Floor Mat Clips

Well it’s been a long while since I posted here. The plane has been flying for almost a year now. I have my repairmen cert so will be doing my own annual in July. I haven’t been flying a lot since December… I got busy… broke my shoulder,,,, weather has sucked…. and many other excuses. I figured I should post a little something that I did to keep the floor mats from slipping. This is especially helpful now because of the way I have to get in the plane with my left shoulders not being able to bare the weight that is needed to hold myself up. I have floor mats that fit over the other thin carpeting material and they kept sliding up into the rudder pedals when I got in and out of the plane. I thought it a good time to do something about it.

SCS Interiors gave me some clips when I purchased the floor mats, but the clips seem to be used for when the floor mats are much smaller than the underlying carpet material, plus the material would seem to need to be quite a bit thicker than the thin carpet I installed (speaker cabinet fabric really). I searched around to find an easy to install and minimally intrusive way to keep the floor mats in place. I don’t know if I really succeeded in that, but I did find something that worked.

I purchased some automobile floor mat clips from Amazon. Of course they were made in China and of course they didn’t work out as planned so some modification was necessary. I think it worked out well and at least the ones on the front seats aren’t noticeable.

These are the original plastic clips. The top most part screws into a hole in the floor, but that didn’t work out so well. I drilled up to a 17/64″ hole (a bit larger than the suggested 6mm hole needed) and still the thing wouldn’t screw in well. The screw part is plastic and looked like it wasn’t going to hold well in the thin aluminum floor anyways so it was time to come up with another method to attached them. I needed to make them removable since it installs on top of the carpeting, fortunately the hole that I drilled to attach them directly wasn’t too large yet for an M5 rivnut. I cut off the plastic screw thread from the back and drilled out the center of the part for an M5 screw. I then installed an M5 rivnut in the hole in the floor and was able to screw the part into that.

Here’s the modified part. I’m thinking maybe to countersink the top of the piece so I can fit a countersunk black M5 screw instead, but this is what I had so can easy modify more later.

These are the modified clips installed on top of the carpet. Obviously there’s a small hole made through the carpet so that the M5 screw can screw into the rivnut installed below. I installed 2 of the clips on the front mats and then just one centered on the back edge for the rear mats.

Not was to install the clip rings in the floor mats. This was done using the small hole I drilled through the floor mat, carpet and floor when the mat was in the plane. I then just uses a step drill to open up the hole to 15/16″. The rings just press into one another so that went pretty quickly.

And finally snapped in the floor mat. I think this will hold them from slipping around too much and with the better mounting I don’t have to worry about the plastic clips breaking or coming out of the floor.