Identifying screw head and type
More actions
It can be very complicated to find the type, name or size of a screw's drive (screw head will be used to reduce confusion, the correct term is 'drive' for the part which interacts with the driver), even for people with years of experience. This is mostly due to the amount of poor information on the subject and misnomers for head and driver types. This will focus on sizes of #0 and under as those are the most likely ones to cause issues, are more common in modern consoles and also because those are the sizes that we have researched the most and are 100% confident on. Using the right one, it is pretty hard to strip your screws.
Sizes
Sizes are often confused, but you can identify the size of the screwdriver needed for the head pretty easily. #0-#000 driver sizes go like this;
- #0 = 2.0mm
- #00 = 1.5mm
- #000 = 1.0mm
You can see the example bellow that this screw's head is 1.5mm in diameter, therefor you need a PH #00 driver to unscrew this screw properly. (Take note that you measure the drive itself and not the whole head.)
Types : Commonly confused
Some kinds are very often confused, either by their similarity or one having a name with a better ring to it. These are the main ones.
JIS & Phillips/PH/ISO8764
They are both very similar, so much that it seems to have started the current Ifixit situation.
JIS has sharper angles with a less rounded center. There is more to it, but that is the gist of it.
PH has softer angles and a thicker center. It is almost the same though.
Their slight difference is enough to be very important. A PH head has to be a size under to fit in a (undamaged) JIS screw. A JIS head cams out PH screws.
Tri-point and Tri-wing
This one is a lot more obvious, Tri-point has 3 straight lines pointing at the center while Tri-wing points to the side of the center point.
Both heads need to be undersized to fit in each others head. You are almost certain of stripping them if you do.
-
Tri-point head -
Tri-wing head
other more obvious screws to be added