There are various sets of standards in the tool world. In America we have The American National Standards Institute or ANSI for short. On a global level, there is the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. Since this is a blog about specifically German made tools we will look at the German version: DIN.
DIN stands for Deutsches Institut Für Normung or German Institute for Standardization in English. They have been operating for literally 100 years and have always been highly regarded in the standards community. Though the name implies an exclusively German operation, the DIN standards have been adopted across the world and influenced many other standards organizations including the ISO. The best example of this is the DIN standard 476 from 1922 introducing the A sizes of paper which would later become ISO 216 in 1975.Read More »
The confusion doesn’t stop there, though. In 2009 Apple launched the pentalobe screw, and that’s about all they did. There was no regulatory sizing so the brains at iFixit reverse engineered the screw and made a driver to work with it. Since it was similar in size to a Torx T2, the called it a P2. After they did this, Apple released sizing information and revealed that iFixit’s P2 was actually a size 1. It was after all this commotion that WIha released their set of pentalobes (to Apple Standards), so their PL1 is actually the same size as iFixit’s P2. Did you get all that? To keep things simple (and since this is the GERMAN tool blog) we will use Wiha’s sizing standard, PL1-PL6.




