Shortcomings of Self-clinching Nuts for Automatic Plug-in Equipment

The rivet nuts usually are fixed by the rivet gun or using mold riveting. Apart from those two common methods, the automatic plug-in equipment has been widely applied. The automatic plug-in technology has been quite mature, but the automatic plug-in devices are adopt of self-clinching nut instead of pulling rivet nut. Compared to the pulling rivet nut, the self-clinching nuts have some shortcomings.

(1) For the same specifications of the riveting nuts, self-clinching nuts cost higher than the rivet nut.

(2) Self-clinching nuts have strict requirements on the thickness of the sheet metal, that is not applicable to the parts made of thin materials, while increasing the sheet thickness to adapt to riveting will greatly raise the production costs. At the same time, the structural parameters of self-clinching nuts used on sheet metals that of different thicknesses are not consistent, if use pulling rivet nut for production, it will increase the nut variety and specifications, and ultimately lead to increasing production management and quality management costs.

The sheet metal industry mostly uses hexagonal rivet nuts. But the current general automatic plug-in equipment can not apply such riveting nuts, because the equipment can not achieve hexagonal riveting nut directional delivery. Although cylindrical riveting nuts may solve the problem, but it may occur loose problem when screwing up the bolts after riveting.