Click Bond

Click Bond was founded in Carson City in 1987 by Charles and Collie Hutter — an Air Force captain and physicist with eighty-odd patents in aerospace fastening, and a Carnegie-Mellon physicist and Wharton MBA who has served the firm at every level of executive office. The company was built around a specific technical proposition: that fastening hardware could be bonded to an airframe rather than riveted through it, sparing the structure the fatigue-crack sites, leak paths, and precision drilling every hole demands. Four decades on, Click Bond’s rivetless bonded fasteners ship on the F-35, Boeing and Airbus airframes, and General Atomics UAVs.

The firm designs, manufactures, and supplies a catalogue of more than 5,000 bonded fastening products — nutplates, standoffs, mounts, bushings, cable-tie mounts, and the adhesives that install them — used to attach systems hardware to aerospace, defence, marine, and industrial structures without drilling holes through the parent material. Manufacturing is concentrated at the Carson City facility, with a second site in Watertown, Connecticut. The principal end markets are aircraft airframes (both military and commercial), unmanned aerial vehicles, spacecraft, and shipbuilding; recurring customers include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, and General Atomics.

What distinguishes Click Bond among aerospace suppliers is the categorical basis of the business: the entire product line exists as an argument against drilling holes to attach things. In an industry whose fastening defaults were set decades before composite airframes made the cost of every hole go up, that argument is not decorative — it changes what an airframe can be. The position has held up in front of the most demanding customers in the sector: Click Bond has been named Boeing Performance Excellence Gold, a Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Top 25 Supplier, and Northrop Grumman Supplier of the Year. The firm remains privately owned by the Hutter family; Karl Hutter has been CEO since 2015.