What is Stripped Out Standoff?

[Guest]

Excuse me if this is a noob question.

I was watching a video on building PC on Youtube. The tutor mentioned that one should not over tighten the motherboard stand offs on the cabinet. If over tightened the stand offs can strip out.

I did not understand what is exactly meant by the term strip out? What exactly happens if the stand off is over tightened? Does it break the threading and then the stand off would simply rotate and rotate but would never come off?

On the contrary in my case when I did not tighten it enough, and later when I was removing the board, the screw and the standoff rotated together and instead of screw coming off the stand off, the entire standoff with attached screw together came off. I had to carefully use pliers and screwdriver to separate the two.

Thanks in advance.

 

[CountMike]

Yes, just like any other screw, when over tightening can strip threads of a screw and make it unusable. Ad to that that most standoffs are made out of softer materials like brass ad screws are not exactly high grade steel and you can see the possible problem.

 

[Karadjgne]

If you strip out a screw you tear off the threads and end up with a blunt nail. If you strip out the hole in the mobo, there's no threads left for any standoff to grab, you've just made the hole too large and any standoff placed there will never be tight, it'll never make a good ground.

 

[Paperdoc]

In your third paragraph, OP, you got it right. The threads can be damaged on either the brass stand-off or the threaded hole in the case back plate. Either way, the item cannot be tightened in the hole any more. This is not necessarily a big problem. A stand-off has two functions. First, it establishes a physical space between the mobo bottom with its traces and the case back plate, thus preventing contact and short circuiting. If one stand-off's threads strip it usually stays in the hole and does not pop out. Since there are many more stand-offs at other points in the mobo, it will remain in position and do its job of maintaining a space gap in that vicinity. The other function is to establish a ground connection to the case from the mobo at that spot. A mobo is designed to be grounded at every mounting hole via the stand-offs, but not at other places. Since there are many other stand-offs doing this function, a poor ground at one is not normally a problem at all.

What you describe in trying to remove the stand-off screw is not uncommon. It is not designed to work that way. When you install those, first there's the "tightness" of the stand-off in the back plate hole. Then there's the "tightness" of the mounting screw into the stand-off top hole. If the second is tighter than the first, you get the result you got. If what you are doing at the time is removing all the mounting screws so that you can remove the mobo from the case, that's not a real problem. You do exactly what you did after the mobo is out - use a pair of piers or a wrench to grab the stand-off on the bottom and loosen it.