Choose Hard Lock Nuts for Critical Mechanical Applications

Industrial fasteners are of immense importance to industries that cover numerous mechanical applications. Many a time, critical applications have products that need to withstand enormous shocks, vibrations, and major impacts. A few examples of these are railways, wind turbines, towers, and bridges. Such applications require fasteners that can handle the extreme natural forces and maintain the integrity of the structure. Today, the best fastening option for such applications is hard lock nuts.

Hard lock nuts are specifically designed to withstand strong natural and man made vibrations. Installing hard lock nuts results in secure connections that enhance safety in an application, and leads to easier maintenance and inspection.

Hard Lock Nut Design

The design of the nut consists of two differently shaped nuts at each end – one concave and one convex. A washer is attached to the concave nut. The hard lock nut is popular due to the fact that it utilizes a distinctive wedge mechanism. The bottom convex nut has a lopsided wedge protrusion. When the concave nut is slowly tightened over the convex, the protrusion helps to create an effect similar to that of a wedge being driven in by a hammer. This principle makes the hard lock nut nearly unsusceptible to vibrations. 

Advantages of Hard Lock Nuts for your Applications

Hard lock nuts have been known to outperform other industrial fasteners such as double nuts, tongued washer nuts, nylon nuts, and other specialty lock nuts. This is due to their varied advantages.

Immense Strength: They are known for their enormous tensile strength. They are generally designed and constructed using high grade stainless steel. They maintain the axial force and prevent the nut and bolt from breaking. This also prevents any screws used in the installation from becoming loose.

Cost Saving: Hard lock nuts have been proven to reduce installation and maintenance costs to a great extent. Once the nut has been installed; its great strength and strong axial force keeps the nut from getting loose, which reduces the number of maintenance and inspection cycles. Hard lock nuts have a long service life cycle, reducing the need to regularly replace the product, which adds to costs savings. 

Versatile Construction: While stainless steel is the preferred material for construction, hard lock nuts can be designed using a variety of other materials along with various surface finishes. The surface finishes make the nut abrasion free, and thus reusable.

Varied Industrial Applications: Hard lock nuts are extremely popular in various industries such as aircraft, construction, automotive, and locomotive applications. 

As a fastening product, hard lock nuts are perhaps the best solutions for applications that involve high pressure and immense shocks and vibrations.