This is about screws, bolts, and the like that are part of various appliances. My experience over the years is that these are generally not of the size and shape that you can purchase replacements for in Home Depot or Lowes. Question is why.
Two possibilities are 1) the manufacturer deliberately makes these of non-standard size so they can profit from selling replacements at outrageous markups, or 2) they are based on genuine engineering considerations.
Isn’t that more of a problem of the poor hardware selection in big box stores? Particularly for anything with metric threads, which seem to be more commonly used by OEMs. It doesn’t take much exotic engineering or conspiracy for an OEM to decide on a torx head metric screw that’s impossible to find locally.
I’ve always been able to find exact replacement fasteners on big catalog suppliers like McMaster-Carr – just have to buy them by the 10- or 100-count.
Good hardware stores still have a better selection of stainless, metric and odd-head fasteners. Look for the aisle with the stacks and stacks of gray pull-out drawers.
There are manufactured items that are very difficult to get replacement parts for. You pretty much have to get them from the OEM, or from pulling the part from another similar device.
I have this issue with my hydrosurge bathing system. It has little brass fittings that cannot be found anywhere, so if there is any maintenance required, I have to send it in to their authorized repair center.
I dunno for sure if this is just to maintain a monopoly, or if it is an actual engineering issue that requires the custom parts, but I actually do lean towards it being necessary, as, well, there are not little brass fittings that I can find that are slightly different either, so it stands to reason that they had to create their own part, rather than take it off the shelves in the first place.
As far as Torx screws and all that, those are easy enough. I have a screwdriver with pretty much all torx head fittings that I picked up at a hardware store for under $5.
Too difficult for a retailer to supply every possible part used. The manufacturer can save money with a custom parts at high enough volume. If everything was built with standard parts that could be found at most hardware stores then everything would cost more. And a lot of these items are considered disposable too. Even if covered by warranty of service contract they’d rather keep the price low, decrease failures, and perform modular or entire replacements instead of having a tech replace a screw. And if the item is low enough in cost they don’t give a damn.
I think mostly this.
When you’re building a few million of something, you design and buy the exact fastener you need, maybe even built to order. Designing around a constraint like “screws Home Depot stocks” is going to be more work (because you have to now design your actual custom parts around a more limited set of fasteners) and probably going to result in a higher cost for your materials because you end up making three parts slightly larger rather than using one tiny custom screw somewhere.
Just a couple of days ago I ran into atri-wing screw on a pump. Never saw one before - hell, I’d never even heard of one.
The galling thing was that the other three screws that held the housing together were standard Phillips-heads, and there was nothing about the size or threading on the tri-wing that was any different from them. It was as if someone on the assembly line ran out of Phillips screws and grabbed something out of the wrong bin on the parts table.
You not only won’t find the screw at Home Depot, you won’t find the screwdriver there, either!
Video game or electronics repair kits usually contain a tri-wing screwdriver.
I have yet to find a triangle head screw or screwdriver at any big box stores or some small one’s either. I filed down part of a square headed one before and wound up stripping the screw, not a good plan. Does anyone know where to located these? Preferably hex shank bits. It seems so handy to have around especially once I have a kid or two (toys).
Not sure what’s in the pack but Harbor Freight has a set of security bits that may have one.
it depends on what the differences are. Odd screw head shapes like flange bolts might be to accommodate the specific fastening tools they use on the assembly line. or, novel (but standard) drive types like Torx/TorxPlus might be used where they need a higher torque for the fastener size, and hex head is impractical and Philips just sucks*.
further, for applications where there may be a lot of vibration or thermal cycling, the manufacturer might have opted to use prevailing-torque screws. These have a feature such as deliberately distorted threads or a shank formed out of round. this causes them to “bind” within whatever they’re threaded into and resist loosening in service.
Yes, they do. Nice little kit, actually. I unfortunately have to rely on it more and more, just as the OP has noted.
RE: McMaster-Carr
From what I know, you need to take out a second mortgage to get shit from that place!
Not at all.
I buy production-quatities of fasteners from them regularly, and their prices are very competitive.
Yeah, for production quantities.
What if I need just 1?
If its a good hardware store just show the guy behind the desk your screw, he will tell you what it is and sell you however many you need.
You buy the 50-pack for $15, pay $10 for shipping, and congratulate yourself for fixing a gizmo for 1/10 the cost of buying a replacement.
And then you end up with an increasingly bizarre collection of hardware that you never get rid of, because someday you’ll totally need the rest of those M3-0.5 x 8mm nylon thumbscrews…
Ooh. Nevermind.
I don’t follow. If the manufacturer can get custom parts cheap because of volume, couldn’t it also get standard parts cheap because of volume? If you’re going to a screw manufacturer with an order for 100,000 screws, I don’t see why a custom screw would be cheaper.
Back to the main topic, I’ve always thought that if they have their own custom parts, it forces consumers and repair shops to buy replacement parts from them and not go to a hardware store. Then they can make you spend $5 for a bolt that a similar sized one cost under a buck at a hardware store. Plus they can gouge for shipping and handling fees.
It’s the number of parts. Manufacturers will do anything to save pennies per unit when the volume is high requiring many thousands of different non-custom parts plus the custom ones. Even without the custom parts it’s too many for the hardware store to carry. The hardware store can’t stock 1 million different screws, the manufacturer ends up having to use something a little larger or heavier duty than necessary and has to make the parts a little larger than needed for the slightly larger fastener. Then the product weighs a little more adding to shipping costs. It’s not just a matter of using custom parts either, many of the parts are stock items but not used widely enough to justify the hardware store stocking them along with the common items. Sometime the custom or special parts will lower their manufacturing cost. My local hardware could be stocking as many as 1 thousand different fasteners in different sizes and materials right now, that’s about all they have room for and they won’t automatically restock the least commonly used items. They can’t offer 10,000 different replacement parts, and even that’s not enough to cover everything.
In my experience, the more specialized something like a machine is, the more proprietary replacement parts, etc become. This is true for appliances but also in industrial applications as well. Heck, we see it in software a lot too.
