On Monday, 17 August 2020 22:09:24 UTC+1, John Rumm wrote:
On 17/08/2020 11:15, T i m wrote:
On Mon, 17 Aug 2020 09:13:41 +0100, Chris Green wrote:

snip

I'm not sure why they were discontinued, it may be that their
downsides (fairly easy to break, easy to damage the heads) caused too
many complaints - though once you had learnt their weaknesses it
wasn't much of an issue.

Agreed ... but once you do they are fairly special.

Alternatively maybe they weren't making a
profit, they were certainly cheap compared with a lot of other
stainless screws.

+1

I'm with you where anything that's likely to love outside is assembled
with stainless. This is because of how often even fairly new fasteners
have rusted to the point where they can't easily be undone, or they
stain, or rust away and then fail.

You may find this interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IIsQr9aY_k


Thanks, John.

Near the end, he shows a gate hinge with seemingly unrusted screws in it.

We have an almost identical hinge on our gate. Two or three screws are looking horribly rusty. The rest look untouched - just like in the video. I didn't fit it, but all the screws look identical. And it reflects my real-world experience. Some rust and some don't - even from the same batch.

The high position of his test screws would tend to dry out in a way that one near the ground on a fence post might never.

Does the material screwed through make a difference? Some sort of electrolytic effect when through a metal object?

Does it make a difference if you had to use an impact driver to get the screw in which might cause much more damage to any plating? It might only be if the particular screw/wood combo was especially tough. Which just possibly might explain some being bad and others not.

Four years ago, I used some decking screws. Brownish ones (make? no idea now). They look as new. So, when I had to make another bit of decking, I used similar ones (though this time, green).

While we might hate the look of rusty screws, I know I do, it seems feasible that using, say, a 6mm silver or gold screw might take very much longer to rust to the point of failure than a similar 4mm screw. Yet be less expensive than a 4mm stainless.