>I've had Phillips over-torque and eat threads. I've had them strip to a raw steel crater long before the head even meets the surface it's being screwed into.

>I've had Phillips over-torque and eat threads. I've had them strip to a raw steel crater long before the head even meets the surface it's being screwed into. >Who knows how many newton-meters a Phillips head takes before it cams? Does anybody? Probably a huge range. Yep, that's the problem with them. Maybe they made sense decades ago when assembling aluminum aircraft and they didn't have widely-available torque-limiting screwdrivers. But now they're ridiculously obsolete, and the only reason we still use them is because of sheer inertia (i.e., everyone has a Phillips-head screwdriver handy, but lots of people do not have a set of Torx drivers at hand; also, the inertia makes them cheap). They should have been retired ages ago. If I were dictator, I'd simply ban them (not allowed in new designs, no new Phillips screws allowed to be sold, but drivers of course are fine for removing old ones to replace with better fasteners). There is simply no good reason to use Phillips now.