Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at a that saves you time (and a few swear words) by keeping your tools within reach, an that supposedly helps to get bad smells out of a car and a that helps to make easy work of changing out brake and power steering lines. This week’s cool tool is the rivet nut or nutsert, a little fastener that creates a nice, threaded hole where once there was only misery. This recommendation comes from NickHasCars and numerous other readers.

One of the most gut-wrenching wrenching moments is when you tighten a fastener and it just keeps on going. There’s a dreadful sinking feeling that comes with feeling a bolt get tight, then suddenly loose. Stripping out a threaded hole means your day just got a lot worse.

A rivet nut is a metal fastener with internal threads and a shank. To use it, you slide it into the whole you want a bolt in, then use a rivet nut setter tool to pull the internal threads, which compress the soft shank, causing it to fold. This is the “rivet” part of a rivet nut. Eventually, the shank will fold enough that it grips the material you’re trying to mount the rivet nut to. The end result is a tight fitting with strong, clean threads for you to insert a bolt into.

Check out this demonstration as the YouTube channel uses rivet nuts to install threads on a fiberglass car hood.

Rivet nuts comes in a wide variety of sizes and threads for practically any project.

The nuts themselves are so cheap that you could get 100 of them . But if you want an installation tool to go with the nuts, those kits appear to be

Do you know of a weird or unique but must-have tool that every wrencher should have? Do you want to see us put a type of tool to the test and see how it performs? Shoot me an email or drop it down in the comments!