80/20: Tips & Tricks – Preloading

Hello and welcome to 80/20's Tips and Tricks series. Today we're going to take a look at one of the most helpful tips, preloading, and how it can save you time during your build, but also prevent backtracking and frustration later on. So as you can see, we've got a flat plate started; we're going to finish it up with one last bolt and one last T-nut.

Now it's important when installing the T-nut to have the pilot projection facing downwards, or away from the flat plate. So once we have that done, we'll install our flat plate, and with preloading these, it's great because you don't have to line up your bolts and your T-nuts later on. So we'll go ahead and tighten that down.

Now the concept of preloading doesn't just apply to flat plates. It applies to profiles, fasteners, and single T-nuts. As you can see here, we've preloaded these T-nuts before putting on our second bar. Had we forgotten to preload, we would have had to taken off this portion of the build, thus backtracking and wasting time.