Grommet

A Ring That Reinforces a Hole

A hole through fabric, leather or sheet material is a weak point: whatever passes through it pulls against its edge, and the edge frays, stretches or tears a little more with every pull, until the hole fails. A grommet solves the problem by giving the hole a hard, smooth lining. Grommets and eyelets are metal, plastic or rubber rings that are inserted into a hole made through another material, clamping the material between their flanges so the ring, not the fabric, takes the wear. They may be used to reinforce the hole, to shield something from the sharp edges of the hole, or both. As reinforcement, grommets are used to reinforce holes in leather, clothing, shoes and other fabrics. Their most common usage is to strengthen the holes for bootlacing, but they are also good for making corsets and other laced clothing, plus curtains and other household items that require hanging from hooks. In every one of those uses the principle is the same: the grommet prevents the cord from tearing through the hole and thus provides structural integrity, turning a punched hole in a soft material into a durable, load-bearing opening.

Setting a grommet is deliberately low-technology work. The parts required are the grommet itself, a grommet-setting tool, a metal rod with a convex tip which usually comes with the grommets when bought in a store, and a hammer. The hole is made, the grommet's barrel is pushed through it, the setting tool spreads and rolls the barrel's edge over a washer on the back, and a few hammer blows lock the sandwich together. Fancier grommet presses exist, and a press earns its place where hundreds of grommets are set to a uniform finish, but generally a hammer and the setting tool work at least as well for setting just a few grommets. Size naming in clothing is the one point of vocabulary: small grommets are also called eyelets, especially when used in clothing, so the eyelets down the front of a boot or a corset are grommets in miniature, doing the same reinforcing work at lace scale.

Shielding What Passes Through, and a Surgical Namesake

The grommet's second job is protection in the other direction, guarding not the material with the hole but the thing that passes through it. If metal or another hard material has a hole made in it, the hole may have sharp edges, and electrical wires, cord, rope, lacings or other soft material passing through the hole can become abraded, resulting in failure. Instead, a rubber or plastic grommet can be inserted into the hole and the wire passed through the grommet, and the soft texture of the grommet shields the wire from damage. This is very commonly done wherever wires pass through punched sheet metal, and rubber grommets are manufactured in a wide variety of sizes expressly for this purpose. In clothing terms the same logic applies wherever a lace, drawstring or strap passes through a hard-edged opening: the ring's smooth bore is what the cord actually touches, thousands of times, so the cord survives.

One further use takes the word into medicine, and it is worth separating from the clothing sense. A surgical grommet is a small Teflon tube inserted into the eardrum to allow air to pass through it into the middle ear, to alleviate the hearing loss and pain that can occur with repeated ear infections, a condition sometimes known as glue ear. Even there, the shared idea is recognizable: a small tube lining a hole so that what passes, air instead of a lace or a wire, can pass safely. For apparel purposes the definition stays with the ring in the hole. Wherever a garment is laced, hung, tied or threaded, at a boot's eyelets, down a corset's back, along a curtain's heading or through a drawstring's exit holes, a grommet or eyelet is the small piece of hardware that lets a hole be used hard without tearing out.