Every time I go to buy ink for my printer, and I’m confronted with literally hundreds of different cartridges, the same two thoughts go through my mind:[ol][li]“Why the heck can’t they decide on a just handful of good designs? Why the ridiculous proliferation?” – and then:[/li][li]“Get used to it. This is really no different than when I would hunt down my particular typewriter ribbon when I was young.”[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]
oh that one’s easy- so they can force you to buy ink from them at ridiculous prices.
For the last 20 years I have owned a screwdriver called a “Reed Prince.” It’s still brand new because I have never used it. It looks almost identical to a Philips. Did some google searching on it, and there’s very little written about it.
If I ever meet the chap who invented those combo heads that mix slotted, Phillips and Robertson into one shallow head, I’m going to plug their tongue into a 240-volt circuit.
So many shapes cut into one head yields a head that doesn’t work well with any driver. I often wind up using a flat driver as the other shapes are goobered out.
As for the cover plates, if you’re twisting hard enough to make the screwdriver slip and scar the head, you’re doing something wrong.
Note that there’s a distinction between “security” and the “one way” screws you sometimes see in bathroom stalls. In one case you deliberately have an unusual driver and a design which can’t easily be unscrewed without that driver. Authorized service people will have the driver and be able to unscrew the things. The one way design used for bathroom stalls, with a half slot which catches only to tighten the bolt, aren’t intended to be unscrewed during the lifetime of the stall.
I have noticed recently that a lot of smaller boxes of screws do that now. I think I’ll end up with so many Torx heads that I won’t know what to do with them.
In this thread, I described how I encountered a triple square bolt on my 1991 Pontiac Sunbird. I’m still not sure why Pontiac had to use a triple square bolt for this application. I had to go out and buy a set of triple square drivers to remove the damn thing.
About the one thing that can be said for a slot head screw is that you can improvise a driver for it out of just about any flat object. Who hasn’t used a dime to open a battery compartment at some point? Not as necessary now that everyone carries some kind of multi tool around on their key chain.
The Phillips head also doesn’t require an exact match, so you can have 1 Phillips screwdriver rather than a set of them, and be able to manage a large range of screw head sizes. Phillips head and simple slots will continue to exist for applications where you expect the average person to unscrew the thing with minimal tools they have lying around the house.
many battery compartment cover screws were designed to be opened with a coin (dime or quarter) and not a screwdriver. to fill the slot width with a screwdriver would take a huge (for this task) screwdriver and the bottom of the slot is not flat but curved to fit a coin.
engineer_comp_geek already provided the canonical answer to this question (automation and proprietary tooling) but it is worth noting that this pattern is repeated in other types of mechanical fasteners, thread types, plumbing joints, et cetera; each nation or industry ends up developing one or a few types of connection or interface, and then either one tends to dominate by shear volume or you have a handful of “standards” while the others pop up intermittently just to piss you off. This happens in hydraulic and pneumatic fittings, where you have JIC 37°, SAE 45°, SAE J1453 ORFS, SAE 4-bolt split flange, NPTF, BSPT, and a huge collection of ISO 12151 connectors with different interfaces, plus a bunch of other miscellaneous threaded connector types that one occasionally runs into when disassembling former Warsaw Pact equipment. Aside from politics and the occasionally obsessive engineer who feels the need to take up the quixotic lance and champion a particular type of fitting, there is no reason to have one or at most two of these types of fittings any any newly designed hardware. The common JIC 37° or SAE J1453 are more than adequate for 99% of all commercial hydraulic fitting needs, but damned if you don’t open up a piece of construction or ag equipment and find representation of nearly all of these (yes, even NPTF) somewhere inside.
You folks are discussing drive recesses, not heads. There are also different heads. There are flat heads, round heads, bin heads, fillister heads, oval heads, pan heads, and so forth. The head refers to the blob at the end of the screw, not the hole in it used to apply torque.
True, but most people refer to the torque driver interface as the “head”, as in “Phillips head”, “Torx head,” et cetera, as the o.p. clearly was. Unlikely the torque driver interface, the types of heads all have practical purposes, either cosmetic or functional.
Then there are thread classes, protective and anti-friction coatings, locking features, et cetera. There is nothing simple about even a “simple screw”.
Used commonly in furniture assembly. I have a box of wood screws with a reed prince drive that came from a store that sells things to furniture and cabinet makers. Most people think they are phillips and bugger up the heads when they try to tighten or loosen the screws.
Recalled seeing this comprehensive writeup on different drive interfaces on instructables.com
Had to register to post it up, because there’s a lot of great info contained within:
Even has 2 different kinds of triple square drives on there.
“Triple Square, also known as a XZN are commonly found on German vehicles such as BMW, Mercedes, and Volkswagen. These screws are used in high torque applications such as cylinder head bolts and drive train components. Increasingly, triple square screws are found on other European and Asian makes of cars.”
“Security screws have been in existence for 50 years and most are without patent protection. “Tamperproof” bits are being manufactured, imported, and widely distributed, without restraint. There are many thousands outlets and catalogues in circulation marketing security bits and with this ease of access it has made Torx-pin®, Hex-pin®, Phillips-pin®, Spanner, Triwing®, Tri-Groove®, Gamer screws and One-Way screws “vandal-proof” only. “Tamperproof screws” are mostly a myth.”
Would take that first sentence to indicate that it’s possible to patent them, but rare.
For wood construction in Canada, Robertson compatible heads are nearly universal. Almost every box of wood screws you could buy are either Robertson or Phillips-Robertson combination heads. Hardware used to always come with Phillips head screws but nearly all the good quality stuff comes with combination heads or even just Robertson heads now. Tradesmen all use cordless impact drivers or drills now and Phillips heads are just a waste of our time in comparison.
Drywall screws are still Phillips because they require the torque limiting cam-out of the Phillips for the depth setting of the drywall guns to work properly - Robertson would not be good for this purpose.
Machine screws are either hex (Allan) head, hex socket, Torx, Phillips or a combination head. And European hardware is all Pozidrive (an excellent format).
Drywall is the only reasonable use of the Phillips head I can think of. I hate the damn things.
