds and earthquakes.
Sutt’s job was to design a nail that resisted all three. “With
the first prototypes,” Sutt says,“we proved that a bigger
head has substantial advantages in terms of stopping the
nail from pulling through the sheathing. But it couldn’t be
too big, because it needed to fit into popular nail guns.”
As the Bostitch team tweaked the head-to-shank ratio,
Sutt and metallurgist Tom Stall worked on optimizing
high-carbon alloys, trying to find the highest-strength
trade-off between stiffness and pliability—the key to pre-
venting snapped nails. “Meanwhile,” Sutt says,“we were
focusing on how to keep the nail from pulling out.”The
team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the
nail’s shaft from its point, experimenting with the size and
placement of the barbs. “You want the rings to have maxi-
mum holding power,” he says,“but if they go up too high, it
creates a more brittle shank that shears more easily.”
The team tested hundreds of designs, looking for the
best compromises. The late prototypes held fast, and Bos-
titch came out with a barbed nail with a larger head in
HUFF AND PUFF, AND . . .
House failure often starts
with a broken window.
High winds act to inflate
the house like a balloon
while creating a zone of
low pressure above. This
pressure difference can
[right] pull the nail’s head
through the sheathing,
yank the nail from the
frame, or shear the nail
sideways. The Hurri-
Quake nail [above] was
designed with a large
head, barbs and a locking
twist top to stop failure.
“EVERYONE ACCEPTED THAT A NAIL WAS A NAIL.
NO ONE WAS TRYING TO MAKE IT BETTER.”
HurriQuake
Low pressure
outside
Broken
window
High pressure
inside
3 Ordinary failures
ILLUSTRATIONS:KEVINHAND;FACINGPAGE:COURTESYBOBEPSTEIN/FEMA
PULL-THROUGH PULLOUT SHEAR
2x4
Sheathing
dino 13091 1/30/07 4:02 PM Page 3
5. POPSCI.COM POPULAR SCIENCE
BRILLIANT 10
2005 called the Sheather Plus. But the solutions created prob-
lems of their own: As the barbs pierced the sheathing, they
generated a hole that was slightly bigger than the shank,
resulting in a loose, sloppy joint.
“We needed a way to lock the top of the shank into the
sheathing,” says Sutt, who attacked the problem in a series of
brainstorming sessions with his engineers. Their solution: a
screw-shank, a slight twist at the top of the shaft that locks the
nail in place. The combination of the screw-shank, barbed rings,
fatter head, and high-strength alloy added up to an elegant
solution to the failures that had plagued nails for more than
two centuries. Sutt’s team had, in effect, reinvented the nail.
SNAPPING WALLS FOR SCIENCE
Tests conducted by researchers at Florida International Uni-
versity and the International Code Council—the independent
building-safety standards organization—confirmed that the
HurriQuake has more than twice the “uplift capacity” of stan-
dard power-driven nails. Other independent tests showed that
the HurriQuake can double a typical home’s resistance to high
winds and add up to 50 percent more resistance to earthquakes.
I wanted to see what that resistance looked like on real
boards, so I asked Scott Schiff, the coordinator of the civil-
engineering and engineering-mechanics graduate programs at
Clemson, to run some tests on the HurriQuake. And I asked
Sutt to accompany me back to his old stomping grounds.
Schiff, who taught Sutt at Clemson, meets us at the Wind
Load Test Facility, which occupies two large sheds a couple
miles from the university’s main campus in northwestern
South Carolina. Inside the sheds, Schiff has created some-
thing of a storm chaser’s fantasy lab. There’s a giant wind
tunnel, Styrofoam models of cities and suburbs, even a home-
made cannon that fires two-by-fours into walls.
In the rear shed, a 20-foot-tall frame of steel I-beams rears
up like a medieval torture device. Schiff’s students have
bolted into the device an eight-foot-square section of wall,
built with conventional 8d “common nails,” that will soon be
methodically torn apart. “Meet the Monster,” Schiff says,
motioning toward the rig’s actuator, which will pull the wall
up at a 45-degree angle. “We use it to simulate the forces of
simultaneous uplift and shear, which is what is exerted
against a house in a high-wind event.”
With a capacity of up to 20,000 pounds of force—“We
won’t get near that today,” Schiff assures me—the Monster
tests how fasteners perform as part of a system. “The first
time I used it,” Sutt says, flashing a guilty grin, “I was try-
ing to apply a shear force on nails through rafters, as part
of my Ph.D. research. But I had it set up wrong, and when
STORM SURVIVAL The HurriQuake will double the resistance
of homes to high winds, like the category-5-force winds of
Hurricane Andrew that devastated South Florida in 1992. No
Atlantic hurricane since has been stronger at landfall.
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