News & insight
Perforated or Plain Head? A comparison of “wet” adhesive bonding with Perforated/ Plain bigHeads
The Perforated Head design is synonymous with bigHead® fasteners. Whilst this makes a bigHead® easily recognisable, we can also provide bigHeads with Plain surface Heads to suit certain applications. When it comes to adhesive bonding of bigHeads with liquid and paste adhesives, there are long-standing questions about which is actually “better” – Perforated or Plain Head? Holes or no-holes? A seemingly simple question – but quite a challenging one to answer, especially if you just want some quick guidance.
At bigHead®, we decided to help resolve this challenge; by providing some basic guidelines in our tecHub. To create these guidelines, we compared adhesive bonding with Perforated and Plain Heads – assessing the mechanical performance, and other considerations such as weight, adhesive usage, cost and whether the Head type has implications for component assembly. This involved manufacturing, inspecting and testing adhesively bonded bigHead® specimens in our own laboratories – and we’re happy to offer similar services to our customers and partners. Sharing this knowledge and offering our assistance is all part of why bigHead® is a fastening solution, not just a fastener.
Having some guidance on the holes or no-holes question can assist bigHead® customers with making quick, informed decisions. The benefit to our customers is that we remove, or at least reduce, the uncertainty of which Head type might be appropriate for a given application, and customers avoid wasting time making their own comparative studies. Of course, the content in our tecHub comparison has scope limitations – there are too many different adhesive/ bigHead® combinations to include them all. The benefit of working with bigHead® is that we’re always happy to test and evaluate a specific combination – this helps ensure our customers have the information they need, saves them spending time and money to do the work themselves, and gives them confidence that a solution will meet their requirements from the outset. There’s even a benefit to bigHead® in doing all this – we learn more every day!