FEATUREPRODUCT REVIEW
Optimaxx Woodscrews Modern design
and maximum performance?
I HESITATE to say this again because it makes me sound positively ancient, but in the world of screws (as in tools generally) we have never had it so good.
I can still remember the days in my youth when putting in a simple woodscrew involved using a hand-powered drill to drill a pilot hole – sometimes two – for the shank and the thread. Then drilling a countersink for the head and then screwing in the screw with a wooden- handled screwdriver, that really tested how much torque you could apply with your hands.
Some old timers even recommended putting a dab of fat onto the screw thread to ease its passage into the wood. It was also said that, when using brass screws, a steel screw should be inserted and then removed to make a track for brass screws because of the potential danger of breaking the brittle brass.
Some years later (1980s/1990s) saw the widespread use of the cordless drill driver in the trades. In retrospect, their peculiar banana shapes and 1.3Ah battery packs don’t seem so great, but it was the start
of an explosion of innovations that came with the extra torque available at the press of a trigger.
Soon the slotted screwdriver head became old-fashioned and even Phillips head screws were outdone by the invention of the Pozi. More recently the Torx, hex and square drives have hit the market, giving end users a wide range to choose from.
Making the old conically shaped woodscrews was diffi cult, even for machines – in England, woodscrews were still being made by hand in the early 1900s! Modern screws are all machine-made in their millions with straight shanks, sharp points, parallel threads, etc, and are so easy to use that modern trades think nothing of using several hundred screws a day on a job. Progress? I would say so.
By PETER BRETT
The Optimaxx design Unsurprisingly, not all the screws we buy are the same. Although they may look superfi cially similar in shape, there are many subtle variations and I have found that I do choose certain brands of screws for certain circumstances. For example, some manufacturers use slimmer designs with sharp teeth on the threads that work better to prevent splitting when used near the edges of boards.
The Optimaxx screws I was sent follow a strong general purpose design that can be used on timber, man-made boards and other materials like plastic and insulation. My user tests found them to be very strong screws – I tried often to break the heads off by overdriving into the timber but I didn’t succeed once. More often, they would just drive through the timber – especially if it was softwood.
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