This Is Killing Your Productivity

The Problem with Pre-Loading Rivets

I usually hear it before I see it.

Walking through a plant, you know you’re getting close to a blind riveting area — the sound of popping, the compressor cycling, the rhythm of the line, even a stray spent mandrel on the floor.

And then you see it: operators putting rivets into the substrate by hand.

Pre-loading them.

Every time, the same thought hits me: Is this a training issue or a process issue?

Not because anyone is doing something wrong on purpose — but because they don’t realize what they’re actually doing.

It looks efficient.

It feels faster.

It’s not.

The Robot Already Solved This

There’s a simple way to sanity-check this process:

If it were truly more efficient… 

the robot would already be doing it.

Robots don’t guess.

They don’t improvise.

They run on one principle: Repeatability.

My colleague, an automation and robotics expert with 20 years’ experience, says: “How far, how fast, how heavy—doesn’t matter. It must be repeatable before we talk about anything else.”

So, what does the robot do?

It loads the rivet into the tool… 

then goes to the substrate… 

then actuates the tool.

Every time.

If pre-loading rivets into the substrate were faster, more efficient, or more reliable—the robot would do that.

It doesn’t.

What Actually Happens When You Pre-Load

You've got a rivet sitting in the work, and now you’re trying to guide the tool onto a tiny protruding mandrel. Think about it…

If you’re setting a 1/8” (3.2 mm) rivet, for example, you’re trying to find a mandrel roughly the thickness of a single strand of spaghetti—with a nosepiece opening only thousandths larger.

That’s not clearance. 

That’s precision.

Humans aren’t built for that kind of precision and even robots don’t try.

What actually happens when you try to find an already seated rivet mandrel in a substrate with the nose of the tool?

You bump it.

You slightly bend it.

You can cause damage.

Maybe not enough to see. 

But enough to matter.

Because inside that rivet tool? 

Tolerances are tight.

And deformed mandrels removed from jammed tools tell the story.

Pre-loaded rivets are a production killer.

And believe it or not, this common habit can damage reputations, stall careers and even hurt entire product lines.

This Isn’t an Operator Problem

This isn’t about blaming the people on the floor. In most cases, operators are doing what they were shown, what feels faster, or what helps them work around an upstream issue. The real question isn’t, “Why are they doing that?”

The real question is: “Is there something in the process causing this?”

Why This Keeps Showing Up Everywhere

After two decades walking plants across five continents, one thing is consistent:

Most plant personnel have never received proper process training on how the tool, fastener, and application work together.

Tool training? Sometimes.

Fastener training? Rarely.

How the two must function as a system at the plant? Almost never.

So, people default to what feels efficient.

And bad habits stick. 

Where This Starts Costing Real Money

Companies see inconsistency, downtime, and quality issues and often jump straight to automation. But automation doesn’t fix a broken process — it just repeats it faster.

I’ve seen cases where a small process correction — sometimes as cheap as a $10 nose piece — could have saved thousands before anyone considered buying new equipment.

Sometimes automation appears to “work better” in blind riveting applications not because it’s "innovative"… but because it forces the correct process through the rigid requirement of repeatability.

Humans are incredibly good at compensating for bad processes. Robots aren’t.

They simply expose them.

I’ll dive deeper into that in an upcoming post.

What’s the Fix?

It’s simple.

Stop pre-loading.

Put the rivet in the tool first. 

Every time.

If the operator can’t—that’s where you begin.

Until next time...M