ع
The Carson City manufacturer ships fastening as a kit that installs on the aircraft itself: no drilled hole, no riveting cell, no dedicated plant. After the SPS Technologies fire showed what centralised fastening costs, the 39-year-old model reads like the industry’s hedge.
Click Bond has spent 39 years making a contrarian argument: that fastening should travel to the aircraft, not the aircraft’s parts to the fastening plant. The family-owned company, founded in Carson City, Nevada in 1987 and running a second facility in Watertown, Connecticut, ships fastening as a self-contained kit, a fastener, a structural adhesive and a disposable fixture that holds clamping pressure while the bond cures. No hole is drilled, no riveting cell or multi-axis machine is required, and installation happens wherever the airframe is: a final assembly line, an MRO hangar, a distributed supplier. For most of the company’s history that was an engineering preference. Over the past 17 months, a fire, a workforce study and a 1.8 billion dollar takeover turned it into supply chain strategy.
One Fire, 600,000 Square Feet, Years to Requalify
On 17 February 2025, fire broke out at SPS Technologies’ century-old plant in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and burned until 22 February. The nearly 600,000 square foot facility, part of Berkshire Hathaway’s Precision Castparts, made high-strength nuts and bolts for engines, wings, fuselages and landing gear, including titanium fasteners of the kind used on the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350, according to Reuters. Boeing and Safran wrote to suppliers within days to map their exposure, GE Aerospace sent teams to the site, and rival fastener makers logged dozens of inquiries in 48 hours. Kevin Michaels of AeroDynamic Advisory flagged “significant concern about the large number of single-source fasteners” tied to the plant, and executives noted that qualifying a replacement source can take years.
Security Now Costs 1.8 Billion Dollars
The honest record is that no major assembly line stopped; Precision Castparts redistributed critical work across its network. The buying changed anyway. By March 2025, Reuters reported Howmet Aerospace fielding a surge in demand for long-term supply agreements from customers diversifying away from single points of failure. On 22 December 2025, Howmet agreed to buy Consolidated Aerospace Manufacturing from Stanley Black & Decker for approximately 1.8 billion dollars, following in February 2026 with the roughly 120 million dollar purchase of Brunner Manufacturing. At Jenkintown, about half the workforce was separated by mid-2025, and reported rebuild plans call for a smaller plant of around 350,000 square feet targeting 2028. Three years to restore one roof, while rivals pay billions to own more roofs.
15 Percent Attrition Meets 47 Jets a Month
The second constraint is people, and no rebuild fixes it. The 2025 AIA and McKinsey workforce study found aerospace and defence attrition near 15 percent in 2024, more than double the average across other US industries, with 76 percent of member companies reporting sustained difficulty hiring engineers and 56 percent short of skilled trades, in a sector employing 2.23 million people on 995 billion dollars of 2024 revenue. One OEM estimate cited in Deloitte’s industry outlook puts the need at 123,000 additional technicians for US commercial aerospace alone over two decades. Demand is running straight into that gap: the FAA cleared Boeing to build 42 737s a month in October 2025 and 47 a month by late May 2026, while Embraer ended 2025 with a record 31.6 billion dollar firm backlog, up 20 percent, and is pushing toward 100 commercial jets a year by 2027.
The Dependency Click Bond Removes
The kit takes the roof out of the equation. Because the fastener needs no drilled hole and no riveting infrastructure, the work is not queued behind heavy plant or behind the certified drill-and-rivet labour the industry cannot hire fast enough. The company states the approach cuts installation, rework and repair time by eliminating attachment holes altogether. For OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers squeezed between rate ambitions and labour gaps across Boeing, Airbus and Embraer programmes, a facility dependency becomes a process one: the work moves to wherever the hands are. That is what makes the model legible to the procurement teams rewriting risk registers since February 2025, a fastening architecture with no single point of failure to insure against.
One Limit, One Acquisition
A bonded fastener does not replace the structural bolts SPS made, and bonding carries its own discipline: surface preparation and cure control decide bond quality, and a finished bond is harder to inspect than a torqued bolt. Click Bond’s answer, announced on 7 January 2026, was to buy the measurement itself, acquiring Brighton Science, the Cincinnati surface-intelligence firm behind the Surface Analyst, for an undisclosed sum. “Adhesion isn’t art; it’s science,” CEO Karl Hutter said of the deal.
Berkshire is spending three years to rebuild capacity it already owned. Howmet paid 1.8 billion dollars to own more of it. Click Bond’s model never depended on a single roof, and after February 2025, where fastening happens is no longer a procurement detail. It is a board-level risk question, and one supplier walked in with the answer already built.
