Sunday, April 27

The tri-wing screw

So with a little help from Wikipedia I figured out the screw that was giving us trouble on the iron yesterday:

"Tri-Wing, as the name suggests, is a screw with three "wings" and a small triangular hole in the center. A variation is a kind in which the three "wings" are joined in the center (with no triangular hole). A somewhat similar-looking design in which three short radial slots are not joined in the center is called a Tri-groove screw head.

Tamper-resistant
"The Tri-Wing is a tamper-resistant screw due to the difficulty in finding Tri-Wing screwdrivers in hardware stores, although they can be legally bought online. As is often the theory with tamper-resistant hardware, there is no expectation that it will be impossible for a tamperer to obtain the driver. Rather, the main idea is simply that most tamperers will not bother to seek out and obtain a driver. In the case of end-users, this reduces the incidence of do-it-yourself repair or modifications (and any resulting injury or product damage). In the cases of vandalism prevention and theft prevention, since most vandalism and theft incidents are simply crimes of easy opportunity, the idea is to "raise the bar" and make the opportunity less easy."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-Wing; my italics)

Take that, tri wing tamperproof do-it-yourselfer protection! I'll pry my iron open if I want it open! And now I want one of those drivers, just so I can tamper when I want to tamper.

1 comment:

Heidi said...

you're welcome.