Hasta La Ideas

It takes balls to redesign a screw, if you’ll pardon my French. The incumbency of standardization is a difficult hurdle to overcome, particularly if you’re going to change the screwhead pattern into something new; I don’t know anyone who enjoys having to change driver bits from Phillips to #2 Phillips to square-drive to Torx, but different manufacturers’ ideas of what shape will drive best without stripping necessitate it.

Still, a team of guys comprised of an industrial designer, a mechanical engineer, a contractor and “some business guys” reckoned they could invent a better deck screw, and having put in two years of development time, they’ll shortly be bringing it to market.

They’ve named their screw Outlaw, and it’s easy to see why: The driver system doesn’t look like any you’ve ever seen. While it’s hexagonal, like an Allen key, it’s also tiered, which technically provides 18 points of contact between the bit and the screw head. This, they reckon, will make it strip-proof. (I do wonder, though, what the lack of cam-out will do if the screw is accidentally driven in an irresistible-force-meets-immovable-object scenario; will the head break off?)

The second benefit of the Outlaw bit/head design is that screws will stay on the driver non-magnetically, like it does with a square-drive set-up, allowing one-handed driving. Maybe I’m just a klutz, but whenever I need to drill one-handed with a conventional Phillips-head screw-—usually when I’m up on a ladder and have to stretch—that’s always when the screw comes unseated from the bit and dangles from it magnetically at a weird angle, which is almost more irritating than if it would just fall off.

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