The aerospace industry is healthy currently. New orders and a backlog of existing orders mean that there are currently 13,380 new aircraft required globally. That represents more than nine and half years of work in hand.
Böllhoff Armstrong has been working in conjunction with aircraft seating manufacturers and subcontractors to the industry by introducing the Helicoil® Tangfree wire thread insert and unique installation tooling with ¼“ inch hexagonal drive. The insertion tool has a spring loaded pawl that engages with the notch and allows it to be installed into the threaded hole. The insert that has a driving notch at both ends of the insert, rather than the conventional tang. It is manufactured by a different process, ensuring symmetry at both ends of the insert, making it truly bi-directional. This guarantees ease of insertion and gives a significant reduction in waste over other Tangless inserts.
Working with Böllhoff Armstrong's technical sales engineers, aircraft seating companies’ design teams and manufacturing companies, it was concluded that aircraft seat designs contained between 50 to 120 Standard tang wire thread inserts in a range of sizes from 4-40UNC to ¼-28UNF in free running and screwlock versions. Time and motion studies concluded that to install a standard tang wire thread insert and remove the tang took an average of 60 seconds.
Using the Helicoil® Tangfree wire thread inserts in the required size and unique installation tooling this installation time was reduced 10-fold to an average 6 seconds an insert resulting in an 80% efficiency on production time.
The Helicoil® Tangfree thread inserts are fully compliant with NAS 1130 and NA 0276 standards. The prevailing torques are defined according to procurement specifications MA 1565 and NASM 8846 and are available in both metric M3-M10 and imperial 4-40UNC-1/4-28UNF sizes.
