O'BERRY Enterprises 3251 Squeak Replacement Screw (50 Count)

After hearing some ridiculous contractor quotes, I went online looking for a solution to my impossibly squeaky floors. We have a cat and you could hear the thing walking they were so bad. The hardware store guys told me you just learn to live with it...after four years in this house I was going crazy. Saw this thing demo'd online and gave the starter set a try. They're not perfect, but when you can find a joist they work very well. Couple things: - if you have an older home with older hardwoods, the holes are nearly invisible among the other surface imperfections. Make sure you pick up a couple colors of wood putty, one darker than your floors and one lighter, so that you can mix them like play-dough and get your color right. - That's important because the screws do not always snap off - I'd say it works about 80-85% of the time. The little tool they give you does not snap the screws as neatly as they show in the video. And in working it around, you enlarge your holes a bit. Or sometimes the screw doesn't generate enough torque to snap before it just starts chewing through the wood and you're just spinning. Then you back it out and either put it in planning to snap it or just fill the hole you create during the mangling process to break it off. - I found these to be useless between joists. Probably a personal situation with our house and the old nails, but the only sound reduction came when the flooring was re-secured to the joists. - In an old house, not all of the joists are 16" apart. Fortunately our basement is unfinished and I was able to see a lot of the time where I was going wrong. Some areas were covered, however, and then it's hide and see. I looked far and wide for a good stud finder that could penetrate 2" of hardwoods and subfloor. Bosch has one that said it could but home depot had stopped carrying it at the store I tried. I found when hunting for a joist that normally the worst of the squeak was directly at the joist. If you can use a finger and create the squeak (vs. jumping on it), you're probably very close. I'm about 200 screws in at this point and have only had one pre-break below the surface but not at the 1/8" that they specify. I find that they torque up a little better if you're going slow so I have a reasonable speed going until I get close to the guard and then slow appreciably. At that point, I'm drilling no faster than I could by hand which seems to work the best. Overall, considering that I had no way to approach some of my floors from underneath, that even if I had, the option of nailing a 2"x4" to the joist and then angling up into the sub-floor sounded like a true waste of time, I think these are the greatest invention I could have asked for. Even using the square drill attachment (vs. say a Phillips) was genius as you never strip a screw. My entire toolkit for this is a set of vise grips, a long paperclip (bend it in half so you don't drop it), tape measure, putty, flashlight, some tape to mark the joist centers and a drill. I'd rate it very easy on the difficulty scale. It is time-consuming, however, and you go through screws like crazy. 6 joists per avg bedroom x 11 feet x 2-3 screws per foot and you're easily over 100 per room even if you're just attacking the squeaky spots (if your rooms are as noisy as ours were). Sweet bliss coming into the house now - I'm almost afraid to walk on them. Good luck! Update - 2 weeks later - couple hundred more screws in place. Still a fan - figured out two things: 1) they will quiet spaces between joists, just put in a grid, spacing them 4" apart, so in 1 sq. ft, you'll use around 16 screws to silence it. compare that to a joist, where you get about 3" of silence on either side when you can snug the floor back down to the joist. ups your total per room substantially. i picked up a 500 pack for the weekend. 2) resist the temptation to rock the screw head back and forth to minimize floor damage - hold the tool like an airplane thrust lever and push forward only. faster and less frustrating.

I bot another product from a different vendor, which has single pitch threads. Did not work well. This product’s threads change pitch in the middle, which makes these screws very effective in tightening subfloors to joists.

I've used 550 of these screws so far, and they saved us a job that would've cost around $15K! Our house had several squeaky floors, and this solution worked perfectly to eliminate the squeaks. My only tip from experience is to make sure you DRILL FIRST. The instructions suggest a 1/8" drill bit, but from my experience, that can hardly cause snapping and doesn't work well. I got much better results with a 3/32" drill bit, and in nearly all cases, the snapping went smoothly. Also, remember to match the wood filler to the color of your floor when filling the holes afterward. A wax stick or furniture repair kit might not work as perfect as wood filler.

Does what they say. They do leave a pretty big hole from the width of the nail (not the head but the nail shaft) up to about 2x that size. It depends on how well the heads snap off. Takes a strong grip and pliers to break them off. Be sure to realize if you have hardwood or softwood floors. I highly recommend but they aren't easy. They often work and made our floor much better but did not completely remove the squeaks.

These are replacement screws for the O’Berry Squeak No More system of stopping floor squeaks. I had it use it on hardwood flooring where I had no access to the underside of the squeak. These variable pitch screws draw the joist, subfloor, and hardwood down tight and, in most cases, alleviate the squeak. The worst part, in my case, was trying to find the joists underneath in order to screw into them. Stud finders will not find the joists through 3/4” flooring and 3/4” sub-flooring so it comes down to drilling a few holes with the smallest drill bit you have to determine the joists’ location. I know, drilling into your beautiful hardwood flooring isn’t something I like to do but, in this case, it’s a necessary evil. Once joists are located, a 3/8” hole is drilled and you used these screws along with the appropriate guide from the Squeak No More kit to screw it down tight. Make sure you’re using a drill or impact screwdriver so when it reaches the proper depth, the screw shears off just below floor level. Repeat as necessary to rid your floors of those annoying squeaks. Once completed, fill in the holes with the appropriately colored wood filler stick (or crayon, actually), smooth it out and the holes are almost invisible. Anyway, these replacement screws work the same as what came in the kit. They worked for me.

Easy to use but still cannot locate the squeak spots yet

For starters: give it a try on a piece of plywood and a 2x4 underneath. Snap two or three. Since Covid the quality went down. The material never used to bent as some screws do, now. Seems the ingredients are not mixed well? By now I used thousands of these and I detect forgeries (there are fake boxes like these out there, clearly a fake and Amazon was informed). A good product. Works.

I bought these Squeak No More screws, to continue trying to silence my noisy chipboard flooring, on my top landing, having previously bought the jig, with 50 screws. They have helped reduce the squeaks, but some still remain. Being 71, I need to visit my bathroom, during the night, and because it is otherwise quiet, the squeaks sound very loud. This system is no quick fix, and you obviously need to apply them to the adjacent areas, to improve the cure. Now that I have an extra 150 screws, I can try them on my adjacent carpeted floors, in the hope that I can stop having to tiptoe around, at night. Top Tip: Try to put the screws in at as much of an angle, as the jig will allow, which won’t be much, but I found this improved their effectiveness. I will try to post another review, when I have either succeeded, or failed; whichever is the case.

Worked perfectly !!

We live on the second floor of an old late 60's house in BC. Our master bedroom still has the original oak floors, and they squeak like crazy in many spots. This was especially bad in the winter when the furnace is working a lot and the wood is drier. Got this product and also ordered the extra 50 screws package (this only has 50, not 100). Took a little while to find the soft squeaky spots, then applied a screw right at the center of the loud spot and surrounded it with 4 additional screws about 1-2 inches away in each direction. This meant each spot took at least 5 screws to get the squeak out. so 100 screws took care of about 20 bad spots in 3 rooms. It doesn't entirely resolve the squeak but reduces it by a lot. Pre-drilling with 1/8 was required. I just drove them into the pre-drilled hole with an impact driver until the score was below the wood, then used the side-snapping tool to do all the screw heads (the original method didn't work well, but the side-snapper worked well)