I feel like a + shaped screw head would be as standard as a pyramid if multiple civilizations had developed screws independently. It wouldn't be the last kind, but it would be there somewhere. Maybe even a long, long time ago.
This bugs me so much more than it should. Why do we have three different standards for + shaped screws? You know what doesn't have this problem? Flatheads. There's exactly one way to make a flathead screwdriver, and I won't be looking it up to make sure I'm right
I see that multiple people have replied, but unfortunately reading these comments would be a form of research so I must decline
Their isn’t one way to make a flat head screwdriver. Some a chisel and some are slots. The slotted ones are better but more expensive.
Both still slip from the screw and are a pain to manually screw (slotted less so).
Pozi is the best + type screw. It’s pretty much standard for UK construction. The only time a different type is used is sometimes Phillips for plaster board or external hex and internal torx for long or large screws.
I think a single slotted screw head would be more universal and easy. You just cut one line into the top of the screw head and your ready to go. A Philips head would need to be cut twice and once you did, you've weakened the head one degree more by removing more material
You clearly haven't had to screw a flathead screw.
Anyone that's dicked around with those little bastards starts hating life after about thirty seconds. A fastener I can screw in a without having to be perfectly in line with the shaft? Yes please! I don't care if it's a shitty Phillips screw, sign me up. I'd even take those goofy square Canadian screws. Hell, anything is better than flathead.
I challenge you to find a screw worse to use than a flathead screw.
This is not (just) the ramblings of a mad nerd, but objective fact derived from contact area between screwdriver and screw.
In practice hex does have one situational advantage over Torx, namely that they are almost always tightened with Allen keys which are more torque-y and can be used in tight spaces. For every other application Torx wins. Every other head type is strictly inferior and only exists for legacy or penny-saving reasons.
What they don't say is that the smaller the features on the contact, the easier it is to strip them. This almost reverses the order on your post depending on the way you tighten the screw.
Torx is more resilient to over-torsion than Hex, but both of them will end near the end of the list on that one metric, with slot first, and way ahead of anything else.
Despite what the Torx publicity says, engineering is done over a multitude of dimensions, and that one dimension Torx wins may not be nearly as important as some other random one.
I agree ... and if I ever had the choice ... I'd go with Robertson or Torx for all my screws
But we were talking about (I thought that is what we were talking about) is what common basic screw design would be common to appear in a world where no screws existed. A slot is simple and easy to make ... just take a metal saw and cut one slot and voila you can turn it with a simple flat screwdriver head ... simple to make, simple to reproduce ... a pain in ass? yes? a universal torture device that will make your life miserable? yes?
But if we ever end up in a situation where we have no hardware stores, no manufactured supplies, no heavy machinery, no metal stamping equipment, no heavy duty presses then cutting a simple slot across the top of a threaded rod is the easiest way to make your own screwhead and start working with using your own homemade screw driver ... a pain in the ass? yes ... but at least you can screw things together after the world has ended.
This probably doesn’t exist but is probably worse the a flat head. What about a friction screw where the top is like rubber and to unscrew you need to rotated using a driver with another flat rubber head
So ironically I’ve used a rubber band similar to what you describe to break free and remove screws on several occasions. It’s not fool proof but worth a shot to avoid drilling and tapping.
(lol just kidding. what you're describing is almost as bad as unscrewing a security flathead screw. look it up. invented by Satan, with help from Brian Thompson)
Easiest to manufacture tho (probably, I'm not an expert. But if you were to make a fastener with rudimentary tools, Phillips seems like it would likely be the easiest.)
Easiest, yes. And wheels are easier than repulserlifts. If sometime said "Ya know, greasing axels sucks balls. Let's invent something better", they probably developed something better than the shittiest screw head in the history of sentience.
Ohhh no... As a person who regularly builds random shit for film and television, the single slotted screw is the bane of my bloody existence. Some designers fucking love em for the aesthetic but the cam outs on them are terrible. Is it technically easier to produce? Yes, is it viable to use for construction purposes comparitively - fuck no. Every time you cam out ( lose traction on the screw) you risk accidentally damaging whatever medium you are screwing into.
Locally there is an insane institutional preference for the Robertson screw (which is basically a square) because it doesn't cam out much, drives in well and arguably resists stripping better than a Phillips... This is believed in so much that any screw not seen by the camera is a Robby (usually size 2) while anything that is perceived by the audience is a phillips or a single slot screw. Given a choice nobody wants to handle single slots and chances are good you only find them in period specific builds or when the designer is a psychopath.
The only thing slotted was good for was on old ships. When water grime built up on them they were easy to scrape out with your screwdriver and use the screw. That is THE ONLY good thing about slotted screws. If they get full of shit it's easy to clean out. Other than that they fucking suck in every other way.
Absolutely the only benefit to slot headed screws is how easy they are to make, which is why they're what a home machinist would make when creating his own fasteners, and why any aliens out there that use threaded fasteners have probably also tried and learned to hate them.
Most other shapes of driver aren't cut, they're stamped.
Neither have I but we were talking about how to make a basic screw without needing to forge or stamp or manufacture screws ... if you ever had to make a screw yourself, you take a hack saw and cut a slot in the screw head ... then a second cut crossing the first to make the (+) shape
Torx is better than whatever this Canadian abomination is. You'd only put pressure on the corners in a realistic setting. These would get rounded so fast unless they are massive, like on some differentials or gearbox oil drains.
Indeed torx is so good because it attempts to maximize the surface where pressure is applied to. This is good on smaller sized bolts that are more prone to being rounded, but especially amazing when removing bolts that may have been exposed and potentially corroded
Yeah, hex is very nice but torx is improvement over it.
I have not checked on it, but I'm like 97.25% sure wood screws jumped from Philips to torx however because of corrosion resistance. Hex is very easy to round already as is on smaller sizes, but even more so if the head is exposed to elements and corroded. Of course material matters a lot, but even stainless corrodes over time.
Torx has to be very, very bad condition for it to round, it's more likely for the screw to snap
Sorry for drunk rambling but I really like bolts. And bearings for what it's worth
Never had or seen a stripped Robertson, they are robust AF. Don't ask me the physics. (They go deep into the screw head because of the simple shape, maybe that has part of it. And they are tapered, it's not just a square, so they manage to grip the bit like a mofo. You don't cam out of a Robertson.)
The internal hex on sway bar end links are useless after any time in the salt. Last time I had to remove them I went straight to the angle grinder and ordered a new pair. Didn't even attempt it.
Slight myth there. It was not the intended purpose, but a sort of happy accident. The original patent stated it was a perfect, never damaging thing. See here and the reply here.
Officially, "flathead" refers to countersunk screws. Slotted screws are terrible for my purposes, but they actually do have 1 advantage. If they get mud or something caked up in the slot it's relatively easy to use a knife or some other pointy thing to clean it out. Guns and other things used in dirty environments often use slotted fasteners for that reason.
Seems to be common on furniture that you're supposed to assemble and rearrange, such as convertible crib/beds. One of my kids' cribs was brand new and the other we got at a garage sale and would be from 2003 or so, and both use torx for this reason
Thank you for replying. Robertson screws are not common in Scandinavia - at least I've never seen one IRL. I use torx for everything, never had an issue with hand screwing them, which is why I asked. But I'm not an expert or professional, just a home owner that tries to DIY as much as I can.
Not having to deal with stripped screws is the biggest plus for me, I hate having to remove a Philips or flathead screw that someone else put in some hard-to-reach location that can't be turned without breaking. (Which happens surprisingly often, actually.)
I have never in my life seen such a screw. Hexagon is the shit here, when it isnt Phillips. Maybe coming from Ikea, I don't know. Is this format a (popular) US thing?
I don't get the problem with flathead, for household applications it seems the most superior because I can use literally anything in my house to drive the screw (butter knife, credit card, a housekey)
plus almost every size of flathead screwdriver can fit in almost every size of flathead screw.
You can use everything, but everything works badly. Even a fitting screwdriver will just randomly jump out after half a turn and scratch whatever you're working on.
No offense, but you haven't unscrewed/screwed enough slot screws if you don't see why they're worse in every way. The criteria for a good screw isn't that you don't have to have the correct tool. The bits are $0.99!
I unscrew a single screw and whether it's a light switch or an electronic device, I'm already annoyed. Even if you use a flathead screwdriver that fits perfectly, it will un-center and slip out, whether you use a hand bit/screw driver or a drill.
Preventing cam-out with a Phillips screw is like learning the ways of the Force. It takes patience and skill, something the Empire’s rigid Torx would never understand.
Pozidriv is intentionally not backwards compatible, and one of the biggest problems it has is looking enough like Phillips that people assume it must be compatible, use a mismatched screw and driver, and strip a head.
Which is why it sucks. I go to work and I see a cross cut, I'm going to use my Phillips head of appropriate size to pull it out or put it in. Does pozidrive have any indication it's not Phillips? I've honestly never seen one. I might be working on brand new stuff or 60 year old stuff.
I don't have any pozidrive bits but I have two sets of long torx, some double sided torx for my hand driver, and a bunch of little torx bits in my bag to hand out to the kid that came to his first day of work with nothing but a #2 Phillips.
I think it's pretty likely that you've seen loads and never known they were different. The difference is small enough that you wouldn't realise it was significant until you were told:
You're right - Torx is definitely a better option. I just mentioned Pozidriv because people seem to love Phillips head so much for whatever reason, so Pozidriv seems like a logical increment from there.
(@Dan not shitting on you, i just really hate Phillips)
Next logical increment...... Gotta say ain't nothing logical about Phillips/posidrive bullshit,
Robertson drive was around when Henry Ford decided to use Phillips on his cars. Robertson was more expensive to licence the patents(Phillips was cheap cause people thought it was shit)
God damned Nazis fucking everything up(Ford was a Nazi(ish) and a real piece of shit). Maximizing profits over everything else screws everything up as we are seeing right now, but sometimes it doesn't just fuck up the here and now, but like Phillips, it just keeps fucking everything up for more than 100 years.
"Let's make a drive that has an angle to it so that it will strip out super easily and destroy the fastener(don't tell me Phillips is great because it limits torque, it doesn't without destroying the head so bad you might not be able to remove it)" said no good engineer ever.
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.
Why wouldn't they? It's an efficient design, and aside from the whole force thing they seem to be working with the same physics that we are. Why wouldn't they invent philips head screws?
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine - it's designed purely for automation. That's why it's tapered, to allow power tools to slip out before they break. That's good for automation in the *1930s (EDIT: I've realised that in a few years it will be the 30s again and maybe I shouldn't leave this so ambiguous in light of that), not so good for hand tools or any modern tool with a torque limiter.
You're much better off with hex or torx, or even the square driver, which is much more tolerant of imperfect handheld tool usage.
The only reason phillips is still used is because it's ubiquitous, it's very much a historical oddity. It's okay for many tasks but unfortunately the slipping out behaviour can destroy the screws very quickly.
I mean it's conceivable they'd come up with something similar, and it would be weird to expect a props department to find different screw heads just to be lore accurate.
Edit: Plus it's common today, which means from a prop design standpoint it communicates the idea that it's hand-built, because just about everyone has a phillips head screwdriver, so seeing it tells you it's something you can work on. I think that's the main reason it would be there. Jedi are supposed to make their own lightsabers.
Fair enough, I'm talking about big H5 construction screws and impact drivers, so a different use case maybe. Also it turns out when ARRMA uses too much threadlock on their axle set screws you can strip them really easily, and I needed more expensive special hex drivers with tight tolerances to work with them.
Torx is cool and all but all the touted virtues such as less cam-out go out the window if you have to drive them in at wonky angles, like tight fitting spaces. If you gotta angle the driver it's not gonna seat well at all, apt to jump and wear out your bit. And if your only T20 rolls away and falls under a deck, yuck, 10mm problems.
Phillips has a place and that place is 'a wonky place to hold a power drill'. That said I'm a huge fan of square head because it's a happy medium between those two
I'm sure they have some kind of crazy riveting technology. Is she installing screws because she wants to be able to easily take apart her lightsaber if needed?
That depends, is the person building it a DIY tinker, or a mass production factory worker? Because a tinkerer is absolutely going to want to open it up easily.
I mean, supposedly some lightsabers were built in a cave. They probably used whatever was on hand, and I'm thinking screws are more common in rubbish strewn pits and rankor caves than welding machines.
But you have to machine a hole in the metal for the screw to function
You know how hard it would be to drill a hole for a screw in a cave with scrap parts and no power drill?
All you need to crudely weld, probably as strong as a screw, is heat. Fire is easy in a cave.
I'd wager they could melt some metal together before devising a cave drill press.
We have no idea what metal or alloy it is. They could have an alloy that melts easily, but once hard, it adheres to other metals and practically unbreakable. Just find some scraps of that alloy to easily weld.
I feel like a + shaped screw head would be as standard as a pyramid if multiple civilizations had developed screws independently. It wouldn't be the last kind, but it would be there somewhere. Maybe even a long, long time ago.
There are at least 3 standards for the + shape already. Phillips, Pozidrive, and Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS). They do not play well together.
insert obligatory xkcd standards reference
Don't forget Frearson/Reed & Prince!
But wait, there's more!
And even more!
We only have standards so we can break'em.
JIS has been obsoleted and replaced in Japanese products with the ISO Phillips bit shape. It still exists on lots of products pre 2000 though.
Kawasaki is still holding on strong to JIS screws in it's machinery.
That's just galvanic corrosion from using cadmium plated bolts in aluminum fuel injection hardware. It's basically free loctite.
Are you sure they're JIS? Because JIS and ISO are interchangeable and effectively the same; the ISO adopted standard used most of JIS's rules.
Yeah. I keep one of these around just for older Yamaha and newer Kawasaki equipment. You'll end up drilling half of them out if you try to use #3 ISO.
I'm in the powersports/agricultural industry, so we tend to lag behind everyone else.
JIS is looking better according to these guys…
This bugs me so much more than it should. Why do we have three different standards for + shaped screws? You know what doesn't have this problem? Flatheads. There's exactly one way to make a flathead screwdriver, and I won't be looking it up to make sure I'm right
I see that multiple people have replied, but unfortunately reading these comments would be a form of research so I must decline
Should the slot be partial or go all the way through? If partial, is that standard for the size of the screw, or universal?
How wide should the slot be? Should that change based on the size of the screw?
How deep should the slot be?
Should the sides of the slot be perfectly straight, or angled to perfectly fit the wedge shape of the driver? If angled, what angle?
Should the bottom of the slot be perfectly flat or slightly rounded so a coin or something could be used in a pinch? If rounded, what radius?
Should the top of the screw be perfectly flat, or domed, or raised?
Should the bottom of the head be flat, angled (at which angle), smooth, rough.
Should we use metric or freedom units for the thread pitch?
Should the threads go all the way to the head?
Should the point of the screw be flat or tapered (at what angle)?
Ok, only the first half of those were about the driver used, but I'm sure there are things I missed in that!
Their isn’t one way to make a flat head screwdriver. Some a chisel and some are slots. The slotted ones are better but more expensive.
Both still slip from the screw and are a pain to manually screw (slotted less so).
Pozi is the best + type screw. It’s pretty much standard for UK construction. The only time a different type is used is sometimes Phillips for plaster board or external hex and internal torx for long or large screws.
I think a single slotted screw head would be more universal and easy. You just cut one line into the top of the screw head and your ready to go. A Philips head would need to be cut twice and once you did, you've weakened the head one degree more by removing more material
You clearly haven't had to screw a flathead screw.
Anyone that's dicked around with those little bastards starts hating life after about thirty seconds. A fastener I can screw in a without having to be perfectly in line with the shaft? Yes please! I don't care if it's a shitty Phillips screw, sign me up. I'd even take those goofy square Canadian screws. Hell, anything is better than flathead.
I challenge you to find a screw worse to use than a flathead screw.
In my experience, Phillips heads strip more often than Robertson.
Torx > Hex > Robertson > Pozidriv > Phillips > Slot.
This is not (just) the ramblings of a mad nerd, but objective fact derived from contact area between screwdriver and screw.
In practice hex does have one situational advantage over Torx, namely that they are almost always tightened with Allen keys which are more torque-y and can be used in tight spaces. For every other application Torx wins. Every other head type is strictly inferior and only exists for legacy or penny-saving reasons.
What they don't say is that the smaller the features on the contact, the easier it is to strip them. This almost reverses the order on your post depending on the way you tighten the screw.
For hex yes, for Torx no. Your smartphone's itty bitty screws are quite possibly T4 or similar.
Torx is more resilient to over-torsion than Hex, but both of them will end near the end of the list on that one metric, with slot first, and way ahead of anything else.
Despite what the Torx publicity says, engineering is done over a multitude of dimensions, and that one dimension Torx wins may not be nearly as important as some other random one.
Ngl if I didn't have impact drivers I'd probably hate Phillips screws a whole lot more
Obligatory 'yo momma'.
I agree ... and if I ever had the choice ... I'd go with Robertson or Torx for all my screws
But we were talking about (I thought that is what we were talking about) is what common basic screw design would be common to appear in a world where no screws existed. A slot is simple and easy to make ... just take a metal saw and cut one slot and voila you can turn it with a simple flat screwdriver head ... simple to make, simple to reproduce ... a pain in ass? yes? a universal torture device that will make your life miserable? yes?
But if we ever end up in a situation where we have no hardware stores, no manufactured supplies, no heavy machinery, no metal stamping equipment, no heavy duty presses then cutting a simple slot across the top of a threaded rod is the easiest way to make your own screwhead and start working with using your own homemade screw driver ... a pain in the ass? yes ... but at least you can screw things together after the world has ended.
How tf can hyperdrive exist but screws haven't been invented lol
I think the real issue is that prop design has fallen so far from the ILM heyday. Now it's best described as follows:
This probably doesn’t exist but is probably worse the a flat head. What about a friction screw where the top is like rubber and to unscrew you need to rotated using a driver with another flat rubber head
So ironically I’ve used a rubber band similar to what you describe to break free and remove screws on several occasions. It’s not fool proof but worth a shot to avoid drilling and tapping.
Pics or it didn't happen
(lol just kidding. what you're describing is almost as bad as unscrewing a security flathead screw. look it up. invented by Satan, with help from Brian Thompson)
Easiest to manufacture tho (probably, I'm not an expert. But if you were to make a fastener with rudimentary tools, Phillips seems like it would likely be the easiest.)
Easiest, yes. And wheels are easier than repulserlifts. If sometime said "Ya know, greasing axels sucks balls. Let's invent something better", they probably developed something better than the shittiest screw head in the history of sentience.
But that's just, like, my opinion man
Ohhh no... As a person who regularly builds random shit for film and television, the single slotted screw is the bane of my bloody existence. Some designers fucking love em for the aesthetic but the cam outs on them are terrible. Is it technically easier to produce? Yes, is it viable to use for construction purposes comparitively - fuck no. Every time you cam out ( lose traction on the screw) you risk accidentally damaging whatever medium you are screwing into.
Locally there is an insane institutional preference for the Robertson screw (which is basically a square) because it doesn't cam out much, drives in well and arguably resists stripping better than a Phillips... This is believed in so much that any screw not seen by the camera is a Robby (usually size 2) while anything that is perceived by the audience is a phillips or a single slot screw. Given a choice nobody wants to handle single slots and chances are good you only find them in period specific builds or when the designer is a psychopath.
The only thing slotted was good for was on old ships. When water grime built up on them they were easy to scrape out with your screwdriver and use the screw. That is THE ONLY good thing about slotted screws. If they get full of shit it's easy to clean out. Other than that they fucking suck in every other way.
☝️ this dude screws
Slotted screws are the proof that Satan is real.
Absolutely the only benefit to slot headed screws is how easy they are to make, which is why they're what a home machinist would make when creating his own fasteners, and why any aliens out there that use threaded fasteners have probably also tried and learned to hate them.
Most other shapes of driver aren't cut, they're stamped.
I have never seen a crosshead screw cut out to the edges...
Neither have I but we were talking about how to make a basic screw without needing to forge or stamp or manufacture screws ... if you ever had to make a screw yourself, you take a hack saw and cut a slot in the screw head ... then a second cut crossing the first to make the (+) shape
Its all fun and games until the Canadians show up.
As an American, we made a mistake in not adopting those. Torx or whatever isn't even as good.
Torx is better than whatever this Canadian abomination is. You'd only put pressure on the corners in a realistic setting. These would get rounded so fast unless they are massive, like on some differentials or gearbox oil drains.
This guy mechanics
Indeed torx is so good because it attempts to maximize the surface where pressure is applied to. This is good on smaller sized bolts that are more prone to being rounded, but especially amazing when removing bolts that may have been exposed and potentially corroded
Hex was for that before.
Yeah, hex is very nice but torx is improvement over it.
I have not checked on it, but I'm like 97.25% sure wood screws jumped from Philips to torx however because of corrosion resistance. Hex is very easy to round already as is on smaller sizes, but even more so if the head is exposed to elements and corroded. Of course material matters a lot, but even stainless corrodes over time.
Torx has to be very, very bad condition for it to round, it's more likely for the screw to snap
Sorry for drunk rambling but I really like bolts. And bearings for what it's worth
Curious how "really like bolts. And bearings!" is working out on your Tindr profile?
Luckily I've never had a tinder profile. And my wife liked my nuts so we're good
Never had or seen a stripped Robertson, they are robust AF. Don't ask me the physics. (They go deep into the screw head because of the simple shape, maybe that has part of it. And they are tapered, it's not just a square, so they manage to grip the bit like a mofo. You don't cam out of a Robertson.)
I've snapped so many Robertson bits in my life. Screws are fine.
1 5/8" cement board screws
They used to be Robertson. They switched to Torx.
Night and day difference
Like you said, they do grip like a mofo, and with an impact driver, the bits snap.
I tried dozens of different brands of bits. Even paid top dollar for special Milwaukee ones.
I was at a point where I had to pre-drill and counter sink the screws because I was breaking too many bits.
I could probably drive a torx head one through a board
Hex already fit that niche.
Torx was just so they could make wood screws that weren’t Robertson and it bled out from there.
Torx bits are waaaay stronger than hex. Like double the surface area and tapered to work when corroded.
My 30 year old VW axles with hex bolts were a nightmare. The new ones are all Torx or 12pt.
I ended to driving an oversized Torx but into the nearly stripped hex bolts to finally remove them.
Oh okay. So just like with everything else we've failed to do
Germany has entered the chat.
I've stripped more internal hex than all other types combined
The internal hex on sway bar end links are useless after any time in the salt. Last time I had to remove them I went straight to the angle grinder and ordered a new pair. Didn't even attempt it.
We have to go deeper.
Yeah boi
Disappointed that the first comment isn't, "May the Torx be with you"
That may have been the actual post title I was looking for.
These aren’t the post titles you’re looking for… 👋
I changed it after the fact but I went with torque instead of Torx because it seemed to make more sense. IYKYK.
Nah, I was just kiddin’!
This was a great post and fun to comment with
Thanks. Most of my memes are stolen but as long as I manage to bring a smile to a few faces each day, it's worth it.
Obligatory xkcd
Thought it was gonna be the Phillip's head strip
https://xkcd.com/1474/
Even in a galaxy far far away everything is still made in china
Edit: at least they didn't use Phillips screws
Can't get more spacey screws than those. They basically look like galaxies
That's because they were worried someone would have taken them off.
Turns out the laws of physics and geometry are the same everywhere.
Even in fictional universes that have wizards in space with swords made of light?
Yes!
Then why would they end up with philips instead of torx?
They get sick pleasure from inflicting stupid fastener design on their users?
Hey, if it works it works.
It works, but badly. All my homies hate cam-out and love torx.
It works great for it's intended purpose which is torque limiting.
Slight myth there. It was not the intended purpose, but a sort of happy accident. The original patent stated it was a perfect, never damaging thing. See here and the reply here.
Correct. The original patent makes no reference to any sort of cam out / torque limiting feature.
Well, limiting torque but killing itself and becoming extremely hard to remove is terrible design lol
Officially, "flathead" refers to countersunk screws. Slotted screws are terrible for my purposes, but they actually do have 1 advantage. If they get mud or something caked up in the slot it's relatively easy to use a knife or some other pointy thing to clean it out. Guns and other things used in dirty environments often use slotted fasteners for that reason.
Yeah it also really difficult to strip a Flathead slot.
But it can be done! https://media.tenor.com/3dnzk_8PqwoAAAAM/dumb-and-dumber-jim-carrey.gif
Wait what should the standard be?
Torx.
Googles it.
Omg, it has 6 sides, that means it’s bestagon
I don't think I had ever actually seen a torx screw head until this conversation lol
If you have an iPhone, you can see two tiny torx screws on the bottom by the lightning/USB-C port
Seems to be common on furniture that you're supposed to assemble and rearrange, such as convertible crib/beds. One of my kids' cribs was brand new and the other we got at a garage sale and would be from 2003 or so, and both use torx for this reason
Honest question, why not torx across the board? What do square do well that's not covered by torx?
Robertson is tapered, so you just have to hit the hole somewhat and it'll guide itself in real easy. Torx is fickle to line up and orientate.
Thank you for replying. Robertson screws are not common in Scandinavia - at least I've never seen one IRL. I use torx for everything, never had an issue with hand screwing them, which is why I asked. But I'm not an expert or professional, just a home owner that tries to DIY as much as I can.
Not having to deal with stripped screws is the biggest plus for me, I hate having to remove a Philips or flathead screw that someone else put in some hard-to-reach location that can't be turned without breaking. (Which happens surprisingly often, actually.)
I think it's slightly more expensive to machine?
Amen, brother!
I'd say cross/slit in tiny, torx in small to big screws.
I have never in my life seen such a screw. Hexagon is the shit here, when it isnt Phillips. Maybe coming from Ikea, I don't know. Is this format a (popular) US thing?
I don't get the problem with flathead, for household applications it seems the most superior because I can use literally anything in my house to drive the screw (butter knife, credit card, a housekey)
plus almost every size of flathead screwdriver can fit in almost every size of flathead screw.
You can use everything, but everything works badly. Even a fitting screwdriver will just randomly jump out after half a turn and scratch whatever you're working on.
No offense, but you haven't unscrewed/screwed enough slot screws if you don't see why they're worse in every way. The criteria for a good screw isn't that you don't have to have the correct tool. The bits are $0.99!
I unscrew a single screw and whether it's a light switch or an electronic device, I'm already annoyed. Even if you use a flathead screwdriver that fits perfectly, it will un-center and slip out, whether you use a hand bit/screw driver or a drill.
Um, actually, those are rigid kal'dron adjustment pins used to correct focus crystal orientation.
Ironically enough other standards appeared because of the need of more torque.
That’s the joke
Preventing cam-out with a Phillips screw is like learning the ways of the Force. It takes patience and skill, something the Empire’s rigid Torx would never understand.
No wonder the Jedi failed.
Bet it’s an inch screw too
You'd think that they would have switched to Pozidriv.
Why? Torx is better in every way. If you are going to change, why half ass it to Phillips 2.0
Backwards compatibility
Pozidriv is intentionally not backwards compatible, and one of the biggest problems it has is looking enough like Phillips that people assume it must be compatible, use a mismatched screw and driver, and strip a head.
Which is why it sucks. I go to work and I see a cross cut, I'm going to use my Phillips head of appropriate size to pull it out or put it in. Does pozidrive have any indication it's not Phillips? I've honestly never seen one. I might be working on brand new stuff or 60 year old stuff.
I don't have any pozidrive bits but I have two sets of long torx, some double sided torx for my hand driver, and a bunch of little torx bits in my bag to hand out to the kid that came to his first day of work with nothing but a #2 Phillips.
Yes, the head is visually distinctive from Phillips, with four smaller cuts in between the main ones.
Good to know if I ever see one.
I think it's pretty likely that you've seen loads and never known they were different. The difference is small enough that you wouldn't realise it was significant until you were told:
You're right - Torx is definitely a better option. I just mentioned Pozidriv because people seem to love Phillips head so much for whatever reason, so Pozidriv seems like a logical increment from there.
(@Dan not shitting on you, i just really hate Phillips)
Next logical increment...... Gotta say ain't nothing logical about Phillips/posidrive bullshit,
Robertson drive was around when Henry Ford decided to use Phillips on his cars. Robertson was more expensive to licence the patents(Phillips was cheap cause people thought it was shit)
God damned Nazis fucking everything up(Ford was a Nazi(ish) and a real piece of shit). Maximizing profits over everything else screws everything up as we are seeing right now, but sometimes it doesn't just fuck up the here and now, but like Phillips, it just keeps fucking everything up for more than 100 years.
"Let's make a drive that has an angle to it so that it will strip out super easily and destroy the fastener(don't tell me Phillips is great because it limits torque, it doesn't without destroying the head so bad you might not be able to remove it)" said no good engineer ever.
TIL
Where do you think we got it from?
May the Philips be with you.
Obligatory Babylon 5 Swedish meatballs
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds. What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.
That reads like it's straight out of one of the Hitchhikers books
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Jynnan_tonnyx
Huh always thought that was a self sealing stem bolt
Wrong universe
See that whooshing over your head its the Clear Air Turbulence.
I thought it was going to say "IG-88 was a dildo."
He certainly looks like one
Could be JIS.
Thank you!
If it ain't broke..
Why wouldn't they? It's an efficient design, and aside from the whole force thing they seem to be working with the same physics that we are. Why wouldn't they invent philips head screws?
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine - it's designed purely for automation. That's why it's tapered, to allow power tools to slip out before they break. That's good for automation in the *1930s (EDIT: I've realised that in a few years it will be the 30s again and maybe I shouldn't leave this so ambiguous in light of that), not so good for hand tools or any modern tool with a torque limiter.
You're much better off with hex or torx, or even the square driver, which is much more tolerant of imperfect handheld tool usage.
The only reason phillips is still used is because it's ubiquitous, it's very much a historical oddity. It's okay for many tasks but unfortunately the slipping out behaviour can destroy the screws very quickly.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/9903/bit-history-the-phillips
I mean it's conceivable they'd come up with something similar, and it would be weird to expect a props department to find different screw heads just to be lore accurate.
Edit: Plus it's common today, which means from a prop design standpoint it communicates the idea that it's hand-built, because just about everyone has a phillips head screwdriver, so seeing it tells you it's something you can work on. I think that's the main reason it would be there. Jedi are supposed to make their own lightsabers.
A good balled hex driver is such a joy to use. Somewhat align it with the screw, and you can use it at weird angle.
I prefer to only use them when I can't get alignment. They're far more likely to round out the head in my experience, but they have their uses.
Maybe I didn't use them enough yet, but I bought some Wiha balled hex driver and I haven't stripped a screw yet, and I use cheap screws.
I also had to dismantle my 3d printer hot end with a lot of weirdly placed screws and it wasn't even an issue.
Fair enough, I'm talking about big H5 construction screws and impact drivers, so a different use case maybe. Also it turns out when ARRMA uses too much threadlock on their axle set screws you can strip them really easily, and I needed more expensive special hex drivers with tight tolerances to work with them.
They strip like a mf.
If you have ever used torx once in your life you can't say that Philip is great anymore.
Torx is cool and all but all the touted virtues such as less cam-out go out the window if you have to drive them in at wonky angles, like tight fitting spaces. If you gotta angle the driver it's not gonna seat well at all, apt to jump and wear out your bit. And if your only T20 rolls away and falls under a deck, yuck, 10mm problems.
Phillips has a place and that place is 'a wonky place to hold a power drill'. That said I'm a huge fan of square head because it's a happy medium between those two
I have used torx in weird angle with less issue than Phillips . My heart is fully sold to torx and Allen keys ❤️
Angled screws only work halfway well with Pozidriv or Torx, standard Phillips slip too.
Btw, why is Torq-set or Tri-wing so uncommon? They seem the best mechanically.
Edit: no way to change image size in markdown?
Efitedit: why does this exist? Oval
Because it's a fucking stupid design! Fuck Phillips, long live Robertson!
A 500+ million dollar budget and you can't even take a proper picture.
What's wrong with the picture?
I thought we got over Bricks and Screws years ago
Oh man, this is 100% real. Disney is such garbage...
Meh, it's one of those things that's going to be around forever. I would be absolutely unsurprised if crosshead screws were still a thing in 4800 ce.
You're building a light saber.
Do you:
A. Weld everything
Or
B. Drill holes and thread the holes for a bolt
I'm sure they have some kind of crazy riveting technology. Is she installing screws because she wants to be able to easily take apart her lightsaber if needed?
Well, the option with screws makes it more repairable.
Republic era lightsabers used neither. They held themselves together kinda like jointing in woodwork.
Also the image doesn't show a lightsaber? It's a bo-staff built out of literal scraps?
That depends, is the person building it a DIY tinker, or a mass production factory worker? Because a tinkerer is absolutely going to want to open it up easily.
I mean, supposedly some lightsabers were built in a cave. They probably used whatever was on hand, and I'm thinking screws are more common in rubbish strewn pits and rankor caves than welding machines.
Screws maybe
But you have to machine a hole in the metal for the screw to function
You know how hard it would be to drill a hole for a screw in a cave with scrap parts and no power drill?
All you need to crudely weld, probably as strong as a screw, is heat. Fire is easy in a cave.
I'd wager they could melt some metal together before devising a cave drill press.
We have no idea what metal or alloy it is. They could have an alloy that melts easily, but once hard, it adheres to other metals and practically unbreakable. Just find some scraps of that alloy to easily weld.
Or perhaps the Jedi are also just cooking with water.