Spacers and standoffs

In general, a spacer is a solid material used to separate two parts in an assembly. Spacers can vary in size from microns to centimeters. They can be made of metal, plastic, glass and other materials. Shapes include flat sheet, cylindrical and spherical.

Two sizes of metal standoffs and one plastic standoff. Background depicts a standoff in use, holding a circuit board above a metal case.

A standoff is a threaded separator of defined length used to raise one part in an assembly above another. They are usually round or hex (for wrench tightening), often made of aluminum, brass, or nylon, and come in male-female or female-female forms. In electronics they are frequently used to raise a printed-circuit board above a surface. Insulating standoffs keep two parts from touching each other, thereby preventing electrical shorts. When used to fasten cable connectors (e.g., "D" connectors) together, they are called jack screws.

In contrast, some spacers may look similar to standoffs but are unthreaded pieces of tubing which let the entire bolt pass through. Since they cannot be tightened, they are usually round.[1]

Audio visual equipment (e.g., AV amplifiers) can utilise extra space above or below their mounting in order to achieve extra cooling in the way of better airflow. AV spacers are made for this purpose.[2]

Usage in home computers

Size 4-40 is used to secure cables to external computer ports, and size 6-32 is used for motherboard mounts.

Dell, Inc. refers to standoffs that receive thumbscrews as "hex nut screws" and measures them with the metric system.

gollark: What I meant was that you could change your code to use parfor or something when iterating over the possible configurations at each stage.
gollark: Since there's synchronization overhead and the non-parallel bits.
gollark: Roughly linearly, actually, but whatever.
gollark: * core
gollark: Well, if the most expensive step is evaluating the configurations, then it should scale linearly with increased thread count.

See also

References
  1. http://www.apexfasteners.com/fasteners/screw-machine-products/spacers-and-standoffs
  2. https://x-air.co.uk
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