How to Remove a Stripped Screw from Wood

Start with a rubber band. It costs nothing and it works more often than anything else on this page. Lay a wide rubber band or a scrap of thick rubber over the chewed screw head, press your bit into it firmly, and turn slowly. The rubber squeezes into the damaged recess, fills the gaps the bit can no longer grip, and gives it something to bite on. Most stripped screws in soft wood come out this way, and you lose thirty seconds finding out.

If that fails, the rest of this page is a ladder: six methods in order from least to most damage to the workpiece. Work down it rather than jumping to the drill, because the methods near the top leave the wood intact and the ones near the bottom do not.

One thing worth doing before any of them: clean the recess. Pick out the compacted dust and the metal burr with an awl, a nail or a toothpick, and look at the head in good light. A real proportion of “stripped” screws are simply full of debris and being driven with a worn bit at too high a speed. A fresh, correctly sized bit pressed in hard with the drill on its slowest setting fixes those outright.

The six methods, in order

1. Rubber band or steel wool in the recess

As above. A wide rubber band is the classic; a small pad of coarse steel wool or a strip of rubber glove does the same job. Push down hard, turn slowly, and do not use an impact driver for this — the hammering spits the rubber out. Low speed, high pressure, one hand on the drill and one hand pressing it square to the screw.

2. Cut a new slot across the head

If the head itself is intact and the recess is destroyed, give it a different recess. Cut a straight slot right across the head with a rotary tool and a thin cut-off disc — or, for a head standing proud, with a hacksaw blade held in your hand. Then back the screw out with the largest flat-blade screwdriver that fits the slot.

This works because a wide flat slot takes far more torque than a shallow cross recess with its corners rounded off, and because a long screwdriver gives you leverage a bit in a drill does not. Mask the surrounding wood with tape if the surface is a show face.

3. Grip the head from the outside

If any part of the head or shank stands proud of the surface, this is the highest-success method available: clamp locking pliers onto it and turn. You are no longer relying on the damaged recess at all, which is why nothing beats it when the geometry allows.

If the head is nearly flush, it is sometimes worth deliberately removing a little wood around it with a chisel to expose enough to grip. That is a small amount of damage to avoid a large amount.

4. A screw extractor bit

The purpose-made answer. An extractor has a reverse-cutting burr that bites into the damaged head, and because the thread is left-handed it tightens its grip as it backs the screw out. If you hit this problem more than twice a year, this is the thing to buy.

We will be straight about this: our registry holds no screw extractor, no left-hand drill bit and no plug cutter, so there is no pick for any of them here and we are not going to point you at something that does a different job. Where to buy woodworking tools covers the options.

5. Drill the screw out

For a screw that cannot be turned by any means, drill it. Use a bit slightly larger than the screw’s shank, center it on the head, and drill down until the head separates — then the parts come apart and the remaining shank can usually be gripped with pliers.

Drilling hardened steel will dull a wood bit immediately, so expect to sacrifice a bit, and go slow with firm pressure rather than fast.

6. Drill around it and plug the hole

The last resort, and the right call when the joint has to come apart and the screw simply will not move. Drill a hole around the screw — an extractor designed for this cuts a ring and lifts out a plug of wood containing the screw — then glue a dowel or a face-grain plug into the hole, let it cure fully, trim it flush, and drill a fresh pilot hole beside or through it.

The one rule: let the plug cure properly before you drill it. A dowel glued in and drilled an hour later tears out. And on a show surface, cut the plug from the same board so its grain matches — the same logic as the wedge repair in how to fill gaps in wood joints.

Why screws strip, and the four habits that prevent it

Every stripped screw has one of four causes, and all four are habits rather than bad luck.

No pilot hole

A screw is a wedge. Driving it into solid wood with no pilot hole makes torque climb until something gives, and the thing that gives is the recess in the head. The engineering reference here is specific: the USDA Forest Service Wood Handbook’s withdrawal equation applies when lead holes are about 70% of the root diameter of the threads in softwoods and about 90% in hardwoods, and it notes that the root diameter of most screws averages about two-thirds the shank diameter. Its own gauge table gives shank diameters of 0.138 in for a #6, 0.164 in for a #8, 0.190 in for a #10 and 0.216 in for a #12.

The same document is blunt about the other way people get this wrong: “Screws should always be turned in. They should never be started or driven with a hammer because this practice tears the wood fibers and injures the screw threads, seriously reducing the load carrying capacity of the screw.” It also notes that soap or a similar lubricant is recommended to ease insertion, especially in dense woods, with little effect on ultimate withdrawal resistance — which is a genuinely useful old trick for hardwood.

The wrong bit, or a worn one

A bit that is one size too small sits shallow in the recess and concentrates all the torque on the corners. A worn bit has already lost those corners. Either way the recess rounds off and the bit cams out — which is the actual mechanism of “stripping” a screw head.

Drive type matters more than most beginners expect. A square (Robertson) or star drive holds a bit far better than a Phillips, which was designed to cam out deliberately. GRK’s own R4 page describes its star drive as giving “zero stripping, with 6 points of contact” — which is the manufacturer’s claim, not ours, and it is the single easiest upgrade available if you keep chewing heads.

Too much speed

Driving a screw fast generates heat and chews the recess before the screw has moved far. Use the drill’s low gear, set the clutch low enough that it slips before the head strips, and let the clutch be the thing that tells you the screw is seated. If you are using an impact driver, feather the trigger — it has the torque to twist a head off entirely.

Over-tightening

One extra turn after the head seats is where most damage happens, and it is worse in sheet goods than in solid wood. The Wood Handbook makes the same point about particleboard: withdrawal is not significantly different for lead holes between 50% and 90% of the root diameter, but “care must be taken when tightening screws in particleboard to avoid stripping the threads”. Stop when it seats. Kreg’s own thread guidance is the companion rule — coarse thread for softwoods and sheet goods such as plywood and MDF, fine thread for dense hardwoods like cherry, maple and oak — and the wrong thread in the wrong material is its own source of stripped holes.

What to own so this stops happening

Three of these four are prevention, which is where the real leverage is. None of them is a repair product.

Tool	Why you need it	Price
FTG USA 5-Piece Tapered Countersink Drill Bit Set (#4 #6 #8 #10 #12)	Drills the tapered pilot, the clearance hole and the countersink in one plunge, sized to real screw gauges — the single biggest cause of stripped screws, removed.	$17.90
DeWalt DWA2T40IR FlexTorq Impact-Ready Screwdriver Bit Set, 40 pieces	Impact-rated bits with CNC-machined tips to reduce cam-out, per the listing. Ordinary screwdriver bits shatter in an impact driver and round off fast in a drill.	$19.98
GRK R4 #8 x 2 in Multi-Purpose Framing Screws, 100 count	GRK's own page calls its star drive 'zero stripping, with 6 points of contact'. A six-point recess holds a bit in a way a worn Phillips cannot.	$11.99
DeWalt DW1720 Brad Point Drill Bit Set, 6-Piece	For drilling a clean hole for a dowel plug when a screw has to come out destructively — the center spur lands where you marked instead of skating.	$12.98
Starter kit subtotal		$62.85

Live Amazon prices as of October 21, 2026; they change, and we don’t display stale numbers — a tool with no live price shows “Check price” and is left out of the subtotal. #ad How we’re funded.

The hand tool rule that applies here

OSHA’s hand tool standard (1926.301) says unsafe hand tools must not be issued or used, and that wooden handles must be kept free of splinters and cracks and kept tight in the tool. On this job that reads as practical advice: a screwdriver with a rounded tip or a loose handle is exactly the tool that turns a tight screw into a stripped one, and a chisel pressed into service as a lever is how chisels get broken. Use the right tool, and replace a worn bit rather than pressing on with it.

One more case: the hole that strips instead of the screw

Sometimes it is not the head that fails but the hole — the screw spins freely and will not tighten, which is common in sheet-good edges and in a hole that has been used twice. Three fixes, in order:

• A longer or thicker screwthat reaches fresh material. The Wood Handbook notes that withdrawal varies, within limits, directly with the depth of penetration of the threaded portion and with screw diameter — though it also warns that the longer lengths are superfluous in dense hardwoods.
• A glued dowel or plug, cured fully, then re-drilled. This is the proper repair and it restores full strength.
• Glue-soaked wood sliverstamped into the hole for a non-structural fixing — a hinge on a cabinet door, a hook. Honest about what it is: a serviceable bodge, not a joint.

And one figure worth knowing before you re-drill into the end of a board: end-grain withdrawal, when splitting is avoided, averages about 75% of side-grain. If the stripped hole is in end grain, consider whether the joint should be using a screw at all — joinery vs fastening is the argument for and against.