Why not just make it one shape, in different sizes?
In: Engineering
That’s how it was for a few hundred years, there were a slotted screws and that was pretty much it. I have seen tanks with armor plate held on with slot-head screws the size of Eisenhower Dollars.
Problem with that is that slot-head screws are very prone to cam-out where the screwdriver slips. Phillips was designed to cam-out on purpose as a torque limiting design for factory assembly with power tools. At the time there were no torque limiting clutches on power screwdrivers. Robertson drive (square hole) is designed to be unable to cam-out. Star Torx is designed for high torque applications but is badly misused by the industry as a “security fastener” and in applications where it has no benefit. The little vanes in a Torx fastener are very suceptible to rust and a rusty one will disintegrate the instant you apply the tool.
There are a multitude of foolish “security fasteners” that get used in places where someone thinks that their use will keep someone out of a device, but the fact is that physical access to the system is total access to the system. The appropriate tool will be acquired or manufactured, or the fastener will fall to the hammer and chisel or the cutoff wheel or the drill. All these do is frustrate repairmen who want to be able to put it back together neatly, someone tearing into it to seek vulnerabilities or acquire intellectual property will not be meaningfully delayed by such fasteners. The other time you find them is when someone is trying to hide poor construction. Whenever I see them on something that otherwise has no reason to (no trade secrets or security functions or intellectual property or suchlike) I open the device up to see what is being hidden.
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