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.