I’m pissed at Blue, the puppy! My daughter has a flashlight from the Blus Clues Live show. The battery has died, but the screw over the battery compartment has a traingular head pattern! None ofthe common drivers (torx?) will mate with this thing! Dang Blue! Ain’t-cha rich enough? Must you go exploiting the kids? - Jinx
Does any SDoper know where I might be able to get such an oddball driver? I once needed an oddball plumber’s socket wrench for my shower. Searched all over creation because it was an odd size - wouldn’t mate to my standard set. Turns out, after I finally find the specialized plumber’s socket in NJ, the bloody thing was only hand tight anyhow! :smack: :smack: :smack:
Bang head here!
- Jinx
No idea off the top of my head, but I do have a possibility for you: Get a square head screw driver (can’t remember the name of them, used in furniture) and grind two of the corners off of it at roughly the same angle as the ones in the screw which you’re wishing to remove.
They seem to be called tri-wing screwdrivers. A quick google found several vendors with drivers for cracking open a game-boy advance and others selling power-driver bits.
While I was busy googling, getting distracted about why someone would want to crack open a game bow, tuckerfan came up with the goods. I think I’m going to have get that set of bits, just so I can be the hero when a Jay Jay or Dora toy goes south.
Actually, I swiped the link from SpectBrain.
I now have a bit set with the triangles in it. Seems like every week some manufacturer is coming out with proprietary hardware to make it a pain not to use their “authorized service center”.
But before I did get ahold of the bit, I was kinda amused. See a triangle is for all intents and purposes, a flat head screw driver. All yo have to do is find one the right width to go from corner to corner.
Try the irrigation department at your home improvement store. I found that a tool already in my box fit the little bugger perfectly. Its a very fine headed driver to adjust sprinkler heads, its thick too so it wont just twist around and riun the driver and gall the screw. Barring that you could always grind down a #1 flat head to fit.
Gaa, posted too soon. I just realized there is also a head shaped like the old “vicks losenge” you knoe a triangle w/ rounded corners. I got that bit too in my little kit, but if I didn’t I would use an “easy out” (brand name screw extractor)
Gaa, posted too soon. I just realized there is also a head shaped like the old “vicks losenge” you know a triangle w/ rounded corners. I got that bit too in my little kit, but if I didn’t I would use an “easy out” (brand name screw extractor)
Assuming they are reffering to the old gameboys and not the new gameboy advance SPs, it’s because there is an after market light you can add to it. The older gameboys were not backlit and were a complete pain to play with. The kit would make it backlit and thus avoid the horrid ‘hot spot’ an attachable light would give off.
I’ve picked up a couple of sets of security bits on e-bay over the years. I’ll probably never use most of them, but these sets often go for a few dollars, and I figure I get that much amusement from having them on my bit rack. I’m weird that way.
WhenI was young, I used to simply grind down or otherwise modify cheap tools from dollar store tool sets (which aren’t much good for anything else, and would soon die under normal use anyway). It only takes a minute or two with a Dremel or similar motor-tool, and once you get intothe habit, you find yourself imagining and making all sorts of doohickeys that no one seems to have bothered to make. Home made tools may not look as elegant as store-bought, but they save me hours each month (time spent wrestling with the wrong tool, running out to buy “the right tool”, or trying to find the right tool I bought three years ago)
A lot of the most useful doohickeys in our house are barely ‘tools’ but are useful for specific common tasks. We have sections of bent steel pipe that excel at getting things out from under or behind furniture (including things whose shape or material resist retrieval, up to and including small pets) or serve as generic handle extenders for various purposes. After decades of evolution they are ideal for us, suffering only from the lack of universal nomenclature:
“Get me the stick”
“What stick?”
"The sofa stick.
“This one?”
“No, you idiot. Not the coin and playing card sofa-stick, the hamster sofa stick!”
“The fat hamster stick or the scared hamster stick?”
“Better make it the scared hamster stick. She looks pretty skittish.”
I glad to see that I’m not the only one who does this! Around this house, home-made expedients are called “cheaters.”
“Ah, crap. I jammed the garbage disposal again. Where’s the cheater?”
It’s amazing what a little more leverage can accomplish sometimes. 