Best thing I've seen so far this Xmas (although hopefully Sherlock will be good).
For a country that likes to pretend it has an engineering base, the fact that you need to buy screwdrivers from the US* might have provoked some cognitive dissonance in some.
(*One thing I've noticed is that US tools are ****ing good -if annoyingly non-metric. I wonder where they learned that ?)
Oh, and bolt/screw ... slot, pozidrive or phillips - screw. Hexagonal (internal or external) - bolt.
It's only half a show at present, though, IMHO. It would be *way* better if James *rebuilt* stuff from scratch: disassemble, assess condition of constituent components, repair/replace/renovate, *then* reassemble. Just my 2p worth.
I didn't see the programme, so what was that about?
Those gripping screwdrivers? I've got a couple of those, of different sizes, purchased, as he says, in the US when I lived there. I had no idea they could not be bought here. Maybe I should get a friend to send/bring me a gross of them, and then sell them.
I bought one of those about 50 years ago, here the UK, in the local tool shop. I have two or three more now.
Like these?
In case anyone is like me and wondering what this is all about, there's a patent that explains it:
Theo
Maybe you should tell James May.
En el artículo , Theo escribió:
I had a couple of those at work. They're not all they're cut up to be, the screw tends to pop off at the most inopportune moment.
a magnetised one is far more useful.
Or this:
Why bother? A dollop of blu-tac will hold the screw on the screw driver (as a kid before blu-tac I used plassticine).
Alan
James was using brass screws.
Andy
I have a version based on splitting the driver shaft diagonally. There is then a sliding collar which forces the two sections together. The two triangular shapes grip the screw slot more tightly as they change from a narrow rectangle to becoming more square.
A drawing would show this simply!
Not a tool for a production environment but handy for otherwise hard to manage jobs.
I have a couple - one cross head, one slot - bought from Maplin many years ago. They have a pair of sliding claws which grip the underside of the screw head, holding it on to the blade. Useful sometimes - but a bit of BlackTac on and ordinary screwdriver is often as good.
I also use whiteTac, BluTak and even pinkTac at work I wouldn't want to be called racist.
Davey used his keyboard to write :
I have one, but I find a blob of bluetack more useful to hold a screw on the tip of a driver, any screwdriver.
When I first started TV servicing when I left school it was a habit to take a blob of wax from the nearest waxed paper capacitor with the end of the screwdriver.
It was a sad day when they stopped using wax - especially if the capacitors where made by TCC - they simply swapped molten wax for a liquid plastic but the capacitor itself was identical. After it had got covered with dust which took away the shine, it was virtually impossible to tell the difference.
I couldn't work out what was going on the first time my screwdriver bounced of the "wax" capacitor I'd chosen as donor ...
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