They’re fine, but why are there just four of them? + Holes through silicone rubber
Phillips head fasteners must have represented a ginormous improvement over slotted drives when they were introduced and began to see widespread adoption, not only because but certainly in part because they reduce the chances of your tool slip-sliding off the fastener head. Inner-hex aka hex socket drive fasteners are a further improvement in this regard, though with the trade-off that it can sometimes take an extra moment’s worth of fiddling to get the business end of the tool seated in the hex-shaped hole fastener head.
key handle
L-keys, in their newly fabricobbled magnet-base holder.
I have modest, semi-organized stockpiles of screws, washers, nuts, etc.all the way from from M2 and M2.5 up to M10 and some odds and ends both smaller than M2 and beefier than M10. Nearly all of it is 304 stainless and I favor smaller sizes because more small screws or small nuts, for example, can fit into a given container than larger-sized screws and nuts, the holes to be drilled (if any) are smaller, and so on and so forth. If I can choose from scratch and the thing I’m making or modifying or damaging is something small(ish) and light)ish), it’ll be M3. At that size, things aren’t so small that, for example, a flat washer could disappear forever into a hairline crack in the floor but they aren’t large enough that you couldn’t fit the screws and nuts you’ll be using or removing into a little lid or whatever other sort of container you have at hand. And the tools are smaller and lighter as well. The type of head on the fastener frequently tends to matter and, at least from the suppliers I can access and at the small sizes (e.g. M3 or M4-M6), there seems to be more variety in head types for hex-socket-drive fasteners than for Torx or Torx-Plus , so that (hex-socket drive ) is mostly what I have and use.
More on the smaller tools advantage of smaller hardware… Smaller screwdrivers, wrenches, socket wrenches/ratchets, nut setters, etc. are nice because they take up less space on a workbench, fit into your pocket more easily, more of them can be hung on the same section of pegboard, etc. Very small bare L-keys are alright but not as nice, ergonomically, as wing handle
L-keys and flag-handle
L-keys. McMaster-Carr prefixes those listings with Torque-Control
but I’m not sure how different grips on the plastic blade handles can give more torque control than, say, grasping a bare L-key at different points on the long-end or grasping at thicker or thinner points on the handle of a screwdriver-style hex socket driver.
AFAICT, all of the wing/flag-handled L-keys on the McMaster-Carr site are Torx or Torx-Plus. I don’t see any wing/flag-handed hex sockeL-keys. Out in the wider world, small Torx drive and Torx-plus drive fasteners may be more commmon than they seem to be here. Or perhaps they’re used more by manufacturers, especially machine tool companies, and machinists need sets of Torx-drive and Torx-Plus-drive keys to change out cutting inserts and tool fixtures on their machines. I still mostly use hex socket keys and wing/flag-handle versions of them are. for whatever reason, less common.
flag– and
key-handled (aka
wing-handled) L-keys, but nearly all of them are for Torx drive (green handles vs. red handles for hex).
So I got all four of Wiha’s wing-handle hex keys (Wiha calls it a key handle
): 1.5mm (Wiha EAN 4010995008949), 2.0mm (EAN 4010995008956), 2.5mm (EAN 4010995008963), and 3mm (EAN 4010995008970). Wiha and McMaster-Carr and other companies sell wing/flag-handle Torx and Torx-Plus keys up to T20 size, which is a bit more girthy than a 3mm hex key. Also, Wiha doesn’t sell them as a set with the same sort of folded metal bench stand available for the same-style Torx and Torx-Plus tools.
If anyone at Wiha is reading this:
Extend the range a bit (e.g. add an H4 key and maybe a couple more) and sell them as a set with a stand. Also, emboss the product information, or at least the important parts like the size, into the plastic handle material instead of printing it onto the handle surface. I haven’t yet subjected the white print on these red handles to the fingernail test or subjected it to trial-by-ethanol-moistened-Kimwipe, but I have a gut feeling that all of the text will go gone-zo at some point, through a combination of abrasion and cleaning. The sizes should also be visible on the knob-end edges of the wing/key handles because those are the most-visible surfaces on the tools when they’re in a stand or block, whether the stand is sitting on a benchtop or stuck onto a vertical face (e.g. the side of a machine tool or a pegboard panel). I wrote the sizes on the tops of the handles of mine with a Sharpie, but that’ll rub off at the merest whiff of alcohol or some other solvents.
Returning to our story…
Needing some sort of a holder and looking at what I had laying around in the way of scrap materials, I went with a ~4.5cm-square cube of translucent-ish while silicone rubber. A thick square rare-earth magnet went onto the bottom so that I could stick the entire thing onto a metal shelf support or metal pegboard panel when not in use (and for retention of the keys). The magnet had a countersunk screw hole at its center and that hole was large enough and countersunk deeply enough that a small-diameter, thin flat head screw wouldn’t poke up above the rim.
I could have carved out the hole for the magnet entirely by using a box cutter, but a Forstner bit seemed likely to give me a hole with a more uniform depth with less effort. If I drilled the hole, I’d have to either cut with an oversized bit, so the magnet’s corners just touched the hole edge, or else (which was the route I took), after using a smaller bit, carve out the corners afterwards with a knife. As you can see in the photo above, the result is not beautiful, but it is serviceable. The magnet is slightly recessed, but I added some black silicone tape to reduce the likelihood of the magnet splitting in half or chipping on impact.
After making the deep square-ish cut-out on the bottom for the magnet and drilling straight from the center of that hole through to the opposate face of the silicone cube to accommodate a 50mm long M3 binding barrel
(an inner-threaded fastener with a smooth outer surface used with a matching screw to binding things like product catalogs, technical documentation, or fabric/upholstery swatches together when being able to add or remove pieces of material as needed is desirous), I had to drill wells for the keys that would bring them deep enough that their tips would feel enough attraction to the magnet below to keep them from falling out of the block of silicone too easily.
Drilling through silicone rubber
Drilling through a block of silicone rubber isn’t especially difficult, but producing a clean, empty hole, like the 3cm-deep wells I wanted to make for these keys to slot into, was a bit bothersome, for me, using the poorly-suited-for-the-job tools I brought to bear (three-point drill bits intended for wood). The bits penetrated as easily as, say, an awl would pass through but didn’t remove much material. For the binding barrel
, it wasn’t an issue. I drilled the hole, pulled out a much-thinner-than-the-drill-bit silicone spaghetti noodle, the hole puckered back up, and I pressed the binding barrel through anyway. Some washers and a stubby M3 screw went on at the top and that aspect of the project was done. For the keys, though, I wanted visible, open holes. The keys themselves range from about 1.6mm (the H1.5 key) to about 3.4mm (the H3 key) in diameter and I used to make holes for them using a 2mm, 3mm, and (for the H3 key once I grokked that the drills weren’t producing perfectly-smooth-walled circular shafts) 4mm drill bit.
It took multiple passes (and abusing the drill bits by moving them laterally in circles around the perimeter of the hole), alternating with fishing out silicone debris with a dental pick, to hog out enough material to leave wells large enough to accept the keys. The drifts of white crumbs that resulted were a pain to clean up and the holes are still shedding specks of silicone. Some of this stuff is visible as white dots on the red plastic of the handles in the photos included in this post.
The result is good enough for me for now, but I’d like to identify a better way of making long clean holes through silicone rubber. The replies to a post on a welding forum by someone seeking advice on drilling through pucks of rubber (Cleanly drilling Holes through dense Rubber – Advice?) include some suggestions intended to make drilling easier, like freezing the material beforehand or sandwiching it between boards, but also some recommendations to punch through it instead of drilling.
Another style of drill bit might have yielded a better result, but I don’t see Forstner or spade bits or anything along those lines smaller than around 6mm. Conventional hole saws don’t come in such small sizes either. A lab rubber-stopper punch or one of the tube-shaped punches that leather workers use (with a hammer or mallet to drive them through) might have worked better. They’re both available for very small holes. There are also diamond-grit-coated hole saws for glass and ceramic materials (available in sizes down to 1mm) and there are so-called paper drill bits
used in commercial printing and binding shops. The diamond-git hole saws are available down to 1mm hole sizes and I see the paper hole cutters as small as 3mm. From what I can glean, however, paper drill bits seem to be another type of punch rather than a drill per se, as the mode of operation appears to be solely through downward pressure, without any of the spinning-around-its-axis stuff one usually associates with drilling. All of these might also require digging or pulling out the core material with a small dental pick or surgical curette.
If time and tide permit, I may take a stab at doing some sort of very rudimentary hole-through-silicone-slab shoot-out, trying leather punches, lab stopper punches, diamond hole saws, et al. in the near future, after the necessary implements have arrived. No promises, though.
The inline images of screw drive types are public domain images from Wikipedia, used in articles like List of screw drives and I changed their color using a CSS filter (filter: invert(21%) sepia(28%) saturate(3828%) hue-rotate(180deg) brightness(96%) contrast(105%);) generated by a tool written by Barrett Sonntag and posted to Codepen.io: CSS filter generator to convert from black to target hex color.