Advantages and Challenges Presented
Posted on 07/24/2017 | by The Orbitform Blog Team
Riveting with stainless steel rivets presents advantages and challenges. Rivets made of stainless steel are durable and corrosion resistant. Stainless steel rivets are also more difficult to upset due to the material strength of the rivets which requires more impact riveting force to upset the shank side of the rivet. Stainless steel rivets often require coatings or lubricants to be applied prior to impacting them due to the likelihood of rivet cracking and/or galling of the forming tool.
A tier 2 automotive supplier of emissions monitoring sensors and fuel economy increasing sensors asked Orbitform for help joining components of a sub-assembly within one of their sensor products. The application included the automatic feeding and impact riveting of several stainless steel rivets to fasten the sub-assembly together.
The Orbitform engineering team ran various samples through the Milford model 56 impact riveter in order to test upper and lower tooling designs, to present the post-forming aesthetics of the upset rivet, and to validate the cycle time of the riveting process. After hitting many semi-tubular stainless steel rivets with the Milford stainless steel rivet riveting machine we were able to offer the customer a good assessment of what to expect from the stainless steel rivets in this automotive emissions sensor assembly application.
If you think this type of assembly process could help your manufacturing operation, please contact us by clicking here.