SkyFrame makes lightweight aluminum mounting frames for inspection drones and camera payloads. Their customers assemble, adjust, and reconfigure the mounts constantly — and the tapped threads in the soft aluminum bosses were galling and pulling out after just a handful of cycles.
Aluminum is light, and soft
The reason SkyFrame uses aluminum is weight — every gram matters on a flying platform. But aluminum threads are soft, and a steel screw run into them repeatedly will gall, cross-thread, and eventually strip the boss. For a product designed to be reconfigured in the field, that's a fundamental mismatch.
Customers were reporting mounts that felt loose or wouldn't torque after a few reconfigurations, and a stripped boss on a machined frame is an expensive part to write off.
Put a steel thread in the aluminum
The standard solution is a helical thread insert: a coil of hard stainless wire screwed into a slightly larger tapped hole, forming a durable steel internal thread inside the aluminum. It spreads load over more of the boss, resists galling, and can take hundreds of assembly cycles where bare aluminum takes a few.
It's also the right call anywhere a fastener is installed and removed repeatedly, which describes SkyFrame's entire product.
The part we supplied
We supplied M5 helical inserts wound from 304 stainless wire with a dry-film lubricant to ease installation and prevent galling, made to the recognized aerospace insert standard. Matched to the correct tapped hole in SkyFrame's aluminum bosses, they give a full-strength steel thread in a part that's still all-aluminum light.
Because these are stocked and supplied to spec, SkyFrame gets consistent inserts with traceability across their production.
Reconfigure without fear
With inserts in every threaded boss, SkyFrame's mounts now take repeated assembly and adjustment without galling or pull-out. The field complaints about loose or stripped mounts stopped, and the machined frames — the expensive part — stopped becoming scrap over a stripped thread.
The frame stayed light; the threads got tough. That's exactly the tradeoff a robotics product needs.
“Our frames have to stay light but get torn down and rebuilt constantly. Inserts gave the aluminum a steel thread — problem solved.”
Owen Marsh, Mechanical Lead, SkyFrame Robotics