In the past weeks I’ve been doing a lot of do-it-yourself, mostly to renew my office, but also because I had some cabling to do (I wrote more than once about it).
One thing I came to wish again, and I wished that before, is that Torx screws were available easily in Italy. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any of them here.
Why would I want Torx screw you might ask. Well, as you can read on the Wikipedia article I linked, while Phillips screws (the most common screws used especially for mounting brackets of PCI/PCI-E cards, hard disks and optical drives, case enclosures and so on) were designed for industrial processing, by letting the screwdriver cam out when the screw is full in. Unfortunately it cams out so easily that most of the times you end up loosening up the screw, and you have to get rid of it.
This is especially true when using electric screwdrivers, which is something I do more than simply often. Torx screws with an electric screwdrivers tend to be quite more easy to screw both in and out. So even if they used to be the screw equivalent of proprietary software (designed also so that users couldn’t open their devices), I tend to think of them as a huge improvement over Phillips screws, and nowadays Torx screwdrivers are quite common.
I’m now looking for somewhere to find Torx screws I could use. I have at least two main uses for screws where I’d rather use Torx screws: power outlets, especially the ones I have to use 10cm long, and computer assembly, not only mine. I’ll have to dig out the specifics of the screws used in those cases, and see if I can find an international supplier that carry these types of screws with Torx heads.
So I’m asking, both to my regular readers and to the lazyweb, if somebody has any pointer of a shop that carry Torx-headed screws with different dimensions, if you could leave me a comment. I really am interested in this.
http://www.bossshop.ch/cgi-…They have an italian-language shop, but I don’t know if they sell to non-company customers. They do have a wide range of screws and they might have what you need. My italian is non-existant, so I can’t really tell.If you anyone doing work on cars or motorbikes, asking them where they get screws if they need replacements could also yield a source for you.
In the USA, at least, there’s RTL Fasteners.http://rtlfasteners.com/RC/…They specialize in rasteners for Radio-Controlled stuff – airplanes, helicopters, etc. So that’s another possible place.For me, there’s also the local “Nut and Bolt” supply store – a speciality shop that carries just about every size nut and bolt I’ve tried – from hex-head to torx, to JIS (similar, but not the same as phillips), posidrive, and about every other kind. They don’t do mail-order though.Google “Nut and Bolt supply” and you should come up with quite a few.That being said, why torx? Is there a problem with hexagonal head screws? They’re a lot easier to find than torx, and are still a step up from phillips.JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) are also a step up from phillips – the problem with them is that they are very hard to distinguish from phillips.
There are lots of Torx screws available today. Including regular Torx screws, tamper-proof Torx screws, TTAP, and Torx Plus screws to name a few. Do a search on Amazon for a pretty good selection of different sizes and threads. Unfortunately there’s not a real nice Torx screw set available at this time. https://besttoolz.com/torx-… has some helpful information for finding the right Torx screws and may be what you’re looking for.