The Church of the Clocked Screws (2019)
blog.lostartpress.com
blog.lostartpress.com
As an aside everyone should know the difference between a Phillips and Pozidrive. It should be required teaching in schools to maintain everyone sanity. Pozidrive screws have a small engraved diagonal cross on the head, the driver has an extra ridge in the cross groove. Use the wrong screwdriver in the wrong screw and you will have a horrible time and wreck the screw head.
I have my grandfathers flat head screwdrivers and love them. Long shafts to help with alignment and prevent riding out. Lovely big wooden handles to help with torque.
Torx really should be used with an electrical screwdriver with a clutch though or you risk snapping the screws if you over tighten.
Philips and Pozidrive are designs to ride out before snapping the screw head off.
Still, when you go to your local hardware store, the kind of cheap screws that are sold in bulk are usually Pozidriv. Torx screws are also available but usually in more expensive, branded, retail packaging.
[100 'old-school' M3x5 screws](https://www.screwsandmore.de/de/sortiment/schrauben-und-bolz...) [50 Torx M3x5 screws](https://www.screwsandmore.de/de/sortiment/schrauben-und-bolz...)
Robertson4Life.
First I heard of them. Looks like that, in a pinch, a flat-head driver could turn it ...
(I'm Canadian. Robertson is the most common driver type here, except for imported products.)
I'm not sure about that: use of posidrive is somewhat regional. In the UK and Germany for example it's relatively common, while I don't think I have ever seen it "in the wild" in the US. In a browsing big-box home improvement stores I have never noticed them when looking at options, and the half dozen set I've accumulated over the years of screws driver sets that have a dozen bits have never include a posidrive driver.
I'm not sure about other areas of the world.
>> I'm not sure about that: use of posidrive is somewhat regional. In the UK and Germany for example it's relatively common, while I don't think I have ever seen it "in the wild" in the US.
> Frustratingly, IKEA uses pozi screws in some applications without including a driver.
IIRC, IKEA uses them in pretty much all applications and almost never includes a driver. An American who hasn't specifically been taught about Pozidrive will almost certainly confuse them for Philips and have a frustrating experience, unless they're so non-handy or pressed for time that they bought their tools from IKEA as well.
It's a weird situation: they're very unusual, except in one extremely popular area which is also the only place where many people will use tools.
One tool they had which became invaluable was the screw starter for flat-head screws. This was nothing like other screw starters commercially available, this worked beautifully and was elegantly simple. It was a thin brass rod about 8" long with a pair of thin steel lips out each end which started out in-contact with each other. When you shoved the lips into the slot on the screw it shoved the lips back into the brass rod and caused them to spread open and grab onto the slot from the inside. It had enough strength to survive dropping the tool on the ground and not release the screw. The tool was strong enough that you could actually fully tighten smaller screws without switching to a screwdriver. There were two sizes of the screw starter and we all kept them stashed everywhere. Once you got used to using this tool then it became clear slotted screws were superior and sooo much easier to work with than Phillips/et. al. There were never problems with a screw dangling off of a magnetic tip when held sideways, or non-ferrous screws not sticking.
Another in-house tool was the very simple "thumb saver" for screwing in PC peripheral connectors like VGA and DB9 cables. It was an 6" plastic tube with 1/2" slotted interior ends which fit over the thumb screws on the thumb screws. There was a different diameter hole on each end and it tapered to a smaller diameter as the hole went deeper. It made it cake to reach in and remove a single set of thumb screws when the back of a system was jammed up with lots of other cables in the way or if you had giant man hands. You could also easily over-torque the screws when re-attaching so guys had to be careful using them.
The SSA screw driver was another one, this was a custom screw driver for IBM's SSA storage system. My recollection was that IBM had proposed SSA to be the SCSI III spec and was rejected, so they ran with it anyway for use with RS/6000 (pSeries/System P/whatever). It was a serial implementation of SCSI and had these narrow blue/black cables and could transfer up to 40MB/s. The cables were a PITA to deal with as they were small and required the use of the screw driver because there was very little space to work around each connector so no thumb-screws. There was nothing terribly unique about the screw driver, it was slotted but had a sleeve tube shrouding the tip to keep the screw driver from slipping off. They required a bit of torque to fully tighten, but not too much. Occasionally some guy got the brilliant idea to cut the handle off one and jam it in a power driver. However no screw drivers we easily had access to had a low enough torque setting for this and these geniuses would usually end up breaking lots of connector ports on SSA arrays.
Is it possible to machine a screw, tap the threads, and control the depth of the countersink so as to produce perfectly aligned slots? It is, and it's been done, but it is also apparently a royal PITA, to indulge in some colorful vernacular. In poking around trying to find out if it's ever been done, and how you do it, I ran across the discussion forum at the Practical Machinist, where several different techniques are mentioned. You do find aligned screws in manufactured objects occasionally – Parker-brand shotguns are one example – but the various methods are extremely labor-intensive
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/why-screw-slots-arent-alig...
Let's get real, fancy mechanical watches are worse at timekeeping than cheap quartz watches. Their only purpose besides just being expensive is to show the incredible craftsmanship of the watchmaker.
That aligning screws is so difficult should add to the value, I'd expect fancy watch people to say "this $10k watch doesn't have aligned screws, but that $100k one does", as an argument to justify the price difference. And I would totally get it.
> In other words, the Speedmaster and [mechanical] watches like it provide a sense of permanence in an age with little of it. The Speedmaster available today is virtually the same as the one Aldrin wore on the moon, or indeed the one Omega introduced way back in 1957, as a tool for race-car drivers.
> It is unchanged because there’s nothing to change: The mechanical watch is, along with the bicycle, an arguably perfect invention. If wound every day and serviced regularly, it can run for perpetuity. There aren’t many things you can say that about in our era of fast fashion and biennial phone upgrades.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/omega-sp...
Once he'd pointed it out, it was obvious to see, and every other screw on the piano is horizontal.
Even using the author's method, the screw just isn't going to catch at the same point in the wood every time, so I think that a little margin on torque, or allowing for less-than-perfect, is required.
The tradition of clocking screws may be a bit silly but it is a mark of attention to detail. It is something you see in bespoke heirloom furniture and it serves no practical value.
If I'm looking for signs of quality then I want to see attention to detail where it matters, not for its own sake.
That said, I can appreciate the aesthetic appeal even if it's non functional.
Getting them pretty darned close doesn't require any extraordinary measures, and they're being driven into wood anyway. It's not like you're putting them in with a torque wrench according to some chart of screw size and material and wood species.
Just don't over-torque brass screws to clock them. That's a sure fire way to break the head off.
Whether the customer notices or not is not my concern. I do it to maintain the same high level of work throughout the building process. It costs approximately zero extra time, and at the price of custom work, I don't want to be explaining to the customer that some detail doesn't matter if it's a small matter to do it right in the first place.
Besides, I routinely put $75 worth of hinges alone on a piece[0]. Not clocking the screws would be like putting on a $3000 suit, and then tying the tie with a granny knot and leaving it peeking out from under the collar.
The fact that this level of attentiveness to detail and a will to do the job all the way right instead of just 90% right (or less) isn't much valued in software[1] has a lot to do with why I now build furniture instead.
[0] https://brusso.com The quality and tolerances match the price, and they sell sizes and types of hinges that nobody else does.
[1] Apologies if your company is one of the rare exceptions.
https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/portfolio
> We couldn't find the page you were looking for. This is either because:
Little details on other furniture types still expose a screw head. Like the strike plate on the locking mechanism of a desk drawer. Or the brackets on a secretary desk. A piano hinge on a piano.
Even high-quality pieces of other styles will still use screws. They're not visible from a normal perspective, but can be seen from under a table for example. (Attaching a solid wood tabletop to the frame is often done with screws and figure eights to allow wood movement.) To someone who's really fussy, seeing those screws clocked the same way might spark joy or something. I don't know, seems a bit much to me.
Now, exposed cam locks? Yeah, always an indicator of low quality :)
[0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c4/1a/d5/c41ad527ebf77a580e76...
That's an unfortunate limitation. I'm able to bring out that side of me without any chemical assistance at all.
A few actual commercial production cars have tolerances tight enough to use that trick, and are dealership darlings because of that. At least those are documented. Engine tweakers who build that tight often regret it.
Not that it matters, but ex-mechanic here, so I do have some idea how an ICE works.
Then my wife paid $1,800 for a "packs & plugs" job at a dealership, when our usual guy was aware that our Honda Insight had that issue and needed that attention and said he'd have charged $200 for it. Individual part numbers for 3 plugs. But still. She was out of town and they talked her into "it's sputtering but it could blow up at any moment!"
The company standard was that all plate screws were left vertical, no exception. The master electrician and managers absolutely checked.
I’ve long appreciated that level of attention to detail and now it drives my wife nuts when she puts a plate in something and I go back and tweak it.
Meanwhile they let 14 year old me drive around between job sites to deliver pets but that’s another story :).
They, uh.. paid attention to their work.