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Floatplane
We’re not talking about incredibly-mid 2010’s radio hits -- we’re talking screwdrivers and also revealing our latest colorway! Introducing the UV-reactive Nuclear LTT Ratcheting Screwdriver -- launching tomorrow, August 28th.
Between that, and having recently been granted a patent for our screwdrivers’ ratcheting mechanism, we thought we’d celebrate by pulling back the curtain and sharing a bit about what it took to get here.
The idea of a retro console-inspired screwdriver handle actually goes all the way back to when we were designing the original LTT Ratcheting Screwdriver, and we were actively making samples for it even back then. Throwback designs like that were sorta popping off… at least, at the time. Better late than never we suppose. But even if we never launched transparent handles, it’s actually a really good thing we had the idea because it might’ve saved the entire product line.
Early in 2022, with our targeted launch window swiftly approaching, we’d had a manufacturer lined up to produce our screwdriver’s ratchet. Their samples were good, and everything was smooth sailing until one day they just stopped communicating with us. Begrudgingly, we were forced to find a new manufacturer.
We’d changed nothing about the design of the ratchet, but as we’d already learned a few times before, many manufacturers rely quite heavily on tribal knowledge to produce their goods, and you often find that small variances between manufacturer goods will occur even if you hand them the same blueprints. Our new ratchets were jamming up a lot more than before, and our design team was at its wit's end trying to figure out why. Worse, since it lives inside the screwdriver’s handle, they couldn’t even observe the defect. If only we could see inside that plastic…
Not only could we make a transparent handle, but we’d already designed and prototyped one! So all we needed was to put a ratchet in a transparent handle and observe. It turned out there were some misaligned parts causing the jams, and now that we knew what needed to change, it was much simpler to fix them and still launch (relatively…) on time!
Now you might remember I said the Nuclear Screwdriver was UV-reactive, and I wasn’t just blowing smoke. This one’s a bit of a happy accident. While we were prototyping all the various color variants, we knew we had to do one in that classic nuclear-green color that seemed like it was on everything back in the day.
…Or maybe that was just me.
To produce color variants, you just add pigments to the plastic mixture before it gets molded. There’s a bit of a science to it though; depending on the exact pigments you’re using and how they interact with the base material, you could risk making the mold more brittle. That obviously wouldn’t do, so we had to be careful about exactly how we accomplished the looks we were going for.
Well it turns out that the manufacturer doing our injection molds is also involved in another weird product category besides eccentric YouTuber passion projects: fishing lures!
Lures often use UV-reactive pigments to appear brighter underwater, which makes them a lot more likely to attract fish. A little bit of that pigment ended up being exactly what we needed to nail our vision.
Unfortunately for those fish, they’ve committed the capital crime of being extremely delicious. But we nerds can appreciate pretty lights too. Though that UV-reactivity may not be especially useful, it’s undeniably a cool look and a great party trick to show your coworkers on the job site. It’s those little things that set a Creator Warehouse product apart from the rest.
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We hope you enjoyed today’s edition of the LTTStore newsletter. We’re going to be releasing these much more frequently from now on, so stay tuned!
