Rivnut Tool

[Ari423]

Originally Posted by cbale2000

Not to get too off-topic, but as someone who had never even heard of Rivnuts before seeing this thread, I'm curious... What are the actual benefits of using a Rivnut? Most of the application examples I've seen so far look like it would have been far simpler and faster to just use a regular bolt+locknut.
You don't appear to be saving space since the rivnuts still stick out, and for that matter the rivnuts also appear to create an additional space on the front side of the material that wouldn't have otherwise been there.

Am I missing something here?

The way I understand it, the point is that the nut stays there when you remove the bolt, so it's better if the nut would be in a hard to reach position. Essentially, it lets you tap a threaded hole into a piece of sheet metal that would otherwise be too thin to tap.

My team has used rivnuts a few times in the past. This year we used them to attach our main breaker because the frame member we wanted to attach it to was surrounded by other components so we couldn't get a wrench behind it to hold a nut. There was probably another way that would have worked just as well, but we have found that aluminum rivnuts work well and are fairly easy to install for low-load applications. We have also used steel rivnuts for higher load applications, but they tend to be harder to install (and remove when they inevitably break) and not be as strong as a regular nut.