I f I C a n D o T hi s
Hal and the clecos with which he's enamored.
Man, I Really Like Clecos
Thank you, Jean J. Blanc
By Hal Bryan
At this point in our Zenith CH 750 build, I must have installed and removed hundreds of clecos, and yet I'm still
amazed at their ridiculously clever utility. When building
an airplane out of sheet metal, you spend a lot of time
assembling two or more pieces, drilling holes that are
matched just perfectly, and then disassembling those
pieces to smooth out—deburr—the sharp edges caused
by drilling, trimming, etc.
When you're assembling these pieces, you need some
way to temporarily hold them together: Enter the humble
cleco. If you don't know, clecos are a family of fasten-
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Vol.2 N o.7 / July 2013
ers originally produced by the Cleveland Pneumatic Tool
Company, hence the name. (If I'd invented them, I would
have called them "cleptcos," so be grateful that I didn't.)
Clecos are extremely simple to use but maddeningly
complicated to describe. They're generally cylindrical, with a set of what I used to call "contracting prong
things" until I learned that they were called step-cut
locks, which stick out of one end. Operating a cleco consists of applying some form of pressure to the other end,
in some cases by turning a wing nut, but most of the time
by using a specialized set of pliers to depress a plunger.