Self Drilling Metal Teks

I’m not impressed with the Buildex Fibre Teks. A failure rate of 30%.

I’m building an all steel framed house and therefore have used an array of fasteners for metal. These fibre teks are the worst. I’ve been installing 6mm Villaboard in the wet areas of the house. It seemed that every second fibre tek was failing, so with the main bathroom I decided to do a count, the results being 305 successfully installed, 93 failed. What I found was happening is the fibre tek drills and screws through the board pulling the board out to the screw head and then the drilling tip wants to wander on the steel frame, the screw head and the driver bit go all skew whiff resulting in one buggered head thus a buggered screw. They’re time wasting and at near enough $100 / 1,000 (Bunnings) become expensive in all aspects.

The Wafer head self-drilling screws for metal aren’t much better. I used these to fix the aluminium window/door frames to the wall steel frames and nearly every time the screw was pressed against the frame to fix the screw would fall off the Tek Screw gun bit. The potential was always there to damage the powder coating of the window / door frames.

In both cases the recommended Phillips head bit has been used.

I’ve also had to use Bugle headed screws. With its recessed 6 sided bit drive I found it to be a very positive drive, the screw always stayed on the drive bit and never had a failure.

Recently I was screwing in a wafer head, I had to have my hand reasonable close to the fixing location, the screw buckled and fell off the drive bit ended up 10mm into my wrist. Luckily no damage tendons etc, just a bit of a hole in my wrist for a week or so.

My opinion is that Phillips heads on self-drilling screws for metal are dangerous and should be replaced, possibly with the bugle type head.