Stripped Screw Removal for Dummies

Stripped phillips-head screw

At one time, the vast collection of internet stupidification called eHow.com linked pages to an author bio. Now that Leaf Group has distributed much of the eHow content among its various niches, they don't do that on a routine basis. Many of the posts to Sciencing.com say that they were written by the "Sciencing team," while in other niches, there's no author bio at all.  The reason's pretty simple: do you want to tell prospective customers that the article they just read on nuclear physics was written by a college student majoring in film? We know where the bios are, though. Feast your eyes on "How to Remove a Stripped Allen Head Screw," written by a "professional writer" with a Masters in education: Lisa Larsen. It's at HomeSteady.com these days.

Larsen's solution to the question (since she obviously had no idea how) was to reword the instructions in a "story" at another content farm, Stretcher.com. Her problem? She didn't know enough about the article (probably written by yet another freelancer with no real-world experience) to realize that there are better solutions out there.

Off the top of our collective head, we think there are a couple of good solutions. First, use a screw extractor. They're not that expensive, and they're easy to come by. Second, if you don't mind chopping up the surface when the screw head is flush, you can use a Dremel® tool to make a slot in the head, which will allow you to use a screwdriver to remove the screw.

Lisa's notion is to use a couple of drill bits, one the same diameter as the screw head and the other the same diameter as the screw's shank:

"...carefully drill the screw head until it falls away from the rest of the screw..."

...first, and then,

"Place the [second] drill bit directly on top of the screw shaft and carefully drill through it."

That seems like a good solution to someone who doesn't realize how time-consuming it is to drill the length of a screw. You also run the risk of leaving the threads in place – her suggestion to use the "proper sized center punch" to remove the thread doesn't make much sense: wouldn't the punch drive the treads farther into wood? and enlarge the hole in both metal and wood?

Given the photographs that accompany Larsen's post, it's apparent that the writer and her photographer had some strange situation in mind in which all you needed to do was drill completely through the workpiece and let the scraps fall on the other side. In a baffling bit of stupidity, Larsen also said in the original that, a drill press would help. Yeah, sure: only someone who doesn't know what a drill press is would say that. Nope, we're gonna stick with a screw extractor, which means only one pass with a drill bit. We've used the Dremel® solution many times, too, so it's too bad Larsen didn't find that idea in a blog somewhere, because it would have been a lot easier to write up and a lot more useful.

On the other hand, you can always count on a Dumbass of the Day to come up with an idea that might work once in a while. Still, drilling out the length of a #10 x 2½" screw doesn't seem a particularly good use of our time.

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