Anyone know what the heck the Pozidriv/Round Hole combo is for?
Anti-removal/tamper resistant. The angle of the slots make it really easy to tighten, a fucking bitch to remove.
Don’t quote me, but if I remember correctly, that is the larger size where the center is more solid like an elliptical half oval that extends nearly to the tip and the fins of the cross are attached. I think it also has the four Pozi minor points at 45 degrees from the cross. It has more of a spline like structure rather than the four pointed cone of a typical Phillips. That tip won’t fit any other Phillips cross. I have only used them a few times, but have had many driver sets that include them. These type are usually tossed in my misc tools drawers because accidentally grabbing them is annoying…
psychopaths
Now I want to see a ‘how it’s made’.
Philips are too easy to strip and Slotted screws are rage inducing trying to keep the driver aligned. :(
Philips are too easy to strip
Sluts
You haven’t lived until you’ve put your driver in all the holy slots
Disagree, Torx all day.
Everything should be a bolt head, you strip bolt heads from incorrect spanners or when shits fucked.
Everything else just fails.
Today I had a 10mm Allen key head strip internally because it was just to damn tight from rust.
Bolt heads stand proud. You can’t build a deck with them.
Just extra grippy
Phillips/square? You mean pre-half-stripped and here I come with a too small screwdriver to finish the job.
Philips/Square/Slotted (all three combined) is really common in North American electrical. Switches, outlets, breakers; all commonly use them for terminal screws.
Great for lower torque applications; you certainly wouldn’t use them for like a deck/structural screw.
You can torque a Roberson until either the screw, driver, or motor break
Robertson on it’s own, yes. As long as you use the proper size driver before you round out the square.
When you start carving out space for additional drivers though, the screw head becomes much weaker. The combo Robertson/Slotted/Philips screw heads will not standup to the same forces.
Makes sense, I haven’t seen Robby+inferior. What the world needs is a Roberson deep, and a torx shallow, on the same head. Everybody can use one of the best 2 drives without fighting about which is better
Friend, that is a REALLY good idea. Do something with it before someone else does.
Take it, I don’t have the tool making capacity or honestly emotional effort available to go farther than a good idea. But thank you, made me feel nice for a change.
i don’t always strip my screws to death but when i do, what the hell do you mean they got the job started for me?
They are all flat head if you have a friend with a large enough selection of drivers to borrow. May take 2 fh for the spanner head.
Never heard of Phillips the screw before. We call it Kreuzschlitzschraube and the tool for it is a Kreuzschlitzschraubendreher, and I think that’s beautiful.
But it’s absolutely fascinating that torx on the other hand is here with its generic name.
Although in my opinion there are three slots only: torx, hex and wrong.
Never heard of Phillips the screw before. We call it Kr💩ube and the tool for it is a Kr💩💩er, and I think that’s beautiful.
I am American.
Not pictured here is also ‘JIS’ or Japanese Industry Standard screws.
They are very similar to Philips, but they’re slightly deeper with sharper corners. They have less tendency to ‘cam-out’ and strip the screw head.
Supposedly the camming out thing is actually intentional design in Philips screws, to prevent screw guns from over torquing screws in early automotive/aircraft assembly lines; but there’s not actually evidence to support that according to Wikipedia.
Not pictured here is also ‘JIS’ or Japanese Industry Standard screws.
Yeah I thought it was funny they got the JIS head shape but not the drive.
They are very similar to Philips, but they’re slightly deeper with sharper corners. They have less tendency to ‘cam-out’ and strip the screw head.
Until you try to drive one with a Philips because who the fuck outside of Japan has a JIS driver lying around, then they strip real easy. Ask me how I know.
Why, why, are there so many different cross-shaped screw drives?
who the fuck outside of Japan has a JIS driver lying around, then they strip real easy. Ask me how I know.
Funnily enough, I only know about these because I’ve got one of I Fix-It’s screwdriver sets with 70 driver bits.
I was wondering why there were two sets of what looked like Philips and went looking for info.
Funnily enough, I only know about these because I’ve got one of I Fix-It’s screwdriver sets with 70 driver bits.
I got one of these too, and holy shit is it worth it. Great purchase. I love not having to wonder if I’m going to have the right screwdriver head (generally. Obviously, this thread has taught me that there’s like infinite more types)
If I could just wave a magic wand and make it happen I would change all screw-type fasteners into Torx and just be done with these problems forever.
Give me a bunch of flat phillips/slot and I’ll assemble the world
also relevant Bonus xkcd
Hexagons are the bestagons!
I worked as a supervisor where my predecessor thought square/Robertson were superior without listening to the others who were used to torx. I very quickly changed back to using torx.
Would you have let an employee continue to use Roberson if that was their preference?
No. It was a scenic construction shop. Letting one person use a different standard would slow the process during break down or repairs. Having to remind the others to swap bits for one scenic piece or even on the same piece when it’s controlled chaos at best is not worth it.
Yea, I suppose. We just kept swap bits with both in our drivers for the one guy we let used torx or he’d have a fit. Or deliberately snap shafts
Whats the advantage of 1 over the other?
Square/Robertson bits hold the fastener tightly so they don’t fall off when starting to drive them. Star/Torx doesn’t hold as well.
It also doesn’t let the bit torque out when your driving into something hard like walnut or oak. In my furniture making days we exclusively used Robertson because the ability to stick a screw on the driver, and to know absolutely that you won’t slip out and gouge the workpiece.
Square/Robertson claims to have less slippage and less prone to rounding out. That’s never held up in my experience. Torx has the same claims and outside of some user error, it’s held up for me.
Torx torx torx torx!
I use exclusively torx or tamper-proof torx for my projects and I love it so much.
SQUARE
You mean Robby
Canadian detected.
Nice drawing, but how exactly is this a guide?
I would actually love to see explanation of what is best use case for the screws (the first two rows)
You only need Torx screws (six-lobe) The only reason to have a bit set with the rest of the heads is so that you can remove an old fastener and replace it with torx.
Try designing stuff to share with people in CAD. You’ll quickly learn to collect such references.
What is this square?
It is called a Robertson not a square.
Not like I made the thing…
Personally, I hate all use of narcissistic, nonintuitive nomenclature. Cross or X are just terrible descriptors, where a random unrelated name holds some utility. It is a square hole. The person that convinced some 1907 patent monkeys that a square hole in metal is innovative has no value to me.
If you’re looking at a guide like this, it’s pretty likely that it’s because you need to know what to put into a search engine to buy the right screwdriver, so it’s absolutely got value to know the name other people are using for a thing and selling it as.
The perimeter of the hole is square. The hole and driver are a trapezoidal prism.
It’s called Robertson by proud Canadians, in the US, at least, “square” is common. A square drive also wasn’t invented by Robertson, he just made the tooling for manufacturing the screws to be economical.
Technically Robertson has a taper to it, while square drive doesn’t. Though nobody really differentiates it in common usage.
At least with star drive, while they are the same, pretty much everyone calls them Torx.
Okay, now I’m really confused. I was going to comment that the six-lobe shape is known to me as star bits, and then I did a search to see if anyone else uses the name, but these sites say they’re 5-point bits, but they’re star-shaped, not pentagons. The star bits in my security bit set all have six points, and I’ve not come across a five-pointed star screw because I’d surely remember being pissed off about them not working. Where/when are five-pointed stars used?
6-lobe, star, and Torx are all names for the same somewhat common screw type. Torx is a trademarked brand name however.
Separately there’s a 5-lobe screw called ‘pentalobe’ that’s looks just like the 6-lobe but with, well…, 5 lobes. It was developed by Apple iirc, to keep people out of their products and make repair harder.
My previous house had security screens on the windows with screws that I could never find a driver for - it was a few years ago, but I think they were pentalobe with the security nub in the middle. I didn’t look too hard though - it was a good excuse to not wash the windows.
The common hack makes it easier to remember: the common star, or brand name Torx, is the same as a hexagon. If you have a full set of both SAE and Metric star drivers, there is a star that will fit tightly into nearly all hexagon cap screws. If you strip a hexagon screw cap, using a star driver will often work to remove it. This only works because it is the same number of points.
There are many other types, but the common star is the 6 point.
What is labelled “flat” here I’ve only ever heard of as “countersunk” and what’s labelled as “slotted” I’ve only ever heard of as “flat head”. Also wtf is “PF”?
PF = Plastic thread Forming. They are basically a self-tapping screw meant for plastics.
damn your area uses dumb names for things then lol
calling a drive type by the head shape, that’s wild
Thanks – little known fact, I time traveled to a hundred years ago to invent these terms.
“square” aka Robertson
I thought, for some reason, that Robertson was ostracized from the screw world.
Yeah screw Robertson
Best drive going hands down. I don’t need a deliberate tourqe out to save my driver, I’m a big boy. Plus it usually just breaks the screw
In the USA maybe.
Everywhere else it’s pretty common.
Fun fact, Henry Ford wanted to use them on his cars, but tried to screw Robertson in the deal. His petulance is the reason that Americans can’t benefit from this perfect design.
I knew there was some reason for it, but I couldn’t get my brain to remember what it was; but this sounds familiar.
I had the same thought! Also I’ve only ever heard “torx” instead of “six lobe” although I’m guessing torx is a brand name.
The one labelled phillips i only ever heard it being calles “cross” and the one labelled pozidriv i only heard it being called “star” but maybe is just ny country
Yeah, in the US I’ve only heard “Philips” or occasionally “four way”. We say star here also though, but I think for the “six lobe” iirc
And if you lack the screwdriver. So long as the head is not the flat style and you have room. Angle grinder/dremel and everything turns into a flat head screw.
Slot screw head you mean. Flat head refers to a head with a shape designed to go into a countersunk hole.
…no it doesn’t. Flat head screwdriver. The head type is called a countersink or self-setting.
um no, that’s wrong.
You can type “flat head fastener” into google and it will explain to you that you are incorrect. Perhaps you don’t have much experience purchasing fasteners?
The person I replied to edited their comment to correct it.
Translation error
Now what I want is a chart of use cases with them all listed in order by usability for each use case.
A good portion of these are ‘security’/anti-tamper fasteners, which basically just means they’re intentionally weirdly shapped and uncommon so people aren’t likely to be carrying the screwdrivers to tamper with stuff.
Stops things like bored crackheads disassembling the toilet stall in a public bathroom.
Anything in the bottom two rows (other than hex) and you are welcome to curse the ancestry of the person who decided to use that type of fastener.
