Six leaves, all of them parts
On this page11
The group has six leaves and they share one property
A cam lock, a drawer slide part, a furniture glide, a hinge part, a picture hanger and a shelf pin. Not one of them is usable alone. Each one is a component that makes an assembly work.
Which is the same observation the spine is built on
Part 770 regulates a material and then insists the obligation travels into the component part and into the finished good. Hardware is the reverse journey: the part only means anything once it is in something.
Shelf pins are the smallest and the most numerous
Five millimeters is the common size and a cabinet uses them by the dozen. They are the leaf most likely to be stored loose and most likely to be lost in a drawer.
Cam locks are an assembly in themselves
A cam and a bolt, sometimes with a washer, and they have to stay together to be useful. A jar of mixed cam parts is slower to work from than two jars of sorted ones.
Hinge parts and drawer slide parts are the bulky leaves
Plates, screws, cover caps, rail clips and dampers. Variable in shape, and the collection grows because hardware is kept after a job in case the next one needs it.
Furniture glides are a size range rather than a part
Felt pads, nail-in glides, levelling feet. They sort by diameter, which makes a set of identical small containers more useful than one large one.
And picture hangers are the leaf with the most variants
Sawtooth, D-ring, wire, hook and pin, each in several weight ratings. Sorting is by the rating, which is printed on the packet and not on the part, so the container has to carry the information the part does not.
That last point is the practical theme of this group
Hardware arrives labeled and is stored unlabeled. The identity lives on the packet, and when the packet is thrown away the only remaining record is whatever is written on the jar.
Which is a small version of what the spine is about
A property that cannot be read off the object has to be carried by a record attached to it. For a certified panel that record is a certification. For a shelf pin it is a label on a lid.
None of the six is a composite wood product
They are metal and plastic hardware. Part 770 sets emission standards for composite wood products and nothing on these pages says it reaches any item in this group.