Tip: Dimple nutplates when attaching to thin material

Several places on these planes you are required to attach nutplates to thin material. Instead of countersinking this thin material, another option is to dimple the material and the ears of the nutplates.

You may need to remove some material from the side of the female die in order to clear the threaded part of the nutplate, but most likely you have done this already to dimple ribs and other tight spots.

Does not hurt the die and the nutplates look and work great afterwards.

Oops rivets -3 alternative

Another alternative is to use -3 "oops" rivets to attach the nutplates.

A much smaller countersink which easily done in the typical 0.025 part of our RVs... In some cases, you can even countersink by hand, so few turns of the cutter are needed.

Use a nutplate jig for ease of drilling.

gil A

Brantel said:

...Does not hurt the die and the nutplates look and work great afterwards.

Click to expand...

No
Yes

Jekyll

I just attached nutplates to my elevator trim reinforcement plate last night. I got a female die in my Avery tool kit that cleared the nut plate just fine. It's about half the diameter of the other female dies.

az_gila said:

Another alternative is to use -3 "oops" rivets to attach the nutplates.

A much smaller countersink which easily done in the typical 0.025 part of our RVs... In some cases, you can even countersink by hand, so few turns of the cutter are needed.

Use a nutplate jig for ease of drilling.

gil A

Click to expand...

The way Gil described is how I install my own nutplates 99% of the time.
Takes much less time...fewer steps involved.

Use NAS1097 3-3.5 rivets most of the time. You can safely machine countersink down to .020 thick material and it can be done easily with a hand deburring tool. It only requires a couple turns by hand and no need to do anything to the nutplates. Of course if you are doing a lot of nutplates you can still use a countersink cage, but it is fast because you are removing such a small amount of material.