Introducing The Aggre-Gator By Elco

Something New, something you need to know about concrete screws, commonly called “Tapcons”… something truly New!

The Concrete Screw has been sold under many variations and brand names for many years. The most recognizable being the Tapcon Brand, patented by the ITW Buildex Company. The Tapcon was and is a remarkable invention. It actually cuts threads in a concrete hole drilled to a specific dimension and are used to anchor a wide variety of items to the concrete. It does the job very well.
 
The thing that makes a Tapcon able to cut the threads in the concrete is also the main drawback to using a Tapcon for many applications, that being Corrosion Resistance. That problem is finally solved! Read On…

By design, a Concrete Screw must be made of a hard carbon steel in order to have the strength required to actually stand up to the very abrasive job of cutting threads in concrete. Hard carbon steel does the trick but will also rust very easily. Eventually the anchor will fail due to the rusting condition.

Over the years, manufacturers of many brands of Concrete Screws have tried to overcome the corrosion problem in several ways. The most obvious way was to coat the screw with a high quality ceramic or epoxy based coating to shield the screw from moisture. This works pretty well but the coating will eventually degrade. The most recognizable brand coating is Stalgard which is patented by the Elco Company. This was a pretty good stop gap measure for preventing corrosion but the main problem was that as the screw grinds through the concrete while cutting threads, it is compromised by the high abrasion and thus the unseen part of the screw below the surface was usually attacked by moisture in the concrete and the anchor would fail to hold long before corrosion showed on the exposed head of the screw.

Another solution for the problem of corrosion was to begin making the screws of stainless steel. Two types of stainless have been used. The 410 series stainless had improved corrosion resistance but it is still high in carbon content and it would also rust out eventually, it just took longer that a coated screw. The 300 series stainless screw was developed as the ultimate answer to corrosion because it has no carbon steel content. The big problem with 300 series concrete screws is that 300 series stainless is a relatively soft metal and it will not cut the threads properly in the concrete. To overcome that problem the manufacturers supplied an oversize drill bit with the screw to make the hole larger and easier to penetrate. This dramatically reduced the holding power of the anchor because the thread engagement was so shallow.

The final answer to all of these problems finally came a couple of years ago with the invention and patent of a concrete screw called the Aggre-Gator by Elco.

This new product is a true breakthrough. It is a hybrid screw that uses high carbon steel and 300 series stainless steel combined in one screw.
The process of manufacturing is to fuse a high carbon steel tip on the end of the 300 series stainless shank and produce a screw with a cutting tip hard enough to cut the threads in the standard size hole but a screw body that won’t rust. The tip of the screw (about ¼”) will eventually rust out but the 300 series body of the screw will retain all of its holding power and corrosion resistance for a long long long time. Just to d

ouble down they also coated it with Silver Stalgard to improve the appearance. It truly is the Ultimate Concrete Screw.