Pop rivets and pneumatic rivet guns

[Andy.I]

Hi Everybody, my first post on here!
I am about to buy a wet bead blaster which requires some self assembly involving 4.8mm stainless pop rivets and some sort of powered rivet gun is highly advisible.
Owning a compressor prompted me to look at a number of pneumatic rivet guns and while the specs say they will handle this size of rivet some of them say they will only handle them in alloy.
I thought it would be logical to find out what the rivet breaking tension was so that I could ensure I bought a tool beefy enough for the job but this information isn't published which leaves me wondering what to do next.
Could anybody advise me on how to select a suitable pneumatic rivet gun please?

 

[MikeK]

Unless you plan on making a career of installing rivets, I wouldn't invest in a pneumatic rivet gun. Instead, I would buy or borrow a heavy duty manual rivet tool, such as this from Amazon.co.uk:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B073WXYDM9

A normal hand-squeeze rivet tool might not work well on the 4.8mm stainless steel rivets. Something like the tool from Amazon is much better than the hand-squeeze tools.

 

[Andy.I]

Sorry, I didn't make clear that space constraints mean that long-handled tools are a no-no, especially as that particular one needs tube extensions to actually finish a 4.8mm stainless pop rivet. Similarly, lazy-tongue riveters are out as well.

 

[NickM]

Rivet guns (including the pneumatic variety) come with different mandrels for the different sizes of rivets. If it has the right mandrel then it should work fine.

I built a car a few years ago and did hundreds of rivets. The pneumatic rivet gun was a god send!

 

[finish_that]

Hand powered are fine if you only need to do 5 rivets , after 10 they are a pain and after that ,,, , there are two styles of air gun , one has the air canister at the bottom and one looks like an air impact gun, a friend works a lot on horse boxes and trailers that use a lot of rivets , currently using a £30 impact style gun, but for better access I would get the bottom canister type, they all have the right mandrel.
One word of caution , never have your head or any part of your body or anybody else in line of fire of the pin ejection, some of them are
prone to ejecting not unlike a nail gun and its not always predictable.
I have the typical squeeze gun and the long handled tool from amazon linked above, its way better than the squeeze gun if you have room, but with steel rivets in the larger sizes it takes some serious technique to close the handles, the air powered Parkside gun I have just does the job with no fuss , which makes a much neater job when you are not wrestling with handles.

 

[hawkeyefxr]

4.8mm pop rivets, after half a dozen of them you hand is going to hurt! When you say long one do you mean lazy tongs?
Look at hiring an air gun, you can hire most things these days.

 

[Blockplane]

If l were in your situation, l would assemble using nuts and bolts and save the expense of a rivet gun .

 

[TFrench]

If you can bring it to me (just south of Leicester - outside the quarantine zone!) I can put it together with my electric riveter.

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

 

[Andy.I]

I have spoken to the designer / manufacturer and he says that other customers have asked him if he has every built one of these cabinets using a manual riveter and he laughs and says no. Apparently it turns a job which would normally take a couple of hours into two days.
He says he uses a Milwaukee cordless rivet gun, but £240 is a bit steep for what I now know to be the 100 rivets I need to set.
He confirmed that some pneumatic guns will only handle 4.8mm alloy rivets and won't set 4.8mm stainless but he says the Clarke CAT151 from Machine Mart does the job. Apparently it's got a mandrel catcher to stop them flying out of the back when they break.
When I suggested using M5 stainless button-head socket screws with washers and nuts he said it was possible but it would be a two-man job and one of the two would need to be a contortionist squeezing fully inside the 750mm cubic workspace without falling out of the bottom while riveting the sump on.
TFrench: I'm tempted to take you up on your very kind offer but if I turned up with a 950 x 750mm footprint bead blaster on a trailer I think you'd regret it, but thank you anyway!

 

[NickM]

My air riveter looks very similar to that Clarke one. It had no trouble doing steel rivets (the hole for which was around 4mm). They weren't stainless but I'd be surprised if it couldn't do them.

 

[Andy.I]

I can confirm that the Clarke CAT151 from Machine Mart does the job a treat. It set my first batch of rivets in one go and the second batch which were marginally longer required to pulls. The job has been done and I now need to finish sealing it before I can start blasting.