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LP4-3 Blind Rivet Problems

goatflieg

Well Known Member
I did some blind riveting yesterday, and started to have problems that seemed to escalate. Riveting my bulkhead caps on with LP4-3 blind rivets using the swivel head pop rivet tool supplied by Cleaveland Tool in 2015 (they sell an almost identical puller with a different brand name now; don't know if that's an issue). We've all had blind rivet mandrels pop in the wrong place, leaving a long tail. Well, yesterday it started happening a LOT... by the time I was done, I'd say one out of four mandrels broke in the wrong place.
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When this happens, the internal jaws can no longer get any purchase on the mandrel, and I had to remove the interchangeable nose piece to get the jaws to engage. I had to make a steel spacer with a mandrel-sized hole drilled in it to act as a nose buck, and getting the long mandrel tails to break inside the rivet took a TREMENDOUS amount of force. Not sure what's going on here; I disassembled and inspected the tool; nothing seemed amiss. It was a mixed batch of LP4-3 rivets supplied at different times; could I have some bad rivets? I don't know much about the physical properties of the LP4-3 rivets, and I'm confused about why some rivets popped correctly and fairly easily, and the huge increase of effort it took to pop the ones that didn't pop correctly. What am I missing here? I will be making inquiries to Cleaveland Tool and Van's... but wanted to get VAF input as well.
 
I had a similar issue and purchased a new rivet puller. With that out of the way, I disassembled the old one to find shavings in it. After I cleaned it out and oiled it with air tool oil, it worked fine!

Not sure if this will help your situation but it's always nice to have a spare tool to maintain momentum.

Good luck!
 
I cant find it now, but I remember a thread in the past few months regarding this issue. It may have even been addressed somewhere on the Vans website. If I remember, they said the possible cause could be due to the blind rivets sitting for a long period of time and the pieces becoming slightly galled. I believe the solution was to add some type of lubrication to the shaft of the blind rivet. Again, I can find this info, and I may have had dreamed the whole thing. Thought I'd mention though.
 
Cherrymax

I cant find it now, but I remember a thread in the past few months regarding this issue. It may have even been addressed somewhere on the Vans website. If I remember, they said the possible cause could be due to the blind rivets sitting for a long period of time and the pieces becoming slightly galled. I believe the solution was to add some type of lubrication to the shaft of the blind rivet. Again, I can find this info, and I may have had dreamed the whole thing. Thought I'd mention though.

Those were Cherry max but the concept is valid with the LP4.
 
I strongly suspect that it is your puller, not the rivets that is the problem. I pulled some 12,000+ LP4-3 rivets when building my RV-12 and don't recall ever having a single rivet setting failure with them. I used a variety of manual and air-powered pullers to successfully pull the rivets but I did not use a "swivel-head" type of puller. Try a different puller.
 
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