My Biggest Pet Peeve AS A Hobby Machinist

7milesup said:
None of those fasteners are exotic, just not a Phillips standard that you may be used to.
I have thrown out nearly every Phillps screw I had in my shop. I haven't used them in years. The one that stumped me a few years ago was a double hex screw, but once I figured that out it was no big deal.
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We haven't discussed "spline drive" fasteners yet. If I run across a cheap buy of small screws I can use, even if they are spline drive, I'll grab 'em. I have a set of spline drivers from waayyy back when I traveled for Wang Computers as a field engineer. They're still OEM length, not ground down. But not thrown out in a housekeeping spree. Just sitting in my Jenson case for 40 odd years, waiting for some obsolete fasteners to show up on eBay.

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7milesup said:
None of those fasteners are exotic, just not a Phillips standard that you may be used to.
I have thrown out nearly every Phillps screw I had in my shop. I haven't used them in years. The one that stumped me a few years ago was a double hex screw, but once I figured that out it was no big deal.
Click to expand...

Any fastener an average consumer is unfamiliar with is exotic.
 
Many of the "exotic" fasteners are designed for ease of assembly and ease of maintenance providing you have the tools and knowledge to do the job. Torx fasteners have been around at least since the early 1980's. GM used them on many applications for light trucks and cars. The "security" style was primarily used for electronic components that had no field serviceable components.

Cost of assembly is another reason they are used. Regardless of whether assembly is done manually or by robots the part has to be picked up and oriented properly for assembly. There's quite a science to determining the type and profile of fasteners needed in a complex assembly for ease and speed of assembly.

While working as a design engineer I was required to take a course on "Design for Assembly" at the UW Madison. Not only was the course interesting it opened your eyes as to the differences in time and effort it took to produce a well-designed assembly as opposed to producing one without taking fastener types and profiles into consideration.

The gist of the course was the greater number of ways a fastener could be gripped, transported, and installed the less time and effort it would take to install it. In a high production environment, we're talking about seconds or even milliseconds per fastener that could potentially mean the difference between profit and loss on each assembly.

As an example, a ball is about the easiest profile to install in any assembly. It can be gripped at any orientation, transported in countless numbers of ways, and installed without regard to orientation. As you move into fasteners things become more complicated. A slot head screw for instance needs to be gripped and transported with the threaded end toward the opening, placed in the hole vertically and fastened with a tool that will only fit in the slot one of two ways.

A Phipps's head screw presents many of the same limitations except for the fact that the assembly tool can be inserted in the head four different ways. Both the straight slot and Phillips screws require down pressure on the fastener to keep the tool properly oriented in the slot.

The Torx head fastener also has some limitations but is more easily transported and properly oriented to the hole in that it can fit the assembly tool in 6 different positions. In addition, it requires less down pressure due to the fact that the tool and fastener are being guided by 6 contact points.

While this is a vast simplification of why different style and profile fasteners are used it is an attempt to explain that by in large fastener choice isn't merely a guess as to what might work, or what the manufacturer could get the cheapest.
 
The thing to keep sight of is that Phillips screws work perfectly well and do not make assembly particularly expensive. If this were not true, my house would not be jam-packed with recently-manufactured cost-competitive products made with Phillips screws. Using super-nanny Torx fasteners with internal nipples doesn't do the manufacturer much good, and it causes a lot of inconvenience for consumers. Very few people will invest in a collection of special tools like mine.

It really looks like the intent is to discourage repair and encourage filling our landfills with junk, while putting up ridiculous websites full of lies about green aspirations.

The hypocrisy of manufacturers is egregious and pervasive. Another example: a few years back, cell makers made phones harder to fix by gluing them shut. They made claims about water resistance, making the new problem sound like a feature. Meanwhile, it has become impossible to find OEM batteries for some phones. So they did two things which, coincidentally, I'm sure, made it hard to get decent life out of $800 phones.

Verizon bombards me with trade-in offers all the time. If they're so green, why don't they and Samsung want me to replace my battery and keep my phone?

And who needs a waterproof phone? It's not that hard to keep a phone dry. And the waterproofing isn't much good anyway, at least for my phone. Unless the water is under a yard deep, it's done for.
 
Making specialty tools is part of what machine work is about. As far as manufacturers cutting corners with odd fasteners.
Amen
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