I don't like the look of that, Bill

MichaelG.

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Thanks to a link from Wikipedia, we have this:

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=289882

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 21/08/2019 00:47:46

The ones on the right were hex socket (see the hex indent around the socket) and were double stroked in the press. Note the nice hex indent on that one then look at the dish dent on the Torx screw. If the hex socket had by some miracle jumped out of the hex header and into the input of the Torx header……

Double stroke. Press clutch issue.

Pete

My opinion, of course.

[This posting has been removed]

Torx head variant or faulty batch?

Not really a question, surely? Not even faulty. Just not Torx.

Has anyone else had a batch of these mongrel Torx heads?

I expect there are quite a few, but possibly not on here!

Can anyone suggest …?

Just cheap chinese rubbish. No quality control. Slave labour production.

It is not the manufacturing that has gone awry. There will always be possible set-up errors, but they should not get palmed off to paying customers!

Care to give the origin (seller) so we all can be careful when making purchases?

Or perhaps more appropriately Alec Guinness' hot box from Bridge on the River Kwai!

Hi NDIY, I have to agree with Barrie, without evidence, you can not accuse anyone of selling cheap goods and as Bill has said, they are not the same as he had better ones from the same supplier before. Quality control is paramount importance, but it is difficult to get 100%, 100% all of the time and mistakes can happen at times. The person may packing this item may not be aware what the items should look like, as they often extract them via bin numbers. I had a similar thing when I purchased some bolts from a local industrial factor, awhile ago. I asked for some 12mm dia. bolts and the lady brought back some 10mm bolts, I said they are not correct and she replied that they where according to the bin numbers, I still insisted that they were not the right size and so she measured them and agreed. The lady then went back to the store and found that several more 10mm bolts were mixed in on top of the 12mm ones that I had asked for, so the clear mistake there was the person loading up the stores bin, may have been one of those grey moments for that person, who knows?

Regards Nick.

Definitely a manufacturing fault that has escaped the rigorous quality control system, I am sure they will be happy to replace with no need to return faulty ones.

Mike

NDIY, please think before you post.

No-one, except perhaps suppliers to aerospace projects, undertakes any more than sample quality control on fixings. Whether these came from China or Germany or anywhere else is irrelevant, any manufacturer of goods on the scale of small fasteners will end up sending out some rogue batches from time to time.

Comments alleging 'slave labour' are not very helpful either, especially from a citizen of country that itself has an estimated 13,000 people working under such conditions. Each province of China has a legally enforced minimum wage that is supposed to be at least 40% of the local average wage. Minimum wage is about 60% of the average wage in the UK.

Neil

A hex socket fastener, if filled with rust and road grit in areas where salt is used on roads in winter, can often be opened/cleared with a small cape chisel quickly. Torx sockets are very hard to clear of rust and grit because of the tiny recesses at the lobes, and they must be cleared out to get a drive tool into the socket at correct depth. To add to this difficulty, for a while car designers were placing a lot of Torx head screws in recesses on the parts they fastened. This made it impossible to get a pair of vise grips / mole wrench over the head to remove them, or clear the sockets, or chisel the heads off. Torx socket screws under cars in areas with salted roads in winter turned many jobs which would normally be 10 minutes into many hours of work just to remove fasteners. This does no one any good, and customers resent having to pay for the hours.

In my opinion all fasteners used in exposed areas of cars trucks and machinery should be external tool drives only, ie hex bolt heads preferably, or external spline/multipoint heads, and be kept proud of mating surfaces for tool /cleanup access. this has not apparently been on the minds of car truck and machinery makers for a very long time.

I have seen Torx fasteners in industry for years and many firms I have worked for were lobbied hard by the manufacturer to force designers to use only Torx screws. They sold the firms on these things by promising low costs and longer assembly tool life. None of these savings actually came true, and in several cases with outdoor exposure as mentioned, resulting in impossible repairs, large dollar warranty claims caused serious losses.

The only people who ever benefitted from Torx fasteners were the manufacturers of them, in my opinion. There are several fastener drive systems far cheaper and just as good or better than Torx, but they are not marketed aggressively as Torx are. Just is just my opinion, but one based on many years exposure to Torx fasteners in industry using, specifying, and dealing with the outcomes of using them.

That's not the model engineers way of doing things Clive, you know you should have spent the next three years contemplating making an EDM machine to modify your existing tools

Edited By JasonB on 21/08/2019 15:24:07

I can’t remember the last time I had a dud fastener. The last bricks and mortar fastener shop I used quite a number of years ago told me that a lot of the stainless stuff I was buying like socket screws were coming from India. Actually I do remember some dodgy fasteners, they came fitted to my Chinese Lathe and also the mill! Easily replaced from stock at the time so I forgot about it.

Apart from NDIY not knowing:

1. The Country of Origin – assumed to be China, maybe not.
2. What Quality Control is in place – assumed to be none, maybe wrongly
3. The Terms and Conditions of the workforce – assumed to be 'Slave Labour', maybe not.

Three generalised assumptions from a commentator not involved in the purchase can hardly be described as 'correct' in the sense they are 'free from error; true; right'. Ironic that a criticism of a faulty product should itself be an intellectual quality failure. (A conclusion drawn in the absence of evidence.)

Personally I think it's a waste of time moaning about Chinese quality in the absence of affordable British alternatives. Whinging may be easy but it's also ineffective. The real challenge is to outperform foreign competition by doing the same thing better and/or cheaper here. Possibly it's not happening in the UK because there are better ways of making a living than making nuts and bolts, possibly it's because some mistakenly fail to believe other folk are just as clever and hard-working as them and go immediately bankrupt. Anyone wanting to bash China should look at their unpleasant foreign and domestic policies. Both are much better targets than cheapo ebay goods, but not really appropriate to this forum.

Dave

PS Jason asked for a shut-up while I was typing – sorry.

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 21/08/2019 16:13:02