After much pain using the manual rivet gun, I went out and bought an air unit. How is it supposed to work?

I have used the correct end which goes over the protruding part of the rivet, got lots of air pressure, placed over the rivet, and other than getting stuck on the rivet, nothing.

Am I missing something?

Mine did this for a bit too, you have to make sure the tension is set right at the back of the head on mine, and that the jaws in the head are clean too. Not sure what else to try after that though.

Thanks. I'm going to return the unit and buy a good one from somewhere else. This is one part of the build I think I can do, so this is very frustrating. Running all over town to get tools that don't seem to work is getting very tiresome though, I must say.

they are easy to adjust , unscrew the chrome front and move the nut up the thread then replace the chrome front will take you less than a minute .. all should be fine.

After trying out a cheapo unit, a lazy tongue and my new riveter, unless you are getting it cheap I wouldn't bother with an air riveter.

The Lazy Tongue one was fine for the underbody took about 1/2 hr of riveting with little effort. The only problem with this one was that I broke the tip off one of the jaws being a bit ham fisted.

The new one I have (in my photo archive) is loveley but you have to be very gentle with rivnuts else it over crushes them. That one cost me 50 quid from my friendly local dealer which was a bit better than the 70 odd quid demon tweeks sell them for

Coupled with the 5 quid one from wilkinsons they do the job between them, can do rivnuts and can get into akward places.

Unfortunately, those are not available in Canada - at least I've never seen them. I think my air compressor doesn't go up to 90 psi, as required by the gun.

I am going to buy another manual riveter and just do 4 or 5 rivets a day: this is all my body can take.

Thank you for your responses; I hope to help somebody else one day, but I fear that day will never come. I don't ever seem to get anywhere - although I could drill holes and paint all right!

[Edited on 8/7/07 by RK]

It shouldn't cost too much to get one shipped up. The boltcutter action ones might be more suited to you if you have limited mobility or upper body strength.Hanson website.

I have an air riveter from machine mart, done 100's of 5mm rivets no problems, apart from one pack of rivets I got from Halfrauds,the rivet leg was 3mm shorter than any others I had used and slipped in the chuck. As previously said adjust the jaws until you have to push the rivet against slight resistance, airline pressure between 80-90psi is enough and they don't need much flow rate at all.
Only other thing I found was, it sometimes needed two pulls of the trigger if the rivet was a bit on the long side.

Turns out my compressor won't go above 70 psi which is not enough for steel core rivets. I'll need to get a stronger person in to finish. I'm going to have a stroke if I continue on these myself.

Question: is there a problem using aluminum rivets for everything else but the floor? I assume those will be a lot easier to do with a manual riveter.

Score so far: Car (pile of welded steel at this point): 1, Me: 0

[Edited on 10/7/07 by RK]

I've used aluminum rivets and steel rivnuts where I need those.

The underside was done with sikaflex bonding and wide headed 5 (4.8?)mm x16mm long rivets at around 60mm intervals. Seems pretty rock solid.

Sikaflex on its own is supposed to be pretty good, though I wouldn't be happy without riveting too.

Update:

Turns out my hand riveter was faulty. Worked like a charm (in about 5 minutes, I was done 20 rivets) with a new conventional riveter. Cost of such device: about 5 pounds sterling to you.

Screw the air riveter: not worth the hassle.

Now I'm on to trying to extract the rubber bushes out of the MX5 differential carrier. Gotta search to find out how people do it.

crude technique is burn them out with a blow torch outside preferably! then hacksaw carefully through the remaining steel sleeve being careful not to cut into the carrier. This is accepted technique for Land Rover chassis bushes that are invariably rusted in and with an old chassis trying too hard with a hammer will distort the hole!

Caber

Thanks for that! I will keep people informed and post pics as I upload them. None there yet because I have to shrink the file sizes.