Pictured are two M3 countersunk Torx head stainless bolts. The smaller, pleasingly star-shaped one is the type I'm used to; the other one is from a bag of twenty, all with identical-looking Torx recesses, that I was sent by the supplier who supplied the regular-looking ones.

A T10 bit (usually the correct bit for an M3) is a very sloppy fit in them, and frustratingly a T15 almost goes in, but not quite. In appearance they're like a strange and useless hybrid between a hex and a Torx head.

Has anyone else had a batch of these mongrel Torx heads? Can anyone suggest how the manufacturing can have gone so awry?

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 right side one looks like "the recess formerly known as Torx"

Could be bad or worn tooling, could be a China oddity, could be a new and better thing....er.....

I'd be a whole lot happier with them if they looked like the left one or better yet were a straight hex socket.

I hate trying to deal with rusty Torx sockets on cars and other machines. Just my $0.02 worth. Ready and waiting to be slammed as usual by the armchair experts.

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.

Hi Bill, don't know what the one on the right is supposed to be, but the ratio of the socket diameter to the head diameter looks totally wrong and I would think the head may be a lot weaker than it should be. Possibly the wrong screws were in the wrong machine or the wrong tooling as Jeff has indicated was used. I would return them for a replacement or refund if it was me.

Regards Nick.

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Torx design is beautifully illustrated, and explained, in this patent: **LINK**

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3584667

MichaelG.

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Edit: ... and the difference between Torx and TorxPlus is shown here:

https://www.wonkeedonkeetools.co.uk/hexagon-and-torx-keys/are-there-any-specialist-hexagon-and-torx-keys/

None of which helps identify the Bill's item !!

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 21/08/2019 10:33:28

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?

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

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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.

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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

It does have quality control. "As part of our quality improvement process we are taking the quality control right to the customer so you can do the quality control for us. "

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

C’mon guys. He asked for Suggestions. Exact response. There may be others. They might be of Indian origin. Unlikely to be made in Britain, ‘cos we don’t make much here these days.

Chinese can make good products. A UK firm, I worked for at one time, sent back containers of failed (as in sub-standard, not-to-specification) items. The message soon got through that the specification was there to be adhered to. They then only got consignments that passed their own QC checks - so the checks in China were always adequately stringent, and/or they more careful in the production departments.

Only one company I have worked for ‘short-changed’ most of its customers - but most of that industry may have been the same, for all I know. One other, that was a bit dodgy, tried to short-change some of its clients but most of them were wise to scams so were very wary of any business in that sector. First was aromatherapy oils and the second was in precious metals recovery.

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.

Then of course TORX put a dimple in the bottom of the recess! so I had to buy 20 sets of new TORX drivers to go with the old ones. My answer was to put a screwdriver against and wipe it out.

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