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jacquesm 5 hours ago

Why not? A properly set up CNC machining center would turn those out by the bucketload. That's precisely the sort of thing that BMW does regularly with exterior details, no reason why they couldn't do it for a batch of bolts.

alnwlsn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You don't use CNC for making a billion individual screws. These would have their heads formed by being stamped in a die, just like phillips, robertson, security torx or any other screw heads.

cucumber3732842 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can make anything on anything. Doesn't make it smart tho.

If this were a production run of a few dozen super high grade aerospace donkey dicks with five shoulders and four pockets, an oil channel, a precisely engineered break point and a 12-step heat treat process I'd say yeah, make it on your Swiss lathe with live tooling or bajillion axis VMC or whatever.

But this looks to be a simple small, probably cosmetic or otherwise low-ish strength stainless or chromed fastener that BMW probably wants a few hundred thousand of. You'll be time, money, labor, frustration, managerial nitpicking, just about everything, ahead to just have the fastener industry and their existing expertise make it for you. The "bespoke" drive, the custom branding, those are all known-knowns to those guys. They'll whip up tooling for their screw machines and fill the same bucket in 1/20th of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJvQZko8uiU

Edit: replaced video link with better one. Obviously there's fiddle fucking around they're not showing and they're mix and matching footage of different products but the speed things move once you've got it all set up is broadly accurate. A whole bunch of these steps would be skipped or altered for a stainless fastener.