I’ve been cleaning my oven. At the back of the oven is a fan with a cover. The cover is held in by two screws with cross heads. One of the screws comes out easily. The other is stuck. I tried it yesterday and it was stuck then, so I started cleaning the oven with the panel left in place. It’s a dirty job but the Oven Pride I used has worked well. But cleaning hasn’t enabled me to loosen the screw. The oven will need another dose of cleaner. And I want to do behind the panel because it will be filthy. The amount of - well, you can imagine - that came out was considerable.
I had a glass of wine at lunch, so I can’t drive round to B&Q for penetrating oil. I’ve tried using a hammer on the screwdriver to give it a better purchase.
All good advice. Make sure the screwdriver you’re using really locks into the screw, and keep forward pressure on it to keep it from spinning out and chewing up the recess. The longer the screw head stays intact, the easier the job.
Hit it with a little shot of Liquid Wrench or the like, and wait at least an hour. Then hit it again with the releaser, and wait overnight. Patience is a virtue.
Try lifting and wiggling the fan cover a little. Sometimes you can move it just enough to break the screw loose from any surface binding.
Worse case, drill off the head of the screw and then use a pair of small vice-grips to remove the stub sticking out when you remove the cover.
Easy-Outs are great on bolts and big screws, but don’t come in a size small enough for your basic #8-#10 appliance screw.
If the problem is that the head is rounded out, so the screwdriver just slips, then as a step before drilling you can try just grabbing the outside of the screwhead with the vice grips and turning it. You may get it out that way, or you may twist off the head so you don’t need to drill!
Take a bow that man! This did the trick. I decided to give it another go and it came out quite straightforwardly after the other screw came out and I wiggled it a bit.
It seems that enough Oven Pride got behind the cover to mean that a rinse cleaned it all.
Replace all the screws you removed with new ones so when you have to do this again, you will be doing it with new screws, not old ones. If you can find them, try and get stainless (non-magnetic) ones. They will resist the heat better and won’t scale up as much. Do not use galvanized screws! The zinc will vaporize and can be poisonous. You may want to investigate hex-head screws (not socket head, like an allen wrench would fit, but a raised hex-head that a small socket-wrench or nut driver would be used on). While it takes more than just a screwdriver, they are much more likely to come out instead of strip.
After forty-odd years of working on older homes, older cars and a whole ton of stuff “worth fixing,” you develop a whole toolbox of tricks. Glad to have passed one along.
the large cover has leverage on the relatively small screw.
screws into metal sheet just spin when the metal sheet is clear of the thread (eg the top of the thread is missing or fouled … )
So you pull the screw out with the cover, and the thread is pulled into the metal sheet that holds it in place… and the sheet then grips the thread properly, the thread does it job… ie turning the screw anticlockwise ejects the screw.
