Cleco Clamps to Hold Panels

An important tool to have in your shop for working efficiently doing patch panels and and doing any kind of metal fabrication is a CLICO panel holder. And what a CLICO panel holder is is a means to blind fasten two pieces of metal together and it could be your body and you're trying to put in a patch panel or it could be like an a series you're building a floor for a custom street rod or something. You need to be able to hold the panels together in order to properly fit them. In the CLICO panel holding system is actually comes from the aviation industry where they're putting big skins on airplanes. And in order to be able to hold the skins in place while they're riveting them, they would use a blind fastener and a blind passenger is essentially a fastener that only needs to be clamped from one side because it'll pull the back into it. And the way these work is actually pretty simple. you have your two pieces of metal that you want to join together and you'll start by drilling like an eighth inch hole. Once you have a hole drilled in it The faster itself actually gets thinner as you compress the pliers. So it will fit into the hole fit the two panels together. And when you release it, it actually pulls up and joins the two panels together. Another type of CLICO fastener is also a clamp type but clamp type is used to actually just kind of when you can get on the edge of something, you can hold the two panels together without having to drill any holes at all. And it actually holds the panels firmly in place. If you have a long series of say, you've got a patch panel that runs the extent of a hole, you know, like the lower rocker panel Or, or quite common on a lot of cars is behind the rear wheels. You'll have to, you know you'll use probably one of these every four or five inches. And then it's just a matter of coming in and welding these panels together. Once they are attacking at once everything is tacked together. You can go in and simply remove this. And because it's just an eighth inch hole, just run a quick a spot there and that'll like fill in and and just you'll be able to grind it off. And there'll be no trace of the hole that you created for it. Great system. You can fit the parts on and off the car. If you get it all on and it doesn't fit you can just easily take it all off and refit your parts to however you want. And that's pretty much how the CLICO system works. It's a great system good tool to have in the shop, get yourself one.