
Cross-Head, Cross-Point, Cruciform,  Square Drive Screws and Drivers - nkurz
http://www.instructables.com/id/When-a-Phillips-is-not-a-Phillips/
======
olyjohn
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.

~~~
dfc
I don't count national standards as "culture." But I am curious what other
culture you think goes unnoticed inside of Japanese cars?

~~~
zachsnow
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.

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asher
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...](http://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/bsp-bell-system-
practices-by-doc/bsp-categories-by-later-division-number-by-
doc/020-199-apparatus-tools-gauges-test-eq-power/074-099-divisions-tools-and-
gauges/075-division-tools-materials-common-use/4221-075-160-301-screwdrivers-
selection-use-and-maintenance/file)

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.

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ComputerGuru
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.)

~~~
StavrosK
If there’s just one takeaway from the article, it’s this: Why the hell can't
we standardize on a single head type?

~~~
ComputerGuru
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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".

------
megaman22
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.

------
neogodless
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.

~~~
hoosieree
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...

[1]: [https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/scrolljacking-the-good-
th...](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/scrolljacking-the-good-the-bad-the-
ugly)

------
ficklepickle
I love Robertson. The nice, proper, tapered Robertson, especially for wood
screws. It's a shame they aren't more popular outside of Canada.

I am, however, ashamed that I wasn't aware of all the Phillips variants. That
would explain why I was drilling out screws last week!

I really enjoyed that article.

------
ComputerGuru
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.

~~~
cr0sh
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.

------
foobar1962
Twice will scrolling down the site it auto-switched to a fake "you have been
infected with a trojan" or "your flash player is out of date" page. Yuk.

One is from [http://help24center.com](http://help24center.com) and is dressed
to look like some kind of official or system alert from Apple.

------
Animats
Where's Torx? Hex head?

~~~
zachsnow
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.

~~~
nkurz
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!

~~~
jessaustin
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.

~~~
cr0sh
> 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.

------
simooooo
Interesting. Allen is still my favourite.

~~~
alejohausner
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.

