Comments on: General Tips for Household Repairs.

By: toby muir

toby muir — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 10:51:03 +0000

I found this VERY helpful! Thank you!

By: derobert

derobert — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 21:25:06 +0000

Its pretty rare to see posidrive screws, But every screwdriver bit set seems to come with posidrive drivers, so its probably more common to go wrong the other way. Thankfully, its easy enough to identify the posidrive drivers, they have an extra 4 spikes, higher up than the normal philips ones.

The only time I've ever seen posidrive screws was on a piece of furniture I was assembling. It amazingly came with them. Of course, it instructed you to use a Phillips #2 driver, which didn't work so well! But once I grabbed the posidrive bit, they work really well. No cam-out at all.

By: gregmac

gregmac — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 04:51:51 +0000

If you're going to mention plaster, you should also mention the possibility of it containing asbestos. Between the 1940's and 1980's it was common to use asbestos in plaster. Asbestos is dangerous when it's airborne, and it's not something you should deal with on your own -- if in doubt, have it tested, and if you need to remove it have a professional asbestos abatement team come in and do it safely.

By: chriscudmore

chriscudmore — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:12:56 +0000

Well, when you google screws, you get a lot of Philips. Yes, torque settings do help. What I omitted, as it was beyond the scope of the article was that there are actually two types of "Star" screwdrivers. There's Philips, which was designed to cam out. If you look at the tip of a Philips driver, you'll see that it's tapered in that the arms of the star are narrower at the tip then at the base. There's also something called a Posi-drive, which uses a more square profile, so it doesn't cam out as much. But this is a less common screw. Perhaps much of the pain in this type of screw is cause by people using a Philips driver in a Posi-drive head.

By: Joe P

Joe P — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 02:46:10 +0000

Interesting article -- although I find it strange that most examples/pictures you gave were Phillips heads even when you weren't condoning their use. I've never actually used a square head before and I've done quite a few projects. Most drills these days have a torque setting that will automatically slip for you so that seems like it may solve some of the stripping issues you mentioned.