Screws and Plywood, the Dummy Combination

Wood plugs to hold screws

As we wander the internet in search of candidates for our (near-)daily award, we've noticed a disturbing pattern among the contributors to the former eHow.com. It appears that a significant number of them attacked topics about which they knew nothing – not news to us, of course – including not knowing enough to know why the OQ would even ask the question they're pretending to answer. Today's nominee is one such post, a shorty called "How to Put Screws Into Plywood." The post, by one Brian Baer, is now living at Hunker.com.

Although Baer claimed to have used a website called "Woodworking: Learning Techniques" as a reference, the sad fact is that none of the information he passed along can be found there. Instead, Brian's materiel appears to be some sort of DIY instructions he pounded out himself, because they're not only quite rudimentary, they're also pretty useless. They're useless because despite his "four years in architecture school," Baer clearly did not understand why the OQ would even ask such a question.
For the record, someone might ask "How to put screws into plywood" for the simple reason that plywood does not take screws in the edge like solid lumber. Now, had Brian known that, he might have come up with some sort of useful information. That's as opposed to the nonsensical,

• "[Place] the plywood on a sturdy table or on the floor..."
• "Measure at least 6 inches from the top and side of the piece of plywood."
• "Drill a hole... using a drill bit that is smaller than the diameter of the screw... Do not drill through the entire piece of plywood."
• "Hold the 1/2-inch screw with the tip in the drilled hole. Using the Phillips head drill bit and the electric drill, slowly rotate the screw into the hole."

We have to ask, just what good is it to drive a screw into plywood like that: screws are used to fasten two items together, but this looks like some sort of ornamentation!
In the real world, someone who understood the question might have suggested that a woodworker trying to drive a screw into the edge of plywood might have used dowel or wood plug glued into the plywood to give a screw's threads something to hold onto. Alternatively, you might be able to use pocket screws that are driven into the face of the plywood.

Baer's instructions, on the other hand, are just plain stupid, at a level that has to struggle to be as useless as a Dumbass of the Day!

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