Dzus Fasteners

The Dzus Fastener was invented by William Dzus in 1931. Dzus was a Ukrainian who immigrated to New York as a teenager, hoping to escape a future as a farmer and pursue the American dream as an inventor. Dzus worked his way up in the automobile repair industry; opening his own garage in his early 20s. Here he came up with several inventions, but none ever took off due to lack of imagination and funding from would-be investors. 

The car repair business dried up with the onset of the Great Depression, and Dzus pivoted to aviation, working as a toolmaker for Fairchild Aircraft Company. Noticing problems with current fasteners on aircraft cowlings, Dzus came up with his revolutionary quarter turn fastener and filed a patent application for it in 1931. Fairchild aggressively sought to obtain his patent, but Dzus, recognizing its value and learning from prior mistakes, would not give it up.

In 1932 he opened the Dzus Fastener Company and his patent was approved in 1934. Over the next few years, Dzus sold fasteners to many different customers, one of those being Pitcairn Aircraft Company.

The early Dzus Fasteners differ slightly from later designs seen on many military aircraft (which would become Dzus’s largest contract, awarded in 1939), and these are the fasteners on NC97W. Notice the flat head design identical to the original patent drawings, not the more mainstream rounded head on aircraft from WWII. These fasteners were installed in 1935 when NC97W was remanufactured at the Pitcairn factory. We believe 97W is one of the earliest airplanes to leave the factory with Dzus Fasteners.