Fun fact: Torx screwdrivers are compatible with Torx Plus screws, but Trox Plus screwdrivers are only compatible with Torx screws that are one size larger
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Robinson aka the square head is by far the superior choice.
I’m not canadian, so I don’t have a lot of experience with robertson. But from the limited experience that I do have, I would rate it 10/10.
What would you recommend for smaller screws (e.g. for electronics)? As far as I know, there aren’t smaller sizes of robertson like there are with torx?
Pozidrive has real nice engagement and doesn’t cam out like Phillips does. And JIS drivers do a better job in Phillips than Phillips ones do.
Yeah but JIS for screws/bolts has been abandoned by the Japanese govt as of… 2005?My JIS screwdrivers are fantastic, not easy to torque out on a regular Phillips screw. Stick with the “vessel” brand.
E: I can’t find anything more than discussion about it, nothing official. Sorry for the wrong info, looks like JIS screws are still alive.
I did not know that, but yes to Vessel!
I think I was wrong, see edit. Carry on!
After wrecking some JIS screws on a vintage reciever, I bought a nice Vessel-brand JIS driver set, and use it for all my crosshead needs.
Pozidriv reliably makes me projectile vomit ☹️
I’ve driven tens of thousands of pozidrive 2/3 screws into timber with an impact driver. For whatever reason my experience is the diametric opposite of yours. Big up the Pozidrive massive.
It’s probably because of the impact driver. The bit seats back into the bottom of the slot between every impact. This doesn’t happen with normal drivers.
People (try to) use a drill driver as opposed to an impact driver? Wow. I now understand why they could have a grim experience… thanks.
I absolutely love the amount of strong opinions on screw heads 🙏
Me too. Nice to see the passion of the construction industry ( and the weekend warriors too)
Philips doesn’t cam out that easily either. Most people just don’t realize there’s three common sizes.
*Robertson
As a person that changes out a lot of electrical outlets and switches I have to agree.
Found the Canadian.
LOL sure, good one… Only time that square abomination is the answer is if the question is “what do you get if you put a toddler in charge of designing a poor knockoff unbrako head?”
TEAM TORX REPRESENT!
Things are getting heated in the screw fandom
Also great for tamper-resistant screws. Makes it harder for my patients to get screws out to make weapons / self injury implements or to get to the electrical wiring or create a ligature attachment point.
my brother in christ have you seen phillips head and posi drive?
Life sucks. You can’t win.
Working on an 86 RV and hating posi drive. I swear they were designed to strip.
Also no mention of Spider drive that everyone insists is a torx
Or Phillips and JIS?
АW Drive On Top
Don’t discount hex, paired with a ball-end wrench, those are great for odd angles or tight spaces a straight wrench can’t get too.
they’re pretty good but semi liable to stripping due to lower surface area, as long as you use the right tool, and a quality one, you’ll be fine though.
Also hex is somewhat inter-compatible with torx, which is really cursed.
Torx are easier to strip, especially the smaller sizes. They’re pretty much single use screws.
small screws in general are just easy to strip. Small torx is also liable to breaking a driver, like most small screws and drivers.
Torx though, i’ve never had strip out once, even doing construction with them. Phillips on the other hand, they kill screws constantly, and the bits themselves get all chewed up causing all kinds of problems. Torx bits still look fine though.
Torx aren’t exactly tapered, so they much less of a problem with stripping, compared to any tapered design, because tapered designs have issues with backing off.
small screws in general are just easy to strip
Hexes are very sturdy. I ride mountain bikes and for some reason brake rotors are secured with Torx while all other screws are hexes. Torx on rotors are usually tightened to 4-6Nm and they are single use 99% of the time. At the same time there are plenty of hexes of the same size which are tightened to 8-10Nm and there are zero issues.
Torx are fucking useless. And don’t get me started on tiny Torxes in laptops…
you’re not using like, soft fasteners or some shit right?
I could see hex performing better on a softer material. That or you’re doing something goofy. I’d be surprised if torx were stripping at that low of a torque rating, unless ur using hex drivers on them or something.
And how many of these are needed by the dictates of their use VS how many are needed to restrict your access?
Torx is the 🐐! Phillips are just terrible, I prefer slotted over Phillips. You can slip out quite easily with slotted but if you are in there they work ok.
When you buy the screws they usually come with a drill bit that fits them
The EU should fine companies for introducing new standards that break old standards. Or any shit standards like Toslink: https://lemmy.world/comment/10671314 . Standardization organizations shouldn’t be sleeping through all this shit.
I don’t use screw drivers enough to know what these are for. But from a programmer’s standpoint, punishing people to deviate away from standard may cause more harm than good, no?
Suppose it’s easier/cheaper/more effective to deviate a bit from standard, why should I be punished to do things a bit differently?
One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those “extensions” started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS’s idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.
It’s complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where “just a little tweak” can be quite a big problem for a standard.
Thanks for the explanation.
I never realised how stupid it is that toslink can only plug in 1 way
Unexpected lonesome German
Y’all need Jesus
^H^H^H^H^H^HRobertson screws.___
I repair a lot of tech and I have never seen torx other than the standard, and security version. And security torx drivers are compatible with regular torx
I assume all those are proprietary temper resistant, tool for it will be expensive so not many tool shop gonna have it.
Not really. A solid set for security Torx is available for like $20 from reputable brands. Naturally, you can get higher quality sets and sets that add other security bits, but you still won’t land in an unacceptable price range even for private use, let alone a pro shop.
Torx plus is getting more common and you can use a torx bit on them still, and superior to torx IMO. I bet you’ve seen since but didn’t notice the difference. As a machine designer it’s my preference but I don’t often for cost
Torx plus ultra premium pro
Use torx all the time on not only building sites, but in machinery repair too.
There’s only one type of torx and I think OP is winding us up :)
Edit - ha ha oh my fucking god. So it turns out the patent for torx expired in 1990. No change for us in Europe, we’re still mostly using the original design.
Not so much for the yanks. Textron, the original patent holder, realised it’d be faaaar more profitable to “licence” slightly improved designs and try to phase out the original
Enjoy your torx my euro friends, and have a giggle at the seppos paying for a fucking screw head lol
Greed to the point of mental illness 😂
There’s only one type of torx
There isn’t. There’s Torx, Torx Plus, and Torx Paralobe. See here for more details: https://www.semblex.com/en/pdf-files/technology-files/torx-paralobe-pdf/ . Plus there’s also the ttap and tamper-resistant variants shown in the meme.
As other people have mentioned, Torx screwdrivers are forwards compatible with Torx Plus and Torx Paralobe. But the screwdrivers for the newer standards are not backwards compatible with older screws.
Similarly, Tamper-Resistant Torx screwdrivers can be used on regular Torx screws. But Tamper-Resistant Torx Plus screwdrivers cannot be used on regular Torx Plus screws – it’s a completely different shape!
If you’re in a professional setting where you order high-quality screws and drivers in bulk directly from a manufacturer, I’d imagine that this isn’t much of an issue. But if you’re a hobbyist or just need to repair something in a domestic setting, the three different torx variants plus the other non-torx hexalobular screws (WA drive, Polydrive, T-Star Plus) can cause quite a bit of confusion. Anecdotally, I have a set of what I thought were really low-quality Torx bits. Turns out, they’re actually good-quality Torx Plus bits that by design don’t fit my Torx screws.
Yeah that’s just what Big Torx wants us to think man
Put timing chains on a Ford v6 without a torx plus 55 and let us know how that went.
Security torx is actually very weak. If you don’t have the security bit, you can break it with a flat head and turn it into a normal torx.
There’s other types on cars
the worst is not when the screwdriver is fucked but the screw is. That is some huge pain in the ass
Torx doesn’t get fucked though, compared to alan or philips
What about square drive… where does it fit in
Fun fact: There are plenty of times a screw that looks like a Philips head is also compatible with a square drive. I’ve mostly seen this on electrical outlets and Ikea furniture.
I don’t know why Robertson/square drives aren’t more common. They’re stable and they resist stripping and rounding.
Removed by mod
Robertson! Say his name!
I was saying it in Mercian for our southern neighbours
I’m not american so you wasted it anyways
That’s right, it goes in the square hole.
wait really? I would imagine those small corners would easily get flattened compared to something with deeper ridges like philips
Phillips strips way, way easier than Torx. Stripping generally happens when a screwdriver cams out, or pops out of the screw. Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia of Torx vs Phillips.
The hexalobular socket screw drive, often referred to by the original proprietary brand name Torx ( /ˈtɔːrks/) or by the alternative generic name star drive, uses a star-shaped recess in the fastener with six rounded points. It was designed to permit increased torque transfer from the driver to the bit compared to other drive systems. The drive was developed in 1967[44] by Camcar Textron.[45] Torx is very popular in the automotive and electronics industries because of resistance to cam out, and extended bit life, as well as reduced operator fatigue by minimizing the need to bear down on the drive tool to prevent cam out.
And Philips on the other hand:
The Phillips screwdriver design has a tendency to cam out during operation due to angled contact surfaces which create an axial force pushing the driver out of the recess as torque is applied. Despite popular belief,[2] there is no clear evidence that this was a deliberate design feature. When the original patent application was filed in 1933, the inventors described the key objectives as providing a screw head recess that (a) may be produced by a simple punching operation and which (b) is adapted for firm engagement with a driving tool with “no tendency of the driver to cam out”.
I’m not sure about Allen. It doesn’t cam out very much, but it does still strip a lot easier than Torx. Probably due to the smaller contact points.
Well said.
And with the hex/Allen, it’s the small contact points as well as the smaller volume of material that needs to be deformed or removed before slippage can occur, as well as the angle of force on the contact point.
With a hex, the contact point and direction are such that the tool is effectively trying to scrape off material at an angle, and if/when it succeeds even a little bit, it’s now much more prone to fail.
With a Torx, the contact area might still be small, but it’s being applied to the lobe in a more perpendicular direction, so rather than a scraping failure, it’s more of a force that is pushing directly against steel instead of scraping. Not that it can’t fail, but the route to failure is significantly less likely.
Maybe because different material? Obviously CrV steel won’t get fucked like chinesium, no matter the shape.
