7mo ago

I'm just gonna stick to slotted, thanks

Fun fact: Torx screwdrivers are compatible with Torx Plus screws, but Trox Plus screwdrivers are only compatible with Torx screws that are one size larger

151 comments

I repair a lot of tech and I have never seen torx other than the standard, and security version. And security torx drivers are compatible with regular torx
- There's other types on cars
- Torx plus is getting more common and you can use a torx bit on them still, and superior to torx IMO. I bet you’ve seen since but didn’t notice the difference. As a machine designer it’s my preference but I don’t often for cost
  
  Torx plus ultra premium pro
- I assume all those are proprietary temper resistant, tool for it will be expensive so not many tool shop gonna have it.
  
  Not really. A solid set for security Torx is available for like $20 from reputable brands. Naturally, you can get higher quality sets and sets that add other security bits, but you still won't land in an unacceptable price range even for private use, let alone a pro shop.
- Security torx is actually very weak. If you don't have the security bit, you can break it with a flat head and turn it into a normal torx.
- Use torx all the time on not only building sites, but in machinery repair too.
  There's only one type of torx and I think OP is winding us up :)
  Edit - ha ha oh my fucking god. So it turns out the patent for torx expired in 1990. No change for us in Europe, we're still mostly using the original design.
  Not so much for the yanks. Textron, the original patent holder, realised it'd be faaaar more profitable to "licence" slightly improved designs and try to phase out the original
  Enjoy your torx my euro friends, and have a giggle at the seppos paying for a fucking screw head lol
  Greed to the point of mental illness 😂
  
  There’s only one type of torx
  There isn't. There's Torx, Torx Plus, and Torx Paralobe. See here for more details: https://www.semblex.com/en/pdf-files/technology-files/torx-paralobe-pdf/ . Plus there's also the ttap and tamper-resistant variants shown in the meme.
  As other people have mentioned, Torx screwdrivers are forwards compatible with Torx Plus and Torx Paralobe. But the screwdrivers for the newer standards are not backwards compatible with older screws.
  Similarly, Tamper-Resistant Torx screwdrivers can be used on regular Torx screws. But Tamper-Resistant Torx Plus screwdrivers cannot be used on regular Torx Plus screws -- it's a completely different shape!
  If you're in a professional setting where you order high-quality screws and drivers in bulk directly from a manufacturer, I'd imagine that this isn't much of an issue. But if you're a hobbyist or just need to repair something in a domestic setting, the three different torx variants plus the other non-torx hexalobular screws (WA drive, Polydrive, T-Star Plus) can cause quite a bit of confusion. Anecdotally, I have a set of what I thought were really low-quality Torx bits. Turns out, they're actually good-quality Torx Plus bits that by design don't fit my Torx screws.
  
  Put timing chains on a Ford v6 without a torx plus 55 and let us know how that went.

We can debate this all day long but we all know torque is cheap.
- But enough torque, have at thee!

the worst is not when the screwdriver is fucked but the screw is. That is some huge pain in the ass
- Torx doesn't get fucked though, compared to alan or philips
  
  What about square drive… where does it fit in
  
  wait really? I would imagine those small corners would easily get flattened compared to something with deeper ridges like philips
  
  Maybe because different material? Obviously CrV steel won't get fucked like chinesium, no matter the shape.

my brother in christ have you seen phillips head and posi drive?
Life sucks. You can't win.
- Or Phillips and JIS?
  
  JIS isn't real
- Working on an 86 RV and hating posi drive. I swear they were designed to strip.
  Also no mention of Spider drive that everyone insists is a torx
  
  probably because nobody buys anything other than torx, considering it's a brand name, it's not like they're going to just do the funny and mislabel a screw. Phillips heads are so common it's a lot easier to mistake them.
  Though if you're in the field and you run across one i could see it being annoying.

Useful tip: with security torx screws, with the little nub in the centre, if you get a small flathead screwdriver to jam in there and wiggle a bit, that centre bit will snap off without much difficulty.
You should be able to use a regular Torx screwdriver bit after that.
- This is really gonna come in handy during some of my heists
  
  Their only "heists" when you get caught, until then they're "shenanigans" 😁
- It's easier to just pick up security bits at any hardware store...
  
  Yeah, just exclusively buy security bits and stop worrying about it.

One of these is a settings icon

I have to admit that each time I saw a torx security screw on a case I had to open (looking at you, Compaq) this made me so angry that I used to punch the middle pin away with a flathead screwdriver, and replace the screw with a regular one later. This was in those past times I did not have a fuckton of assorted torx bits in a gigantic case...
- Didn't Compaq use to have those torx with a slit in them where you could put a flathead screwdriver in the slit part?
  
  I know HP uses those on some computers. Pretty neat design, if you ask me!
- I'm with you. I've replaced all the torx screws on my Dell with Philips head screws because fuck you Dell. (all the screws inside were already Philips)

Lmao you've clearly never met Philips.
And if you're advocating slotted screws (flathead) you've already lost.
Torx is supreme. The end.
- No slot shaming!
- Robertson is superior.
  
  sell them in the continental US then >:(
  There are basically none here in the 50 states. You can find em, along 50x more torx screws...
- Hex is supreme, torx is mental health problem
  
  Hex strips itself constantly. Torx never does that.

Robinson aka the square head is by far the superior choice.
- LOL sure, good one... Only time robinson is the answer is if the question is "what do you get if you put a toddler in charge of designing a poor knockoff unbrako head?"
  TEAM TORX REPRESENT!
  
  Things are getting heated in the screw fandom
- I'm not canadian, so I don't have a lot of experience with robertson. But from the limited experience that I do have, I would rate it 10/10.
  What would you recommend for smaller screws (e.g. for electronics)? As far as I know, there aren't smaller sizes of robertson like there are with torx?
  
  Pozidrive has real nice engagement and doesn't cam out like Phillips does. And JIS drivers do a better job in Phillips than Phillips ones do.
- *Robertson
- Found the Canadian.
- Its flaw is that you can only get to it in 90deg increments. When the screw is in a hard to reach place that will drive you crazy
- As a person that changes out a lot of electrical outlets and switches I have to agree.

I'm Jewish, so I'm going to have to go with the tamper-resistant Torx when I need to use screws on myself.
Edit: A troll flagged this as antisemitic, so apparently I hate my own ethnicity?
- Would you mind explaining? I think not being Jewish and not having enough he-bros is making this go over my head.
  
  It’s a Star of David.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David
- Welcome to the internet

Relevant xkcd
Relevant xkcd

Don't discount hex, paired with a ball-end wrench, those are great for odd angles or tight spaces a straight wrench can't get too.
- they're pretty good but semi liable to stripping due to lower surface area, as long as you use the right tool, and a quality one, you'll be fine though.
  Also hex is somewhat inter-compatible with torx, which is really cursed.
  
  Torx are easier to strip, especially the smaller sizes. They're pretty much single use screws.

Not a single person sharing the xkcd comic about standards? Well I'm not doing it.

The EU should fine companies for introducing new standards that break old standards. Or any shit standards like Toslink: https://lemmy.world/comment/10671314 . Standardization organizations shouldn't be sleeping through all this shit.
- I never realised how stupid it is that toslink can only plug in 1 way
- I don't use screw drivers enough to know what these are for. But from a programmer's standpoint, punishing people to deviate away from standard may cause more harm than good, no?
  Suppose it's easier/cheaper/more effective to deviate a bit from standard, why should I be punished to do things a bit differently?
  
  One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those "extensions" started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS's idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.
  It's complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where "just a little tweak" can be quite a big problem for a standard.
  
  Think about all the micro USB, lightning cables, USB cables etc. In programming it's different, but for this stuff it's a waste of money and actual resources.

Why is screw DLC legal? Why are people ok with companies preventing people from working in their own devices?
- Tamper proof is to prevent random idiots from messing with your stuff.
  
  Tamper resistant torx is still a weird niche. Tamper resistant slotted for bathroom stalls makes sense because a person with a coin could disassemble a whole row of stalls without any effort, but if you're carrying around a torx bit, you might as well be carrying around a security bit.
  For some reason, Ford decided to use Security Torx to hold together their hybrid battery packs. Couldn't tell you why that was better then regular Torx.
  
  Random idiots that don't know hardware stores exist
- Who said we are? It's up to Congress to regulate things like that and they don't know shit about fuck. Unless someone "lobbies" them to do it of course.
- You can turn a tamper proof screw into a regular screw by using a flat head as a lever and breaking off the center post. Harder to do the bigger the screw is.

Why does Torx Plus have six teeth but tamper-resistant Torx Plus has five? Whereas 'what the fuck is this' basically looks like it should be tamper-resistant Torx Plus?
- I guess they wanted to make the screws even more tamper-resistant? With the standard Torx Tamper-Resistant screws, they could often be bypassed by chiseling the pin away with a flathead and a hammer, and then using a standard Torx driver. Can't do that with the pentalobular design!

Torx is the 🐐! Phillips are just terrible, I prefer slotted over Phillips. You can slip out quite easily with slotted but if you are in there they work ok.
- Phillips are horrible. You need to have 20 different ones that look all the same and you have to try them multiple times to figure out which slip the least. The post and people with no clue make it seem like they make new torx every day to fuck with people. If you have a 15, 20 and 25 torx bit you can use most torx screws out there. If you work on small applications you need a 10 and below. If you use massive screws you ned a 30 and a 40.

+1 for hex, but that's in a lab setting --- climate controlled environment, generally not high torque, pretty benign conditions. But even that is fraught with metric-vs.-imperial mix ups.
- The key is to drag the US into the future along with literally everyone but Liberia and Myanmar.
- But even that is fraught with metric-vs.-imperial mix ups.
  Get a set of rotary broaches in the nearest metric size up from the imperial ones and remove the problem.

Torx drivers are forward compatible with Torx plus screws

Plus what?!
- Torx++
  Not to be confused with Torx#

Fuck you all!! I’m not arguing about this again :(
But I found this interesting.
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-screws-and-screwdrivers-1992422

Unexpected lonesome German

The "wtf is this?" is settings, obviously.

And how many of these are needed by the dictates of their use VS how many are needed to restrict your access?

Why is tamper-resistant torx plus the only one that's 5-pronged?
- Apple?
- because the goal of tamper resistance is to make it harder to unscrew without apple's approval
- To make it even less likely that someone will be able to get it unscrewed without having the right set.
  They’re not perfect, obviously, but they do harden a target more than regular Torx.
  I use tamper resistant screws to keep an AirTag on my eBike to discourage its removal. Obviously a determined thief could remove it, but lots of stolen bikes get abandoned anyway. My hope is that if it gets stolen it gets abandoned and I can find it then.
  
  Okay, then a slightly different question: why aren't tamper-resistant torx (non-plus) 5-prong?

When you buy the screws they usually come with a drill bit that fits them

АW Drive On Top

Ah, torx plus, used on Chevy bellhousings. Real easy to strip with a regular torx driver.

Reject threaded fasteners, return to nail and rivet.

Y'all need Jesus^H^H^H^H^H^H Robertson screws.___

I hate torx and my superduke is covered in those fucking things

151 comments