If you own a Japanese car, really take notice of the JIS section. I spent years stripping out screws before I finally learned of the JIS screws. I always just thought it was me, or the screws were too tight. Nope, you need a JIS screwdriver to work on your car properly. Makes the job of taking everything apart about 10x easier. I'm honestly pretty blown away with how many Japanese cars, and how much culture there is around them, and how few people realize the screws are different.
I imagine the idea was that, despite there being so much "car culture" around Japanese cars, many within the culture aren't aware of these things. I certainly had never heard of JIS screws, and I have worked on the odd Japanese motorcycle now and again.
I think you have misinterpreted him. His says there is culture around the cars, not within them. He is expressing surprise that even among aficionados whose self-identity sems defined by modifying and repairing Japanese cars, there is surprisingly little realization that a Phillips screwdriver is rarely the right tool for working on a Japanese product.
The Bell System (America's telecom monopoly until it's breakup in the 80s) pretty much avoided Phillips, etc. screws. Everything was slot (or pin-hex tamperproof). I do see mention of a Phillips driver in this 1961 BSP: http://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/bsp-bel...
The slotted terminal screws worked well because they were cheese head, or cylindrical, allowing the driver to apply torque at the very edge of the slot. Outside the Bell System, terminal screws are usually binding head, which has a fillet around the top edge, removing material where it's most needed.
If there’s just one takeaway from the article, it’s this: Phillips screws were a niche-specific invention and have absolutely no business being as popular as they are today (except that they’re ridiculously cheap to make). They absolutely suck for every other purpose and it’s a shame they’re as popular as they are.
(Pro-tip: IKEA never uses Phillips screws. They’re exclusively Pozidriv. Get yourself a Pozidriv driver and assembling their furniture becomes an order of magnitude easier and faster.)
To the contrary, I think the arrtie made it very clear why there are competing standards. Read the section about the Robertson drive and the Model T, the difficulties in getting anyone but ASC to go for the Phillips head, the different approaches to to forming heads in screws and their technological requirements, the natural progression of improvements to torque delivery, the expiry of patents, and the development of newer applications for screws that had differing requirements.
But I know what you really meant ;) - there really are an insane amount of heads covered in the article, and it doesn’t even scrape the top of the barrel.
Well that's the thing, it seems that only a few types are actually used because of technical advantages. Phillips heads should have been super niche, and we should have just standardized on a happy medium of "not too expensive to make, not too bad". Instead, we have all these thousands of types, most of which are minor improvements on previous types.
Relevant XKCD of "now there are eleven standards".
Ikea uses a variety of screws, even though their best known "key to happiness"-type screws are hex drive. Anything below a certain size will have a different head, though. Small wood-holding screws, for example. Or the "sticky out" bits that their screw locks can attach to.
At this point, I don't want to use anything other than star-drive screws, like GRKs, if I can help it. They're a little pricier, but its worth not dealing with stripped out heads and bits that get all chewed up.
Off-topic: This is one of those web sites where, each time I pan and scroll to the content, and prepare to start reading, it suddenly jumps around again. My patience ran out after the second time this happened.
Some sites do this intentionally. Not sure if there's a positive name for it, but I've always seen it called "scrolljacking"[1]. FWIW, I don't notice it when I view the page, but that could be any number of OS/browser/extension permutations...
The first time I saw a one-way screw, I was struck by equal parts horror and admiration at the simplicity and effectiveness of locking people out of a device. It’s sheer genius in its simplicity.
Several years back there was a concept (don't know if it was ever realized) of a "smart bolt".
Essentially, it was a bolt that had an integrated electro-mechanical locking mechanism, plus a microcontroller.
The idea was that these bolts could be used in places where you wouldn't want them to be removed by just "anyone". One example was head bolts on a car (you can imagine how well that went over).
To remove the bolt after it was put in place and "locked" would require a special device that would apply power and a required code to the controller, to cause it to "unlock". Likely this device would be a special kind of wrench or socket.
Now, I could see such a device in certain cases - for example, lamp posts or traffic signs (though how often have you heard of people just removing those bolts?). But the application almost always illustrated had to do with cars; that manufacturers would be able to restrict access to repair to only dealers and no one else.
I'm not sure if this was why they never were created or not; maybe. I tend to think, though, that the complexity of integrating the required locking mechanism into a bolt while simultaneously ensuring its integrity and strength (especially in the case of say, head bolts), probably was more a factor in it.
> When I wrote this "ible" the original intent was to stick to Phillips look-a-likes. It grew to this.
> Due to input and interest shown by readers, I'm already working on a sequal, or re-write to include combo drives, security drives, and incorporate comments and new pictures.
Stripping a torx or "star drive" screw takes real effort; switching over was the best thing that ever happened to my mediocre carpentry and framing work.
I thought best part of the article was the explanation that Phillips head screws were in fact designed to be difficult to fully tighten:
The Phillips system was invented for use in assembling aluminum aircraft, with the object of preventing assemblers from tightening screws so tightly that the aluminum threads strip. The driver will cam out before that happens. ... Phillips is designed so that when excess torque is applied it will camout rather than ream the recess and destroy the bit.
It's not a bug that the screwdriver keeps slipping out when you are struggling to make that last quarter turn at an awkward angle, it's a feature!
This is sort of like the QWERTY keyboard layout: originally designed to slow down typists so they wouldn't type faster than the typewriters of the day could handle. That constraint is now long obsolete, yet we're still stuck with it.
The application that really showcases what TFA calls the "camout" feature is drywall. A drywall installer will keep the screwgun turning, and every time he punches the gun into the drywall, a new screw is pushed off the belt. The screw is driven until the gun hits its stop (a sliding mechanism that controls how close the gun can get to the drywall) and the screw naturally slips out when it's at the proper depth. This is important because drywall is quite fragile and otherwise it would be easy to drive a screw too far.
> This is sort of like the QWERTY keyboard layout: originally designed to slow down typists so they wouldn't type faster than the typewriters of the day could handle. That constraint is now long obsolete, yet we're still stuck with it.
Except that wasn't really the reason. The reason was to prevent the keys from jamming (by locating common letters and sequences of letters away from each other); the fact that it tended to slow typists down was only a side-effect.
Absolutely; I've also worked with screws that were, as far I as I could understand, purposely made of less rugged metal to ensure that when they were tightened against the object they were meant to fasten (made of plastic), they would strip before damaging it.
Still sucks to accidentally strip a screw that really should be that tight!
Hmmm... Why are Allen bolts made of hardened steel? Maybe a hexagon in mild steel would get stripped: it approximates a circle better than a square, so it could take less torque than a square.
