Have you ever taken a look at a beehive or honeycomb? If you have, you’d notice that bees use hexagonal patterns for their honeycombs. Hexagonal patterns are prevalent in nature because they’re efficient. By using hexagonal patterns, honeycombs require less wax to construct. They also gain strength under compression, so it’s a win-win situation for bees.
Besides honeycombs and beehives, did you know snowflakes use hexagonal patterns? Biological cells do, too. Hexagons are a space-efficient way to squish roughly circular things together.
A hexagon is a six-sided polygon. It is the most common shape for nuts. Look around at things you have in your house and you’ll find hexagonal nuts in kids’ toys, appliances, and furniture.
There are plenty of shapes but the hexagonal shape is preferred for nuts… why is that? Well, with six sides, hexagonal nuts are easy to turn. They actually require less turning than a four sided nut or fastener would. And, if nuts had more than six sides, they’d be prone to breakage. So, the industry smartly settled on making hexagonal nuts the norm because they’re so efficient.
The hexagonal shape of nuts isn’t just an American thing. It’s a universal standard, so you’d find hexagonal nuts in Asia, Europe, Africa, etc. Rather than everyone having different shapes, there’s one agreed upon shape which makes things much more compatible no matter what the country.
Dependable Acme is a company known for selling threaded products. If you take a look at our website, you’ll see we offer several products, including screws, rods and nuts. Of course we stock and sell hexagonal nuts… they’re quite popular. Do you have a project you need hexagonal nuts for, especially in large quantities? For more information, please call Dependable Acme at 800-893-3792. We are located in Westbury, NY, not too far from New York City.