I am trying to remove some screws with some very annoying heads. The screws look like a regular Phillips head but have the center rounded out. This makes a normal Phillps head screwdriver slip as if the screw was already stripped.
I am looking for the correct bit to remove this, as I would like to reuse the screws later. That failing, has anyone had success removing screws with similar "pre-stripped" heads?
I have included an additional photo of another screw "as delivered." This close up shows the center of the head is square, with facets inside the square part of the head. For added context, every screw on the piece of furniture in question has the same head. If it is the result of stripping, the manufacturer was very thorough.
Best Answer
The top looks like a Pozidrive or Supadrive and the bottom looks like a Quadrex to me.
If those don't work, you can always cut a flat blade slot for a protruding screw and remove it that way. If that doesn't work, particularly for the top screw which looks actually stripped, get a screw extractor and take it out that way. Always try first without drilling and if you drill be careful not to cut the head off the shaft. For one stripped screw I absolutely could not afford to break, I stopped trying to turn it before it was stripped bald and used PL4OO to glue my screwdriver into the screw.
If you don't need to free the hole, if a screw is soft enough to strip, it's soft enough to drill the head off. For large lag bolt type screws, you can even drill a pilot hole and reclaim the hole by drilling the screw out with increasing sized bits, but these are extremely likely to come out with a screw remover.