Core77

Apple's custom screw hullabaloo, hollow-ground bits, and why a vintage sewing machine repair brought me to the gunsmith's

By Rain Noe - January 21, 2011

in Object Culture

As CNET reports, Apple users including iFixit's CEO are up in arms about Apple's tamper-resistant "pentalobe" screws, which have been popping up in their MacBooks and now iPhones. The non-standard screws were obviously chosen to keep users from opening the machines.

What people may not realize is that this practice is far from new. I'm currently refurbishing a pair of 1937 and '38 Singer sewing machines and having a hell of a time getting parts of it undone. Reason being that Singer, which was wildly successful in its heyday and had buckets of cash, invested in their own machining facilities and not only produced their own hardware, but purposely made it in odd custom sizes. What seem like typical flathead screws holding their products together have threads that do not correspond with any metric or standard dimension. If a screw falls out of the machine, you cannot run down to the hardware store to replace it. If you try to jam a similar-sized screw into a Singer threaded hole, you'll strip it.

Even worse, the heads of Singer screws feature slots of odd widths, heights, and depths, but their familiar slot shape leads you to believe you can unscrew it with a regular flathead. As you can guess, this often leads to stripped screws, particularly with standard-shaped wedge-tip screwdrivers, which is a poor design that has a tendency to "back out" under pressure.

Apple, like Singer, did this for obvious reasons: If the product breaks, they want you to bring it to them.

My solution to the Singer problem was to pick up a set of gunsmithing screwdriver bits at a nearby gun store for cops. Gunsmiths use what are called hollow-ground screwdriver bits, as opposed to the wedge shape. The hollow-grounds are squared-off when seen in cross-section and are designed to fill a screw's entire slot, increasing friction and reducing the chance of slippage. These drivers are also good for working on a variety of vintage products or old woodworking projects where you cannot afford to strip a screw.

Some places where you can order hollow-ground drivers: Forster Products makes them, as does Brownell's and Wheeler Engineering.

As for the solution to Apple's screws, iFixit's selling corresponding drivers.

We think corporations have the right to build things any way they want, and if a user doesn't like it they should vote with their dollars. And with the recent arrival of consumer-affordable titanium RP, nowadays we can pretty much make any tool we want if we're willing to put in the time and bread.

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EP

14 years ago

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Growing up, I was stopped by tamper-resistant screws a lot. Then one day I walked into the parts department of an arcade game store. There on the wall was the penultimate "Tamper Proof Screwdriver Bit Set." It was all of $5 and has been very useful in the years since. Tamper proof slows down "dumb" consumers before they break something. If you know what you're doing, those screws won't be an issue.

As for the Singer screws.couldn't you drill & re-tap the holes for modern machine screws? I know, I know, it's not "vintage," but it's a modern solution to your old problem.
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DrSpiv

14 years ago

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"standards" in the 30's were still pretty loose, which is why singer did what they did. At the time most products were like this- not because they were trying to screw their customers or repair shops, but because the buy in costs to screw manufacturing were not like they are today. These parts were expensive to produce, and the machinery to do so was simple. Companies did it in house with their own tooling. Today it is the opposite, which has brought us to a generation of factories that produce standard things that can be used across many many industries.

Odd example: where 18 guage 1x1" square tube used to be common, and is why it was used for the original Lotuses, this particular format is now considered an "aircraft" thing (due to its difficulty to weld I suspect), and so it's quite a bit more expensive than 16 gauge despite it actually being less metal.

Apple may do what they please, they are large enough to not take much of a hit by using less common parts (because they will make them common enough), but the intent is clear. They want you to buy a new phone, not simply grab a $10 screen kit from ebay to fix your clumsy issues. Again, it's their prerogative. And perfectly fair. It will probably keep one more level of curious tinkerers out of their wares.

It won't really hold up, of course, because like all things it will just make for one more cheap tool set you keep around the garage if this is something you're in to. When they decide to get serious they will start gluing things together with things that require restricted solvents to undo. Try pulling apart a camera lens some time. Without a hacksaw.

It's also fair that some of us think that this is another "you don't own your phone, you rent it from us until we abandon it" issue. Which is how business works these days. That's where people are getting a real issue with it.

It isn't exactly fair to pick on apple alone in this either: my nexus one uses torx screws, which are just a previous attempt at "tamper proof."

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