What Installation Equipment Should I Use for Blind Rivet Nut Applications?

When you come to Bossard for fastening solutions, our engineers may recommend rivet nuts, which typically have access from two sides. Blind rivet nuts allow access only from one side making them suitable for more flexible applications in agriculture, residential lighting, trucking and transportation, mining, and solar or green energy, among others. They’re useful, for example, when you want to join brittle or thin materials that may shatter with ordinary nuts.

Choosing the correct blind rivet nut is one half of the fastening solution. The other is selecting the right installation.

Types of Tools

The following are some of the most popular options from our tooling portfolio:

• Spin/spin tool: After you thread the blind rivet nut onto the mandrel of the pneumatic power tool, the tool inserts the nut into the hole of your application. The tool then spins the mandrel to pull the threaded part of the shank to the blind side of the application, which creates a bulge around the unthreaded part. As the bulge pushes against the rear of the panel, it grips the sheet. After securing the nut in place, the mandrel removes itself from the nut by spinning in the opposite direction. The internal threads of the nut remain unaffected.
• Spin/pull tool: Pulls the mandrel back a specific distance to set the nut.
• “Pull to pressure” or “force control” tool: Pulls the mandrel back to a specific pressure.
• “Pull to stroke” or “stroke control” tool: Pulls the mandrel back to a specific stroke distance or thickness.

More Considerations

Other questions to ask when deciding on installation equipment include the following:

• What are the sizes of the blind rivet nuts? We offer M3 to M12, or, if you prefer, can deliver specifications in inches.
• Do you prefer the control and finesse of hand tools or the efficiency and strength of battery-powered or pneumatic tools?
• What materials are you fastening? Aluminum, steel, stainless steel, or high-strength steel need different equipment. For example, spin/pull tools are ideal for fastening plastic components and pull-to-pressure tools work well for metal or hard plastic.
• What other options do you want: real-time process monitoring with multistage programming, force/stroke curve documentation, upgrade modules like Wi-Fi or barcode readers?

Want to learn more? Then please use the form to the right to contact us and a Bossard representative will get in touch with you shortly.