There are millions of different tools and fasteners deployed by people all over. One of them is the self-sealing stem bolt, and despite this fastener being reliable and even used in trade nobody seems to know what they do. In fact, for much of my time in this industry I have never seen one of these, let alone used one.

As you all know, in my day job I wrench on a lot of stuff. If I’m not keeping a station up and running I’m repairing runabouts and all kinds of ships that come to our dock. I’ve had some bad luck through my years on the job. It seems as if at least once a year I have to endure through some hardship of some kind. I mean, this one time my wife told me to do a bunch of confusing stuff without telling me why. Another time, I was assumed guilty in a trial where I was alleged to be working with some bad guys. O’Brien must suffer, I guess. But hey, through all of it I still kept things running.

Still, when the son of a captain and his friend ended up with 100 gross self-sealing stem bolts I had no idea what they were.

Amazingly, they got them on trade for 5,000 wrappages of Cardassian yamok sauce to a freighter captain . And through their company, the Noh-Jay Consortium, they managed to trade the self-sealing stem bolts for seven tessipates of land on Bajor.

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That gives you more than enough square kerripates to grow some yelg melons.

Six years later, I decided to teach a class so I could tell folks the difference between one of these and a warp matrix flux capacitor.

I guess if you don’t know what to do with these, you could just get rid of them for some land. You can also use self-sealing stem bolts in the production of a reverse-ratcheting routing planer . And in a pinch, a self-sealing stem bolt may be able to be used as an escape tool.

Should you have the need to attempt to figure out what you need a self-sealing stem bolt for, one of them sold for $2,040 . Since they’re antiques today you can get them for about $37 .

Do you know of a weird or unique but must-have tool that every 24th century wrencher should know about? Beam your suggestion right to my inbox. I also accept Romulan ale.

(Author’s Note: Check the calendar. This was for fun!)