LRod said something like:
On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:34:52 GMT, "Thomas G. Marshall"
. com wrote:

Top posted for your convenience.

(In other words, you can look at the earlier text by scrolling down if
you *want* to, but you're not forced to wade through dozens of lines
of unedited material to get to the meat of THIS post

Top posting is convenient as you point out for email, because in email there
are two contributors, and less need for interleaved posting.

Please see further down (for a visual demonstration.)


************************************************** ************

There is an article at WoodCentral which has the correct sizes of
drill bits for screwhead, shank, and root diameters of common sizes.
There's also drilling and tapping information for metal work.

http://www.woodcentral.com/articles/...cles_713.shtml



I'm never quite sure what the best practices are for pre-drilling holes
for
screws.

But if in a usenet environment, you have many interleaved posting
opportunities. Pretend I was someone who wanted to repond to both your post
and this part of my post. In such a case, top posting is the formula for a
mess.

Please scroll further down....



What I have been doing is holding the drill bit in front of the screw at
eye
level and trying to sight it to see if I can still see the shaft of the
screw behind it. If I can just /barely/ see it, then I know that the
screw's shaft will be a smidgeon larger than the hole it's teething into,
and that's what I'm aiming for usually.

Someone replying now to this point as well would want to interleave here.

Interleaved posts by their nature follow top-down. An interleaved comment
follows immediately the paragraph or line it refers to. But your top post
is bottom up. But a response to a *part* of your top post (interleaved)
would be top down. If there were several cycles of interleaved posts and
top posts a complicated conversation would be nearly impossible to follow.

And you have no idea as to how complicated a conversation an existing thread
might turn into.



Note, I'm not talking about the case where I need a hole large enough in
a
board for the threads to spin freely to pull the board down to something
underneath. I'm talking about the underneath business, but perhaps there
are rules for the board here too.

Fundamentals:

1. Does pre-drilling generally create a stronger hold, because presumably
there is less wood pushed to the side of the screw? Or does the stress
of
the wood split to the side add to the hold against the threads?

2. Should a pre-bore be large enough to only grab the threads? Or is
this
only necessary for the harder of the hard woods?

Thanks!



--
"Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity!
Two weeks from everywhere!"