The future of the aerospace fasteners market looks lighter and stronger, thanks to engineering innovation by Sky Climber Fasteners, with designs that are quickly outmoding many commonly used aerospace fasteners.
1) Design engineers continue to seek lightweight fastener options, using materials such as aluminum, aluminum alloys, plastics such as PEI and PEEK, titanium, carbon fiber, stainless and carbon steel, nickel, and nickel-chromium. While aluminum and plastics weigh less, they typically lack the strength of steel versions. Most lightweight fasteners have considerable flaws that limit their safe use.
2) The key to circumventing these weaknesses is using engineering innovations to develop new designs without the weight of steel, the expense of titanium, or limits of adhesives or lock wire. Sky Climber Fasteners is at the forefront of fastener engineering innovation, with products that are outperforming these fastener types and establishing a new generation in aerospace hardware.
3) The Rhino Hybrid Nut™ from Sky Climber Fasteners shatters aerospace fastener standards by combining lightweight materials with patent-pending locking or non-locking inserts. Combining these elements has yielded incredibly high strength-to-weight ratios and a slew of other benefits:
- 50-cycle lock-torque performance in all materials with no crimping, adhesives mean fastener is reusable without significant change in lock torque performance
- Some designs permit torqueing to specific values, locking in place every time
- Eliminates FOD
- Less expensive than titanium
- 30,000-cycle vibration test certified
- Can eliminate expensive, dangerous coatings such as silver plate, cadmium
- Chromate-free
- Requires no special installation tools
4) More impressive, though, are the tensile and torque results demonstrated during quality testing. The Rhino Aluminum Nut™ has exhibited significant advantages of strength, torque, and torque consistency when supplied as locknuts with the locking inserts. Aluminum nuts have not historically been available with locking torques certified to 15-cycles, proving that the Rhino Aluminum Lock Nut™ represents a significant advancement in fastener design.
- Tensile strength 23% greater than steel based on NASM25027 requirements
- Nearly double the wrench torque required by NASM25027 standards for steel
- Less than half the weight of steel alternatives
5) Rhino Lock Nuts™ with patented locking inserts deliver unprecedented strength in Hybrid and Aluminum versions and are available now from Sky Climber Fasteners. With this fastener and its family of designs, Sky Climber Fasteners is establishing a new generation in high-performance aerospace hardware.
Sky Climber Fasteners LLC
740.816.9830
