Ed Huntress wrote:
"Christopher Tidy" wrote in message
...

DoN. Nichols wrote:


I would really not want to modify a good screwdriver -- I would
prefer to start from scratch. A cheap screwdriver I would (and have)
modified -- for example when I needed a split blade to drive a nut which
had a slot on either side of the screw -- but needed a gap in the blade
for the screw to project into. (Hex head on the screw, so the nut
*must* rotate, and the nut fit into a recess in a connector.) So I just
grabbed a cheap screwdriver (Stubby one of the kind provided in Army
toolkits, since I was working for an Army R&D lab at the time, and this
was truly a government project, so I could expend a screwdriver for the
cause. I simply took a file to cut the needed notch.

The problem I find with cheap screwdrivers is that they wear quickly, and
sometimes the tip becomes twisted. I have a cheap Stanley flat screwdriver
I bought a while back (it was not one of their most expensive ones) and
the blade distorted in normal use. If I'm going to spend time carefully
modifying a screwdriver, I don't want to find that it rapidly becomes
unusable because of the quality of the material. My experience has been
that cheap screwdrivers are mostly a nuisance.


When I have a soft, cheap one that I want to keep for some reason, I polish
off any plating near the tip and give it two or three passes in
case-hardening compound. This is one situation where you *do* want to temper
after case-hardening, but I just do it with a torch, and temper by color.

Handy if you have the compound already, but if not it'll probably cost
you more than a decent screwdriver :-).

Chris