Yesterday started like most weekend days, with Dad annoying me. I was sound asleep when I heard my phone beeping with a text message. For some reason I thought it might be an out of towner wanting to meet up, so I bounded out of my cozy to bed to see the message. The day before, my family had a bit of a fiasco over in Cincinnati involving faulty plumbing construction work. My Dad was not a happy camper. So yesterday morning I get a text from him saying, "I slept like a rock, how about you?" I responded "not anymore." It was 7:00 and I decided to stay up and get the day going. It was a productive day for me. I got a lot done, but the big thing was that I fixed two problems with my car. First I fixed the antenna that was no longer going up and down when I turned on the radio on and off. That wasn’t too bad, it just needed some WD-40 and a bit of twisting. It’s not perfect yet, but things are better.
The second project was fixing my car door. Recently, I had the weather strip on the driver’s side door replaced. But when I got the car back I found the driver’s door to be very tight. By tight I mean that when I pulled the handle the door didn’t want to open. It was too tight on the latch that connects the door to the car. Now they said that for a couple days it would be tight, because the rubber that makes up the weather strip had to get a bit worn in. I drove the car for about two weeks and the problem didn’t go away. In fact there were three times that I couldn’t open the door from the inside, and I had to crawl out the passenger side. This was fairly embarrassing, but thankfully I think I was able to get out undetected. Anyway, I took the car back to the body shop and told them that I thought the current tightness I was experiencing was a bit exaggerated from their description. The owner of the shop looked at it, agreed with me, and had a worker fix it up. A few minutes later the staff member pulled the car around to the front of the shop and showed me how the door was all fixed up. Fantastic, the door open and closed just fine.
But the next day I noticed that the door was now not fully shut. Before it was too shut, and now it wasn’t shut enough. The result was that there was an air gap between the door and the car. So much so that if I was standing outside, I could look directly into the car. This worried me, because that meant rain could get inside. Also when I was driving there was a constant draft noise. Before I left the shop the staff member showed me what he had done to fix the problem. There is a part on the car that the door latches onto. All cars have some variation of this part. Supposedly when they put the new weather strip on, this part got moved back, more inwards to the car, and it caused the car door to latch with a much tighter seal that usual, and that was what was causing my difficulties with opening the door. I do not know why they had to move this part, it is connected to the car, not the door. It shouldn’t have had anything to do with the weather strip. But they moved it and apparently it had been moved too much.
With that in mind, I decided that instead of taking the car back a second time, that I would try to fix the problem myself. The part that is connected to the car is fastened on by two screws. The problem with the screws is that they are star shaped. A Phillips head screw has four grooves, these screws had 6. These types of screws are called torx screws, and I had no idea where to get the right type of screw driver for them.
Today is not tutorial Tuesday but I think now is a fine time for a lesson on screws. Phillip head screws are purposely made to cam out when they are screwed in all the way. Cam out is that frustration you experience when you're sitting their nicely screwing in the screw and all of a sudden your screwdriver pops out. Apparently that is meant to happen. This was because way back when automatic torque sensing instruments did not exist. If you were using an automatic screwdriver it was possible that you'd screw in the screw too tight and potentially damage the piece the screw was being twisted into. Phillip's heads were developed to purposely cause the screwdriver to get dislodged from the screw once it was twisted in to a particularly set tightness. The fancy language is torque. At a certain amount of torque the screw cams out. Torque = force * distance, and relates to rotational force. Torque explains why it's much harder to screw in a screw with a regular screwdriver (just a long metal stick with a pointy end), than a ratchet (which is beant and has a long arm). In the first case you have to apply almost all the force to screw the screw in because you don't have any distance. You're hand is only a few inches from the screw and your arm has to do all the turning. With a ratchet, the arm is nice and long and it does all the turning. So you only have to generate just a little bit of force to get the same effect as a straight screw driver.
But despite the benefit of developing a screw that cannot be turned too tight, many of us have experienced the drawback of cam out. When the screw gets tight enough and cams out the screw driver, frequently we'll either strip the screw, ruin the screw driver, or slip and jam the screw driver into ourselves or the piece we're working on. With the advent of torque sensing screw drivers, a new type of screw was developed to prevent cam out. This was the torx screw. Like any screw, torx screws can be twisted too tightly, potentially damaging the piece, but they are typically used with automatic screw drivers that automatically shut off once the torque meets a certain threshold. Since distance remains the same, these screw drivers will shut off once the amount of force required to further screw in the screw gets too great.
In the end I went to Auto Zone picked up a socket ratchet and a T40 torx screw head, and adjusted the screws just fine. I was able to get my door to shut more tightly but not nearly so hard as before, and that air gap which would have let in the rain is now sealed off.
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