Brief Description: Swivel rivet set with rubber guard
I thought it might be helpful to share some of my experience and thoughts concerning riveting. I began my project using a nice US Industrial 3X recoiless rivet gun purchased at a reduced rate on Ebay (see Image 1). The gun came with a swivel type regulator. After talking with numerous people who couldn't tell me how to adjust the gun in terms of pressure, I tried to find the proper setting by trial and error on some aluminum scrap in the shop. I started with a plain mushroom rivet set and later tried a recommended swivel set from Avery Tools with an integral rubber guard. Regardless of the regulator settings and rivet sets, I could not get a good result.
Finally, I contacted George Omdorff of GeoBeck Inc. who gave me some good information. First, he suggested removing the regulator at the gun and set the regulator at the compressor to 60 psi rather than the 90 suggested by some sources. The 60 psi setting with a 2X gun gave good results using a plain mushroom rivet set. Switching to the swivel set with rubber guard again resulted in poor results. While all the advice indicated the swivel set would work well as delivered from Avery, it didn't work for me. The rubber guard extended almost 1/8" beyond the face of the rivet set. This kept the rivet set from touching and holding the rivet against the aluminum sheet. It simply would not drive a rivet properly and wanted to dance all over the sheet metal.
The fix for the problem was to remove the excess rubber material from the guard using a sanding block. I placed some masking tape on the face of the rivet set for protection and then used a sanding block to reduce the rubber guard to where it is just barely proud of the rivet set face. By using a small piece of 3M tape to hold the rivet in place and protect the aluminum surface, I then got good results. When I have some extra time, I plan to put a gauge on the gun regulator to see how much pressure actually passes to the gun at each setting.
