How To Use A Castle Nut

Installing A Castle Nut

Castle nuts are nuts that look like crowns or parapets of mid evil castles. These nuts are used together with a bolt and a cotter pin to create a secure nut in place so that it cannot be tightened or loosened.

Before We Begin:

In order to install a castle nut you will need:

Castle Nut
Cotter Pin
A Bolt with a hole

You can find bolts that come with pre-drilled holes for castle nuts, but you must know the length of the bolt you will need. If you do not have a bolt with a pre-drilled hole, you may drill your own, we can talk about that in another post. In this post, we will drill out own hole to show you how to make one yourself for better sizing.

Step One:

Now that you are ready to begin, slide the bolt through the installation material and screw the castle nut onto the other side. You can use a sharpie or pencil to mark the area where you need the hole to be (inside the peaks of the nut). Then remove the nut and bolt and place the bolt into a vice.

Step Two:

Screw the nut back onto the bolt and align it with the mark you drew earlier. This will serve as the drilling point. Use a punch to create an indent into the bolt so your drill bit has a starting point. Make sure you drill perpendicular to the hole so that it comes out in between the peaks on the other side as well.

Step Three:

After you have drilled your hole, remove from the vice and place back into your installation material. For the purpose of this blog, we have left ours in the vice as we did not have an installation material readily available. Once it is back in the material place your cotter pin through the hole. Take a pair of pliers and bend the cotter pin out away from the center on each side. This will create a locking effect and the pin will not be able to fall out.

Removing Stripped Screws in 3 Easy Steps – Quick Tip

How To Remove Stripped Screws With a Rubber Band

Removing stripped screws can be incredibly annoying. There’s no way around it, literally. In the case of stripped screws, they can severely hinder your ability to get a project done. So we have once again consulted our fastener expert for a solution to this problem.

His first recommendation was a drill extractor bit, but those of you that follow our blog knew that already. We posted a blog about how to use a screw extractor a while ago.

But what about the everyday DIYer who doesn’t come across this situation constantly. You might not want to go buy a bolt extractor set when you only need to get rid of one pesky screw.

Enter the most useful tool ever created, next to duct tape of course! The rubber-band. A tool used for anything from a bracelet to a keep your favorite bag of chips from getting stale. A tool that is going to help you remove that screw as if it was never stripped to begin with.

Lets begin

So now that you have the secret tool you need to get that stripped screw removed, lets walk you through the process in three easy steps.

Place the rubber-band over the screw head.
Place the drill bit against the screw head through the rubber-band and apply pressure.
Spin Slowly

And that’s pretty much it.

When you press the rubber-band against the stripped head, it fills in the spacing created by the stripping. We have done some basic testing and determined that this trick works best on semi-stripped screws but you can still get it to work on some of the more dramatically stripped screws as well if your lucky.

Most effective on semi-stripped screws

Have a question you need answered? Leave a comment below! If the question stumps us it may turn into a post of its own!

Removing Stripped Screws With a Rubber Band

Using a Rubber Band to Remove Stripped Screws

Rubber Band Trick For Stripped Screws Transcript

Scroll Down To Continue Reading

Bob: Welcome back to Albany County Fasteners – Fasteners 101. I’m Bob and I’m going to show you today how to remove a stripped screw.

I’m just showing you here that these heads are stripped out. I’m going to show you how to remove them with a rubber band. So let’s get started.

I’m gonna put it here in my vise. Okay, so I have a rubber band. We’ll put the rubber band onto the head of the Phillips and we’re going to go slow and steady outward, okay.

You have to put nice pressure on this and we’ll back it out.

So basically what the rubber band does is fill the void between the Phillips head (and the driver).

There you go.

What Are Jam Nuts? and How To Use Them

Jam Nuts and How to Use Them

Jam nuts are nuts that are about half of the size of a regular nut. In practice, these nuts are both screwed onto the bolt and then they are tightened against each other.

There are a couple of different reasons you might want to use jam nuts. The first is if you are fastening to a very soft material and cannot risk hurting the material by fastening against it. The second is when you need to attach something to the bolt but let it move around on the bolt.

How to Use Them

installing jam nuts

The process of installing jam nuts is very simple. We’ve chosen to use our trusty vice to hold our bolt in place for this example. So once your bolt is in place simply screw the first nut onto the bolt. Make sure the bolt is far enough down to allow room for the second one. After you get the first nut on far enough you can begin spinning the second one. These nuts should both slide onto the bolt very easily.

Before tightening you need to set the bottom nut, the one that is closer to the bolt head, to the desired height. Next take an adjustable (or the correct size) wrench and slide it onto the bottom nut. You will the proceed to used either a wrench or socket as we do here, to tighten the top nut against the bottom one. These nuts tightening against each other will lock the nuts in place on the bolt. We also recommend using threadlocker to keep these nuts in place during an installation.

The main differences between a jam nut and a regular hex nut is that they are tightened against each other instead of against a material, and that they are about half of the size of a regular nut.

tightening the top nut installed jam nuts

How to Measure a Rivet

Using a Rivet Gauge to Measure a Rivet

Many of our customers get in contact with us and ask us how to measure rivets. We used to find rivets annoying to measure ourselves, until we found this. This rivet measuring gauge is perfect for measuring rivets. We are so sure that it’s the perfect measuring tool we use it ourselves in our warehouse.

Made of sturdy plastic, this tool comes with preset sizes and lengths used to measure all kinds of rivets. So, where should we begin?

Understanding a Rivet

Rivets are odd-looking fasteners composed of two parts. The hat and the mandrel. The hat is the short stubby side which needs to be measured for its length and diameter. The mandrel is the long thin end that is pulled off of the rivet during the installation process.

To understand what size rivet you will need you need to determine the diameter of the hole to be filled and the material installation thickness. You then need to find a rivet size that fits this range.

Measuring a Rivet Using the Gauge

So, first things first, we are going to place the hat of the rivet into the circular holes on the rivet gauge. The holes represent different diameters that rivets come in. When you place the rivet into the hole it should be a snug fit. If you have a lot of wiggle room then you are probably in a size that is too big. On the other side, if you cannot fit the hat into the hole the hole is probably too small. The diameter of our test rivet was 4.

Next we are going to measure the length of the rivet. insert the hat into the open-ended top areas. You will want to make sure the rivet’s washer or flange area is pressed up against measuring rivet length the top of the plastic. As you can see from our example, the first section did not properly house the hat of our example rivet so we had to check the next size up. After checking that we determined that our length was 4.

This rivet is a #4-4.

What Comes Next?

Now that you know the size of your rivet you can find out what range it fits to determine if it is the proper rivet to fit your needs.

For everything you will ever need to know about rivets we have compiled all of our information about rivets onto our free Fasteners 101: Rivets Guide Resource. Please check it out to find any information you are looking for.

If you are interested in buying one of these tools, check out our Rivet Gauge page to learn more.

Tool: Rivet Gauge

Rivet Installation Guide

How Do I Install A Rivet?

It’s a question many people ask the first time they see a rivet and not one that’s incredibly easy to explain. Today we will show you how to install a rivet, but first, we need to determine what tools we will need for the job.

The Tools You Need

Riveter
Rivets
Drill
Drill Bits

Installing Your First Rivet

hand riveter

The first thing to do when installing a rivet is to choose the appropriate tool for the job. There are many different riveting tools but we find that for day to day use, a simple hand riveter will do nicely. If you plan on installing a large number of rivets, check out this Battery Operated Rivet Tool and our review of a similar tool here.

The next step is to use your drill and drill bit to create a hole in the materials you plan on fastening together.

After drilling the hole its time to prep the rivet for install. All you do is slide the mandrel (longer thin end of a rivet) into the hand riveter until it sits against the flange.

After the rivet is placed into the hand riveter you place the hat of the rivet (the end still sticking out of the tool) through the hole. Now while keeping pressure against the rivet so it stays all the way in the hole, squeeze the handle.

install a rivet installed rivet

When you squeeze the handle several things happen at once. The tool bites down on the mandrel and begins to pull it backwards. As it does, the mandrel, which starts in the hat of the rivet is pulled through the hat towards the riveter tool. As the mandrel is pulled through the hat the hat expands creating a fat end which can no longer slide through the hole. Once the maximum torque is reached the mandrel snaps and leaves only the hat and flange behind.

installed rivet (front) installed rivet (back)

Above are images from the front and back of 6 installed rivets. The image on the left is the front of the rivet which is what is exposed once the installation is complete. The picture on the right is the back (blind) side of the installed rivet.

Conclusion

As you can see, installing a rivet is a simple process that can be difficult to explain. You should also note that rivets need to be sized based off the thickness they are being installed into. If you do not choose a rivet in the correct grip range your rivet will either be loose or try to expand into the hole during installation.

Need more rivet information? Check out our Free Rivet Guide. We have compiled helpful videos, charts, grip ranges and other useful information to make rivet installation a breeze!