Fill the stripped hole with wood and glue

A screw that spins forever without tightening has not broken. The hole has. The wood fibres it was gripping have been chewed into fluff, and there is nothing left in there for the threads to hold.

Break wooden toothpicks into the hole until it is packed tight, wet them with yellow wood glue, snap them off flush, and let it dry properly before the screw goes back.

The order of importance in that sentence is not the order people remember it in. The toothpicks are scaffolding — something for the glue to sit on and something to stop it running away down the hole. The glue soaking into the ruined fibres in the wall of the hole is what actually rebuilds the wood. A hole packed with dry toothpicks and no glue will hold a screw for a while, and then it will not.

Which glue, since people argue about it

The argument in these conversations is yellow wood glue against the white glue in the cupboard, and it gets stated too strongly on both sides. The version passed around is that white glue is weak and fails before the wood does. That is not really it: both kinds set harder than the wood around them, so on straight pulling strength there is not much in it.

The difference that matters here is creep — slow movement under a load that never lets up — and water. Yellow wood glue resists both better. And creep is precisely what a hinge does to a repair: a door hangs on it all day, every day, for years, and never stops pulling.

So for a drawer knob, the white glue in the drawer is fine. For anything carrying weight or living anywhere damp, buy the yellow. It costs very little and a bottle lasts for years.

Two other fillers worth knowing. Sawdust mixed into wood glue makes a paste you can pack a hole with, which sets hard and takes a screw. And if the hole is too big for toothpicks — a hinge screw is often too big — step up the filler: matchsticks are harder wood, a wooden golf tee fills a wider hole neatly, and people who do this daily carry chopsticks in the toolbag because they snap to length and are strong. The proper version of the same idea is to drill the ruined hole out to a clean round, glue in a hardwood dowel, trim it flush and drill a fresh pilot hole into new wood. Half an hour, and it is not a repair any more.

There is a lazier option that sometimes beats all of this: a longer screw. If there is solid wood further down, a screw that reaches past the damaged part will bite into material that was never touched.

How long it lasts

People split on whether this is a real fix or a stopgap, and both camps are describing something true about different jobs.

For a cabinet door, a loose handle, a curtain rail, a bathroom hook — it is a repair, and it will outlive your interest in it. Guitarists have been doing it to strap buttons for decades.

For anything that carries weight or takes a shock, it is a stopgap that will hold until it does not. People said so over and again, and it is the one thing here stated as an actual warning rather than a preference. Exterior entry doors especially: that is above this page for a reason.

The honest test is not how it feels on the day. It is what happens when it fails. A cabinet door drops open. A front door does something else.

When it is the head, not the hole

Different problem, worth knowing because it looks the same from where you are standing. Sometimes the hole is fine and the screw head is rounded out, so the driver just spins in it.

Lay a wide rubber band flat over the head, press the driver into it and turn slowly with real downward weight. The rubber packs the chewed recess and gives the bit something to bear on. People report it working and people report it doing nothing, and the conditions seem to be these: you need the right size bit, you need to push hard rather than turn hard, and the head has to be worn rather than genuinely destroyed. If the screw was fitted with thread-locking compound, or it is a small screw or a Torx head with little metal left to grab, it will not save you. A drill or impact driver run in reverse is the next thing to try, and drilling the head off is the end of the road.

While you are down there, one small trick from somebody who clearly does this in bad light: press a fingertip firmly onto the screw head and look at your finger. The pattern prints on the skin, and you can read whether it is a cross, a square or a star without getting your face down there.

Not stripping the next one

This is the part that is worth more than the repair, and it applies to anything with a thread — a bolt, a hose fitting, a gas bottle, a jar of something.

Before you tighten, turn it the wrong way. Set the screw or bolt in place and rotate it anticlockwise, gently, until you feel it drop or click very slightly. That is the start of the existing thread finding its groove. Now turn it the right way, and it will run in along the thread that is already there instead of cutting a new one across it.

It takes a second and it prevents cross-threading, which is what happens when a fastener starts at a slight angle and carves a fresh, crooked thread through the old one. In soft material — pine, plastic housings, anything self-tapping — that is how a hole gets stripped in the first place, and doing this is why some people’s flat-pack furniture survives a house move.

Somebody mentioned being laughed at on site for doing it. It is worth being laughed at.

Two warnings alongside it. Some threads run the other way entirely — the left pedal on a bicycle, certain gas fittings, some older wheel nuts — and there is no marking to tell you, so if something is refusing to move in the direction you expect, stop and look it up rather than leaning harder. And on anything expensive with a fine thread — a sensor, an engine bolt, an exhaust stud — forcing a misaligned fastener does not end with a stripped hole. It ends with a snapped bolt inside a casting and a much worse afternoon. Somebody in these conversations described treating a cross-threaded fastener as effectively locked in place, like thread-locker. On a shelf bracket, fine. Anywhere that matters, that is not a plan, it is a delayed failure.