In a Home Hardware home centre in Ontario (i.e. lumber yard) I found some metric dimension wood screws. They are manufactured by GRK Canada, but the literature quotes "The screw with the German twist" and "Swiss Quality". The box itself quotes the "nominal" imperial size in large font with the hard metric size in small font (i.e. 4.0 x 40 mm; #8 x 1-1/2 nominal). The two varieties I saw was the regular pan head and a regular counter-sink head. The counter-sink head had a novel feature of having small "blades" beneath the head to chisel out it's own countersink hole. There were two obvious differences: they use a torx (six point star) driver, either T15 or T25, and the price was about 50% greater than equivalent North American screws. The woman at the sales counter said that they stopped carrying the screws for a few months, but the local contractors demanded that they stock them again. Apparently the Torx head works very well with a modern power screw drivers (better than Robertson (square) or Phillips (4 point star) drivers). I've had a chance to use the new screws and the driver doesn't "hop" out of the screw head. The information I have quotes a supplier in Thunder Bay, Ontario: L-W M Group White-Wood Distribution 1046 Gorham Street Thunder Bay ON Canada P7B 5X5 tel 807 345-1605 fax 807 345-0300 The web address for GRK Canada is: http://www.grk-canada.com/
