George’s Tips on Impact Driver Tips

Workin' the shop and especially work with fasteners has sure come along way from when I got started and we were driving slotted screws with a handheld screwdriver. Today, you know, honestly I can barely remember the last time I used a handheld screwdriver for anything because being able to power drive our fasteners has really come so far. Between cordless drills and increased quality of the driver tips themselves, we can get a lot of work done a lot more quickly. So let's talk about tips a little bit. Here's my really really big advice for ya. When you're gettin' yourself a driver tip, don't skimp. Because it's one of these kinda pay me now pay me later sort of things. If you skimp on your driver tip and you don't get a good one what's gonna happen is that as you use it the tip itself is gonna start to wear out. Now couple things can go kerflooey with ya here. One, it might be sort of engaged in the screw but it's just gonna sit and spin because it wore out completely. Even worse, the chance we don't wanna take is that it wears out to a point where it jumps out of the fastener and the next thing in line is your work. And on a finished surface if that tip makes contact, we're gonna screw up a piece. So don't skimp on the tips that you get. Now let's talk a little bit about what's goin' on here. Obviously different lengths. But then what's goin' on here on the driver end of this thing. We've got a couple ways we can go. With a hex end, what's that's gonna let that tip do is engage with a conventional three-jaw chuck. There we go, so that we can socket in that way. Now, what I really like, especially if we're drivin' any kind of a heavy fastener. Easy out, easy in. So when you look at these driver tips and you see this recess in here, what's happening when I put that into the driver, is it's engaging inside so that can't fall out. One of the benefits I get from that is really easy to do a quick change and this can't come loose, can't possibly fall out of there. Now, the impact driver that's laying here is another good example of why we don't wanna skimp on that driver tip. Impact drivers are more and more prevalent and what we don't wanna do is give the impact driver the opportunity to mess up a tip which with a low-end driving tip could happen. Here's another thing that really cool and I take advantage of this all the time. I can't say enough about magnetic tips. So, lazy woodworker that I am, I can reach for my screw, the magnetized tip grabs it for me, get it in place, even more importantly, when I'm tryin' do work here and feel like I need one more hand, what is gonna happen for me here is that the square driver's engaged, the magnetic holds it in place so with my other hand I can position my work and we can drive. Just like I'm about to do here to finish off my cool maple burl table. Now the other thing that comes out of this is the benefits of having different lengths available. With these hairpin legs havin' that long driver just made it a lot easier to get to the screw. And what you're gonna find is that as you use drivers for different tasks, in your shop or when you're installing cabinets, you gonna find applications where you wanna have a number of different lengths of available depending on what you're doin'. So, don't skimp on the tip. Magnetized is great. The recess so that it'll accept, specially in an impact driver like this, is a wonderful thing to have. Make sure you're gettin' a good quality one so it doesn't strip out. The last thing we want to do is the driver itself to go bad which can then make your work go badly. So, those are my tips on driver tips.