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Bear with me here..
For the purpose of this exercise, let's call a regular screwdriver bit two-pointed. The phillips bit then has four points, and works better because (as I understand these things) the torque it applies on the screw falls over more surface area (much like a person lying on a bed of nails). The torx bit (six-pointed) is even better for that reason -- you can apply more torque without damaging the screw or screwdriver. This relation seems to hold, in theory (assuming perfect materials and manufacturing) until, much as in the case of an n-gon as n->infinity, you end up with a circle.
That's a crappy screwdriver.
This is even without taking account that some bits are pointy and some are flat (pointy easier to stick into a screw?), as well as that some are star-shaped (torx) and some are n-gon shaped (ikea hexagon bits). Can anyone provide (or point out) a concise account of how all these factors affect how these damn wonders of modern technology work?
And that's my brain at 3am.
Gerbil, out.
September 26 2005, 13:17:45 UTC 6 years ago
I think the pointy vs flat phenomenon is just a way to get Phillips screwdrivers to fit different sized screws- but if a regular screwdriver were pointy, there wouldn't be enough surface area to screw in smaller screws.
As for those Ikea screws, I would expect them to be less efficient than regular screws, but the actual tool to use them is more space efficient and less costly than including a phillips screwdriver in every box. Instead, you get a cheaply manufactured L-shaped bit.
This is all pulled out of my ass, but it seems logical.