[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Mr V

I've been fighting to use rivet nuts for some time and out head Coach/Advisor just didn't believe that they were robust enough. So the other day when one of the other mentors was saying how their sub-team wanted to use them but were being over-ruled I devised a little test to show that they won't pull through.

In this blog post on our website you'll see a picture of a properly installed steel rivet nut from Mc-Master http://www.mcmaster.com/#95105A127 that was subject to attempted destructive testing. It was installed properly and a bolt threaded into it. Then we placed it in the hydraulic press and proceeded to push on the bolt from the back side. The 1/8" aluminum that was over an aprox 1.5" x 1.5" hole deformed first, once it started to tilt the bolt then deformed but there was zero sign of the rivet nut wanting to push through the material.

I'm not surprised you had to convince someone unfamiliar with rivnuts of their strength. Every time we get a new mentor, even experienced ones from other teams they question us on it. I then show them some heavily abused robots that have rivnuts in high stress locations where they survived. After that most people start to think of how to utilize them. Since we use mostly 1/16" wall 1x1 we rarely have a robot that doesn't need them somewhere.