In Europe (well worldwide) there is another "Philips" like screw head called Pozidriv [0], it has a small engraved cross 45deg to the main recess on the screw head. The drivers have flutes in the head identifying them. They are much better than Philips as they are designed to not ride out until under a high enough torque where the screw could be damaged.
In the UK they are the dominant product in hardware stores.
Until I heard about Robertson in Canada I had assumed that commodity items like screws and screwdrivers were truly international. Is Pozidriv really not common in the US?
Yeah, it's super uncommon. Torx is what you find on most fasteners that aren't Phipps or slotted. I've found Pozi in two applications in my house:
1) An IKEA bed requires it for some screws that self-tap into sheet metal with a machine screw thread. Running them in with Philips is hopeless. Does IKEA supply the required driver? Of course not.
2) Blum cup hinges use Pozi for the adjustment screws. By extension, if you want an actual Pozi screw driver, find a local joint that supplies Blum to cabinet shops.
There are at least a few other cruciform drives out there that you'll rarely encounter:
> Torx is what you find on most fasteners that aren't Phipps or slotted.
Torx is also FAR better than Pozidriv. Pz cams out very easily. Once Tx is slotted properly it just won't slip. I'm very happy that Torx is getting more traction here, because I'm fed up with stripped Pozidriv screws.
> An IKEA bed requires it for some screws that self-tap into sheet metal with a machine screw thread. Running them in with Philips is hopeless. Does IKEA supply the required driver? Of course not.
Interestingly, I bought some lamps in (Dutch) Ikea that required Torx and they did add a bit for those. In every lamp package, so now I have 8.
Modern drills have better clutches and don't need cam out to not over torque screws. Cam out is a feature from the 1930s and should be left behind now that we have better
That's interesting. Thinking back over thirty-plus years of buying various bits for hand-held and electric screwdrivers (my dad was using battery powered Makitas before I graduated high school in 1984), I can't remember the last set that I bought which didn't include Pozidrive.
And so far as I know, I've never actually encountered anything that used Pozidrive, so I've always thought it was a huge waste that they were always included.
IKEA uses them extensively in all of their hardware. If you find yourself, say, assembling a whole kitchen worth of IKEA cabinets it’s worth picking up a few bits.
Even if you're only assembling one IKEA thing every now and then it's still worth picking up. Makes building anything from there less stressful, especially those cam screws. I bought a driver on Amazon.
The Ikea FIXA hand tool set includes a Pozidrive bit. It's a couple bucks, if you're buying IKEA furniture its worth picking up that toolkit. Ikea uses it on most of their furniture, not just beds.
Robertson is an upgrade from Phillips for sure, but it's not even in the same league as Torx. I've laid down many decks using Robertson and Torx. Robertson bits or heads strip fairly easy. I've used the same Torx bit on multiple decks, where I'd probably go through 5-10 Robertson bits per deck.
I think the only thing Robertson really has over Torx is the 60 or so years it preexisted the other. Probably couldn’t mass manufacture the Torx shape in the 1800s.
But these days I’m not sure if Robertson has any advantages.
Philips (00, 0, and 2) are by far the most common screw heads here for most people. (Pretty much every household will have these for changing batteries, assembling furniture, doing minor repairs...) Slotted screw heads used to be ubiquitous, and the screwdrivers still are, though mostly for use as pry bars. You'll see some socket-head hex-drive stuff, in a mix of metric and fractional inch drives (which can inform you on how US-centric the design and manufacture of the product was), and maybe some Torx (especially in electronics). I've only seen Robertson in drywall and decking screws at the hardware store, and I haven't yet seen them used in someone's home.
Or people who need to drive in a lot of fasteners. Philips is a pain even with an impact driver/screw gun, the bit cannot hold the fastener unlike Torx/Robertson.
Yep. In my house, every thing I work on or replace gets replaced with Torx screws. Slotted have their place, I have no idea how or why Phillips ever got popular.
Limitations of screw-making technology and metallurgy at the time, Phillips is quite an old standard, patented in 1932 (although there was a similar British patent 60 years earlier).
Drywall screws are Philips, not Robertson. The cam-out feature is used to prevent over-penetration, which badly weakens the drywall. These bits are used; they precisely dimple the paperboard and prevent the gypsum from being crushed.
Besides the already-mentioned Ikea, the other most common application in the US (best guess) is Ski Bindings, probably because most bindings in the US come from European Brands.
Thanks for posting the archive.org link. The site _was_ fast when I posted this earlier today. I suppose they don't receive much traffic, and host their site on a non-scaling potato server.
The screws in computers don't have to deal with much so "Philips" is indicated. They are a few mm long and hold tin plate sheets together or hds in the case etc.
You can have say 120mm+ long woodscrews - No 10 with cruel cutting points and fancy low friction finishes. These beasts need a lot of driving and the extra hold that the additional cross gives really helps. My drill driver can easily wrench your wrist if you are not careful.
Beyond that you have things like concrete screws - 150mm long, 10mm wide. Drill a pilot hole first 8mm? wide and off you go. These use a hex head. I also have some whopper fasteners for things like sleepers that drive into wood with a hex head and need a shit load of torque. You soon learn to use your leg as a stop for things like that.
Torx n Pozi is everywhere in the UK - more so than Philips. Have a look in B&Q, Screwfix et al sometime!
I own an IT company and do quite a lot of DiY. I think Pozi is dominant in the UK for cross-headed screws.
Flat head screws had no problem with long screws in the 1800s when a human drove them in by hand. However with early automation in the 1930s there was an overtorque problem and so fasteners that couldn't handle the torque were developed.
Note that the blacksmith made screw drivers of the 1800s were hollow ground, or at least parallel. If you have a cheap modern flathead screwdriver it is probably tapered the wrong way and can't deliver enough torque. That is the fault of your screwdriver though, not the screw design.
The article talks about "normal" versus JIS Phillips drives. But "normal" actually comes in two different flavors: US (ANSI) and German (DIN/later ISO). ISO Phillips drivers work perfectly on ISO Phillips heads and quite well on JIS or ANSI Phillips heads. ANSI Phillips drivers work perfectly on ANSI Phillips heads and noticeably worse on JIS or ISO Phillips heads.
You probably have not experienced this if your Phillips screwdrivers were not made in USA, as virtually every manufacturer outside the US used or uses the JIS, DIN, or ISO profile for their tools, and those work tolerably on all Phillips type screws. (Of course JIS is palpably best on JIS, which is the subject of the article.) But if you have older or newer made in USA tools (especially Pratt-Read, who recently closed down) or fasteners (which probably had to come from some industrial type place), you may have noticed that Phillips is even more crap than expected. Or you might have noticed that the "foreigners" are better at tools if you compared against a good German or Japanese screwdriver.
Not really! It's just that there are three kinds of Phillips profile. It's awful. Death to Phillips, death to Pozidriv (too easy to confuse and damage here in the US), death to anything that looks like Phillips. Long live Robertson, Hex, Torx, and anything with ball end drivers available!
Those are the same as or at least closely related to quadrex, xeno, or "terminal" (as in "wiring terminal") bits. I have them in two sizes, both bits and insulated handles. I find I never use them as just sticking a #1 Robertson in there (despite my being American) does everything I could want.
I never realized how bad Phillips was until I started renovating a home this year. They are truly the worst of all the options. They need to be phased out completely. Square is better in every way. A core problem with Phillips is not only that the cross is simply not the best shape to hold torque, which it's not, but that there is no consistency between the crosses themselves. With square, you only have to worry about size. With Phillips, you have to pay attention to the angles and character of the cross, in addition to size. One Phillips might be deeper or skinnier than another that looks the same. Matching the perfect driver to a screw is difficult in general, and near impossible by eye.
Phillips is great when you’re screwing in an area you can’t see. The bit slips in nicely and you don’t have to think about size. But yeah Robertsons are nice in many other instances.
As someone with very little recent experience with these types, could you elaborate on what you mean by this, at least compared to the Robertson screw?
Can do that with any head really. But imagine the screw is there already. And you don’t know the size. Phillips is probably better here. Not a common use case for most people.
Interesting that the USA doesn't seem to use Pozi.
In Australia and NZ -
Pozi are by far the most common in building/construction (although everyone refers them as Phillips colloquially) with square drive there after. Cheap/poorly made hardware from China will at times ship with Phillips instead of Pozi (or JIS), you can always tell because Philip screwdrivers are easy to strip in comparison and require slightly more talk to tighten I think.
With machined screws such as those used on electronics the most common for commercial/industrial would probably be Torx, followed by Pozi. In cheap consumer gear it's probably a mix of Phillips and Pozi.
Really no one should be using Phillips in this day and age, it's horribly dated - easy to strip and low torque.
I'm sure it's not a factor in their general popularity, but from an aesthetic point of view I think Pozidriv is inferior to Philips; pozidriv fastener heads look messy with those 45 degree tickmarks. But both are inferior to Robertson/Square. Those look the most neat and trim of any screw head.
Been looking for JIS screwdrivers which don't cost a fortune here in Europe, not had much luck. Don't quite need it before a few months from now but it's still frustrating!
This is where North America got it right 100%. Coming from Europe I was used to Phillips and flathead but my eyes were opened here in Canada when all screws were basically either the #6 or (mostly) the #8 Robertson. Why on earth do I have literally 20 different Phillips and maybe 10 different flathead bits? And that's finding the right one that doesn't slip and destroy the screw is so much work. Robertson ftw.
I owned a honda motorcycle from the mid-70s for a while. I have a hammer actuated JIS impact driver, as a result: the crank-case was held on by 8 of the bloody things.
On of my most memorable courses in school was an evolutionary computation course. It dealt with algorithms like using genetic algorithms for search.
Interesting work.
One of the lectures I remember mentioned some work being done using genetic algorithms to design automotive fenders to absorb the greatest amount of energy.
I could imagine using GAs to design optimal screw heads. You'd need a set of restrictions, but I think physics models are well known and simple enough to do it.
Then there's the big question. What other common everyday objects do we overlook that could use a redesign using similar techniques?
I wish I'd read this before camming out the screws holding my Nikkor 105mm trying to get into it to fix a sticky aperture :(.
On the bright side, I didn't completely round them out - I knew enough to stop when it came out the first time. I've been meaning to send it off, but maybe I'll just invest in the proper drivers instead.
I let a repairman service a 105/2.5 that didn't focus to infinity, as well as a 35/1.4 with slow aperture blades, but sadly he suffered a stroke and had to stop working :(
Something I've found is that if I don't have precisely the right bit on hand, a sharp new Phillips bit will usually work well enough, and much better then a dull rounded one.
I keep going for bits that kind of work and if I can't find anything my lowest common denominator is the angle grinder. Then I can replace the thing with a proper screw.
In Europe (well worldwide) there is another "Philips" like screw head called Pozidriv [0], it has a small engraved cross 45deg to the main recess on the screw head. The drivers have flutes in the head identifying them. They are much better than Philips as they are designed to not ride out until under a high enough torque where the screw could be damaged.
In the UK they are the dominant product in hardware stores.
0: https://shop4fasteners.co.uk/blog/pozidriv-vs-phillips/