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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

US-Canada Cultural Divides

Every once in a while, I experience something that reminds me that Canada and the US are worlds apart.  That I am in a strange land, that I will never, ever fit in.  There are just some things, some aspects of Canadian life that will always be foreign to me, and I to them.

No, this is not about bags of milk.

This is about .... the Robertson screw:

I was surprised when I moved here that my house had a screwhead I had never seen before.  But I shook it off and moved on.  This week, I had a contractor in my house, working to fix stuff so that we can the house in the winter/spring.  He ended up telling me a tale of helping his sister in Philadelphia with renovating her house.  He was flummoxed by his inability to get some screws with the Robertson head and had much hate for the Phillips screw head that is most familiar to Americans:






As this figure suggests, there are many kinds of screw heads.  The contractor insists that the Phillips head can easily be stripped.  Well, I have stripped more than a few Robertsons.

Anyway, this is yet another example of the challenges of being an alien abroad.


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4 comments:

  1. Jacob T. LevyDecember 21, 2011 at 6:33 PM

    Agreed-- I noticed it almost right away, and in doing a lot more construction-type work in the last year I've had to readjust fully.

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  2. Steve GreeneDecember 21, 2011 at 7:18 PM

    So, what type of screw head is actually best? I hate stripping screws.

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  3. Steve SaidemanDecember 21, 2011 at 7:58 PM

    Greg the contractor strongly prefers the square head of the Robertson. I guess it is ok, but I am not sure you cannot strip those either.

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  4. Theo McLauchlinDecember 22, 2011 at 8:33 AM

    Robertson is objectively superior. While it's still possible to strip Robertson screws, it's much harder than Phillips. There are certain other advantages to the Robertson over the Philips. Principally, the screw has a stronger tendency to stay on the driver. You can hold it horizontally and it won't pop off. And the diagonal head of the Philips gives the driver a tendency to pop out of the screw when it meets resistance--not so with the Robertson.

    Henry Ford recognized the virtues of the Robertson, but Robertson wouldn't license it to Ford. Ford, worried about supply consistency, stuck with other alternatives at his plant. A shame; one assumes the Robertson would have had pretty wide adoption in the U.S. otherwise.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Robertson

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