Highland Delrin Nuts

[cool_hardware52]

The Deco Stop

Tobin

 

[Rainer]

LOL, that's awesome!

The Deco Stop

Tobin

 

[Rhone Man]

The Deco Stop

Tobin

Thanks, Tobin. I confess I have heard people speak ill of your thumbwheels, but I think those photos provide a pretty comprehensive rebuttal!

Unrelated: do you still sell knives as stand alone products? Managed to break mine by putting a tank down on it when it was wedged against a step. I couldn't see them on your website.

 

[deepdvr1]

Nice! I might just order a set of those now.

 

[rjack321]

Thanks, Tobin. I confess I have heard people speak ill of your thumbwheels, but I think those photos provide a pretty comprehensive rebuttal!

Yeah everyone who's broken or seen someone break a delrin nut just criticizes them to be an arse.

 

[cool_hardware52]

Yeah everyone who's broken or seen someone break a delrin nut just criticizes them to be an arse.

Whatever floats your boat Richard.

We have seen a few failures. Every single one was caused by not having enough thread engagement.

There were some widely distributed STA's (DSS doesn't make STA's) that were furnished with bolts that were too short for use with ANY type of nut.

These "too short" bolts would engage only 1 -1.5 threads and this could lead to stripping.

I'm sure a search here on SB would turn up the STA + short bolt threads.

As with any threaded nut it's best to get at least one bolt diameter of engagement, for example if the bolt diameter is 5/16 one should have 5/16 of the threads engaged in the nut.

Using any nut including a stainless wing nut with only 1 -1.5 threads engaged is a bad idea.

Short bolts are hardly the fault of the "Nut" that chooses to use them.

Tobin

 

[riguerin]

Anyone ever use these instead of wing nuts to secure your backplate?

Any thoughts - good, bad, indifferent?

I use SS wing-nuts and am quite happy with them. I did recently borrow an STA that had delrin nuts. While I can't say who the manufacturer was with absolute certainly , the nuts did look very similar to ones that you have pictured.

The only complaint that I have is that the nuts would not properly engage the threads of the upper bolt when the nut was installed in its intended orientation (knurled end up away from plate). This was primarily due to 2 separate issues:

1.) On this model, the 1st 1/4" or so of the ID on the delrin nut was left unthreaded.
2.) The through-hole on the webbing had a metal grommet installed on it.

Coupled with the length of the provided bolts, the tolerance stack-up just didn't work on the upper bolt (no problem on the lower bolt). To temporarily work around the issue, we just flipped the nut around (knurled end down toward plate) which did provide just enough thread engagement to work. YMMV.

 

[rjack321]

Whatever floats your boat Richard.

We have seen a few failures. Every single one was caused by not having enough thread engagement.

There were some widely distributed STA's (DSS doesn't make STA's) that were furnished with bolts that were too short for use with ANY type of nut.

These "too short" bolts would engage only 1 -1.5 threads and this could lead to stripping.

I'm sure a search here on SB would turn up the STA + short bolt threads.

As with any threaded nut it's best to get at least one bolt diameter of engagement, for example if the bolt diameter is 5/16 one should have 5/16 of the threads engaged in the nut.

Using any nut including a stainless wing nut with only 1 -1.5 threads engaged is a bad idea.

Short bolts are hardly the fault of the "Nut" that chooses to use them.

Tobin

I have no idea why the one on the STA failed. He put his plate on and the tank went sideways as the nut came off in 2 peices. Hard to tell "why" and I didn't take pictures of it.

The other one happened in a class where a buddy got tangled in a mooring buoy chain (she had "help" getting tangled). The chain got caught between her plate and the tanks and the lower nut came apart. Since this was in the water and I might have even been maskless at the time I don't know what it looked like afterwards.

I have lost SS wingnuts (never in the water) but otherwise never seen a wingnut fail. They are also cheap so its easy to have spares, and seem generally problem free. Once a SS wingnut got misthreaded onto a rental doubles bolt in MX and it munged up the threads, I suspect the end threads on the bolt were already damaged by previous plates. We didn't have any delrin type nuts to try them on the damaged threads, maybe they would have worked, maybe not. We dove with the SS wingnut partially installed and it stayed put.

 

[cbrich]

There are also plastic versions too, and they look very similar to the Delrin. I know folks that use Delrin, and never had a problem with them. I personally use SS316 version.

You can't go wrong with the Delrin version.

 

[kpdivers]

I have and love them for the cross etching on the knob. Makes for a nice grip. I did strip a not though, but my fault as I put a pair of channel locks on it.... that is a no no!