Brett Buck · May 11, 2005 08:11 PM
#0 sourceI've been meaning to mention this for a while now, but kept forgetting.
Everybody hates Phillips head screws. They always strip out, and the Japanese screws seem to get screwed up if you look at them funny.
Well, the problem is that the thing on you OS, Suzuki etc, that looks like a Phillips-head screw ISN'T. The Japanese standard looks pretty close, but isn't really the same as the original Phillips specification. The result is that if you use a regular American Phillips-head screwdriver on Japanese Industrial Standard cross-head screws, the slight difference in the shape makes it "cam out", knocking off the edges of the slots, and making it very dificult to ever get it to come out again.
The solution, which should have been obvious when I was working on motorcycles 30 years ago, but wasn't "cuz i'm stoopid" is to get Japanese drivers.
For our purposes, Central Hobbies
sells high-quality JIS Scredrivers sets for a reasonable price - $18. You get 4 screwdrivers of different sizes that cover the range you will likely ever need for modeling. My set from Central look exactly like the driver I got from the guy on the Snap-On truck a few years ago.
In use, it's *very easy* to tell that this is different. Put it in the screw, and it has a very solid grip in the slot. Unlike usual phillips in Japanese screws, it only fits one way, doesn't rock around at all. There is NO WAY you could get it to slip before simply breaking something. The result is no camming out, and no damage to the screw head. It feels better than an Allen wrench/hex key.
If you have an OS, Saito, etc, Japanese engine (or other Japanese devices) with cross-head screws, I HIGHLY recommend this as an investment that will save you a lot of annoyance and frustration.
Central has a fair number of other neat things, too. They cater to R/C pattern, but there are lot of little bits and peices that we can put to good use. The trick titanium pushrod ends, for example, can be found here as well.
BTW- another point, that the experienced know, but newbies may not. The screws have standardized slots in the heads, and they go with one, and only one, size of screwdriver. This is true of regular slotted screws, Phillips-head screws, and JIS screws. Frequently, you can sort of get more than one to fit. The correct screwdriver size is the largest size that will fit in the slot. The right driver usually looks too big, or disproportionate to the screw size. Too small, and the torque you use to try to turn it gets transferred only at a few points on the screw and driver, not all the way across. You might get away with it a few times, but the chances of damaging the screw slot(s) are very high. But you can really tell the difference when you get it right because it fits tight.
Brett