Fastener 🔩 Training Min Sept '22 Fully Threaded Radio Podcast
In this episode, Carmen Vertullo compares wood screws and drywall screws.
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We're talking about some very generic screws and how they are often interchanged with each other. Sometimes correctly, and sometimes not. And those two screws are what we would commonly call the drywall screw , and wood screws.
The wood screw is a very different animal from the drywall screw. And oftentimes people will use the drywall screw in the place of a wood screw.
So, drywall screws and wood screws both function as a flat head. Notice I said function. Technically, the drywall screw has a bugle head, not a flathead, but it functions as a flathead. They have tapping screw threads or spaced threads. They have a sharp point. If the drywall screw happens to be yellow zinc plated, they have a similar color, and they have a Phillips drive in many cases. So you would expect with all these similarities, you could have some cross usage between the two of them. However, they also have many differences.
The material of a brass wood screw, for example, is brass, though there are steel wood screws and they are not heat treated or hardened, whereas the drywall screw is made out of steel and it is heat treated. But believe it or not, the brass wood screw probably is stronger than the heat treated drywall screw.
The point of the drywall screw is much sharper than that of the wood screw, and it can pierce wood and maybe even some very thin metals easily. The wood screw has a coarser thread than the drywall screw in some cases, or it can have a finer thread. But most drywall screws have a sharper, deeper and coarser thread than the wood screws, so it's easier to put them into material without having any kind of a pilot hole. The thread length drywall screws are typically threaded to the head or pretty close, whereas the wood screws and the long versions are not threaded to the head. The head of the wood screw is actually an 82 deg flat head if it's a flathead. And of course, the drywall screw has a bugle head.
So where do we see them interchanged?
Well, if you're building wood furniture, making stuff out of particle board or even wood, and you're not a really picky craftsman, that drive all screw works great in many cases. You can put it into softer woods without having to drill a pilot hole. It'll sink in oftentimes without leaving much of a bulge. So just for some cheap wood assembly, it's okay if you're doing the job right. You should use a common wood screw with an 82 degree head. These screws have a tapered body. They require a pilot hole.
The really good craftsman will use a drill that will make a tapered pilot hole and also a true hole for the top piece and a counter sink all in one operation. It's a very cool tool. You cannot only get those. And woodworking stores. You probably would not find it at the Home Depot. The wood screw is commonly used to attach door hinges, and I'm talking about like your office store. If you go look at your office door and open it, you'll notice the hinge requires flathead screw. Sometimes we'll see some people use drywall screws in place of that application, and that is a no no because two reasons they're not strong enough. Number one, and they're very likely to break if you over tightening them and then you cannot remove it. There's no repair for that broken drywall screw that's underneath that door hinge hole.
Drywall screws are very good for other types of applications that are not drywall that would typically, maybe a wood screw would work. These are things like holding lightweight devices onto walls and ceilings like smoke detectors and thermostats and CO2 detectors and other types of small sensors and cameras.
Electricians love to use these drywall screws to attach their electrical boxes to fur studs in the build out. And that's because they're very easy to use and you can put them in off angle like you often have to do with the installation of electrical boxes in conduit and conduit clips. And most importantly, they are really cheap. It's probably the cheapest screw that we have is our number six or number eight by maybe inch and 58 drywall screw. So that's what you need to know regarding using and misusing drywall screws and wood screws and how they have some cross application.