FONTANA, CA – GatorJaw, the nutless aluminum frame building system, has been receiving praise from facility engineers for its benefits since it first came on the market two years ago. But according to GatorJaw developer Duane McKinnon, the real benefits of this versatile product are really starting to be appreciated.
“It saves time,” revealed McKinnon, “plain and simple.”
“GatorJaw goes together so easily and so quickly that users report that its greatest benefit is that it saves an enormous amount of time in people hours,” continued McKinnon. “The time spent in assembly is considerably reduced. This is time that would ordinarily be wasted struggling with cumbersome t-slot designs that go together far less quickly and are much more difficult to alter once they have been assembled.”
GatorJaw is an aluminum extrusion featuring continuously grooved channels on each side of the railing and a patented square thread design that allows for attachments at virtually any point. In addition to its simplicity, another substantial benefit is the GatorJaw innovative one-piece fastener. The square-thread design and matching square thread fasteners eliminates those troublesome nut inserts required for fastening pieces in conventional t-slot frame systems. A simple twist of the GatorJaw tool supplied with each purchase and the fastener locks down tight. There is no drilling, tapping or welding.
“One of our marketing themes has been to urge customers to ‘go nutless’,” said McKinnon. “Anyone who has worked with conventional t-slot frame systems knows the frustration of dropping the nut inserts and having to fish them out try to position them in place. GatorJaw solves that.”
James V. Meiselbach, a member of the engineering team at Futek, a manufacturer of sensors for technology applications, discovered the versatility of GatorJaw. Meiselbach reported that Futek took delivery of some instrumentation that was mounted on a stand made of conventional t-slot material. He could see the possibilities, but wanted an easier solution.
“The material was too difficult to work with,” Meiselbach said, “Fasteners needed to be counter sunk, and making adjustments and changes required time and peoplepower. I found GatorJaw through a web search. Its design is just as strong, more universal and less expensive. GatorJaw is by far the simplest, most economical and best performing. It allows us to develop these projects with the least amount of parts and the quickest assembly time.”
Futek recently took delivery on a second order of pre-cut GatorJaw intended to build stands for larger curing ovens, built to handle components weighing as much as 500 pounds. Meiselbach is also going to be considering GatorJaw for other projects at Futek.
“Now that I know the possibilities of GatorJaw I am going to be looking at a lot of other applications,” he added. “The medical industry would love this stuff. They would have all sorts of applications for it.”
McKinnon also reported that the praises from GatorJaw are coming from places other than industry.
“I got a call from John McClean, an assistant profession of the Chemistry Group at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. McClean described how he was using GatorJaw to mount sensitive instrumentation used in mass spectrometry.
“You can spend a heck of a lot of money building a stainless steel rail system to mount the equipment,” said McClean. “But GatorJaw works great, and it supports a lot of weight.”
McClean also said that one of the great benefits of GatorJaw was the ability to make quick, incremental changes to designs.
“Previously we were using stainless steel,” he said, “cutting it and welding it into a stand. But with welding you were saddled with the final product. If it wobbled, or the floor was slightly uneven, you had a problem. But GatorJaw can quickly be adjusted to fit the situation.”
McClean added that the versatility of GatorJaw also inspired them to incorporate an overhead chassis design for mounting additional instrumentation.
“GatorJaw has proven to be a really flexible way of mounting the instrumentation, concluded McClean.
“One of the assets we brought to the design of GatorJaw was our understanding of the challenges facing the facility engineer,” said McKinnon at the GatorJaw offices. McKinnon is also president of Simplex Isolation Systems, a thirty-year-old firm that designs and manufactures modular cleanrooms and other isolation enclosures. “Our experiences working with customers at Simplex continually reinforced the need for solutions to common, everyday problems faced by facility engineers. Judging by the communications we are getting from GatorJaw clients, the product is doing the job.”
GatorJaw can be purchased in bulk quantities along with hardware, based on the needs of the project, or as one of several builders’ kits with enough hardware and extrusion to build an assortment of projects. Find out more about this exciting new development in structural extrusions. Call GatorJaw at 800-960-1679, or visit the GatorJaw website at www.gatorjaw.com.