Zipbushing VS Threaded Insert

Hey guys, it's Rick and Elijah tooling! Give me two, I'll make it worth your while. 

Just the other day, we were reminiscing about some favorite stories as we were celebrating the anniversary of our company. And one of my favorite stories is the development of this product we call the Zipbushing. And the reason is not because it's super cool product (it is) but because it was embraced, accepted so readily and to this day is one of our best sellers. So I thought I'd take a second and explain to you why somebody would want to buy this thing, what value it brings to the marketplace.

So in a grid plate like this, or any time you're trying to locate / hold things, sometimes you're going to need the possibility of location. So what happened in the past was we would take a threaded insert like this and combine it with a bushing and they would go into the plate. We'd screw them in and then pound this bushing in and that would form that product, it's not really a product, but it would do that function.

My idea was to combine them into one product. In this case, this product [the zipbushing] will fit in a one and a quarter inch plate, that [traditional bushing] won't, it has to be a thicker plate. This product has a super precise outside and a super precise inside. So you can see there's teeth and the teeth allow you to drive it, but in between the teeth is a locating surface so, we didn't lose any location.

Also down below is still a smooth surface so that you can sweep this bushing. It's got these holes in it so that it'll self tap in soft materials and it's colinear; It's never going to be out of round! So that can happen in this case, but I'll tell you probably one of the biggest reasons people use it is because of the ease of use.

It's just fast. And then if you do come into a problem with it, it's tough to get these out. So let me just take a second of your time and show you how that works. I'm going to stick that one in there like that for now.

So in the past, the way we would do this is we would take our threaded insert and we would screw it into the hole. And you had to screw it such that it was at the right depth - having it at the wrong depth is a bit of a problem. There's some things that can go wrong with this process, this is going pretty well. Screw it in and then take our bushing and you would take a hammer like this and pound it in. Now you've basically got a permanent solution, but it took a while to get it in there. And for sure, if you wanted to skim that plate or something its no good. This guy [the zipbushing], it is fast and easy.

[screws the zipbushing into a plate] I'd like to measure that in seconds, but I bet it's like one second or something [1/10 of a second]. So if you had the choice of a minute and a second, which would you do? Right? The cool thing is that these guys go in and out super fast, super easy. Anybody can do it.

And that's the story that I told the other day. Thanks for sharing it with me. I'll see you next time!

-Rick

CEO & Founder of Elijah Tooling