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Hurricane nuts - am I cursed?
I needed to make a very secure driver mounting that would not pull out or strip the MDF baffle, so I used some 10-24 hurricane nuts. I set all of the nuts beforehand by tightening a #10 fastener to pull it into place before mounting the driver. Despite that, when I went to mount the driver, one of the machine screws pushed on the nut as I was attempting to get it threaded and it fell out of its hole and into the cabinet.
Of course I need to open everything up again. I needed to do that anyway, but this reminded me that in the past I used PU glue to hold the nuts in place but I was always worried some of it would foam up into/onto the threads.
I am wondering what other people might suggest for this situation. Maybe a drop or two of superglue on the flange just before pulling the nut into place?
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I've been using a dab of a gel style cyano. I had a pair of 15" PRs in and out of a box multiple times last year for tuning and... so far so good?
Super glue should do well to hold it in place quick. But would probably crack over time. I've used Liquid nails Fuze*It. It provides a little tack at first, but once it dries I bet you could hammer on the bolt without budging.
I use epoxy.
CA glue
Since I have a bottle of not too old CA(super) glue at hand that is probably what I will try first. It's also relatively easy to deploy just a drop or two of the stuff where you need it. Hopefully this will prevent similar future problems. I already have too few hairs left for this stuff to keep happening!
I use epoxy for that purpose, and pull the nut tight into the baffle. Once the epoxy is set, I oil a screw and work it in and out of the threads a few times. No problem to date with this.
I hate the tangs on the T-nut style of nuts but they are cheap and available at Lowes and HD so I pre drill for the tangs, recess the T-nut and glue a block of wood over the top of the T-nut. If the bolt is extra long I'll drill the block of wood with a oversized hole for the bolt.
I used t-nuts in a few early projects. To make sure that they would stay put I used PU glue when installing the nut in a piece of 2x2 furring strip, e.g. a couple of inches long. Once that looked good and the threads checked out as clear, I glued that assembly into place in the cabinet. Works well but is a slow PITA process.
Hurricane nuts are definitely easier to work with. As long as you can make sure they do not move out of place when getting the bolt or screw started into it and do not push when tightening the nut (that tends to push them into the cab) then you are golden. Only need a little bit of adhesion for that, so CA glue is probably good enough. Once the screw is tightened it is not going anywhere.
I have never problems with MDF pulling out or stripping. I have used t-nuts, mainly on areas where the entire weight of the speaker is distributed over 4 screws eg. Speaker feet
For 15” subwoofers to 3/4” dome tweeters to baffles, wood screws just seems to work just fine. I do drill pilot holes. Even with a test mule cabinet that has had a half a dozen different woofers in it. What am I doing with or not doing or not aware of that may benefit from t-nuts or hurricane nuts? Are there different grades of MDF that affect their durability? I was under the assumption they are pretty standardised, but you know what they say about ASS-U-ME
There are a lot of different grades of MDF. Some are garbage and some make me rethink the negative things I normally think about MDF. Recently I got exposed to lightweight MDF this is much less weight than standard MDF but has more "glue". The result is lighter weight with better surface finish and machined edges.
Unfortunately most don't have access to all these different levels/grades of MDF.