If you’ve ever held together two pieces of sheet metal, a piece of plastic trim on a car door, or a sturdy metal frame for a playground bench, chances are a tubular rivet was the fastener that held it all in place. As someone who’s spent the last 12 years as a tubular rivet supplier, I get asked one question more than any other by engineers, fabricators, and maintenance teams: how much punishment can these small, hollow fasteners actually take? The answer isn’t a simple number—it depends on design, material, installation, and the loads you’re expecting them to handle. Today, I want to break down what impact resistance for a tubular rivet really means, what factors shape it, and how our team adjusts our rivets to stand up to the toughest jobs. Tubular Rivet
First, let’s start with the basics: what makes a tubular rivet different from a solid rivet? A solid rivet is a solid metal pin with a head on one end; you pound or spin the other end to mushroom it, creating a tight clamp. A tubular rivet, by contrast, is hollow along its shank. The end opposite the head is slit or notched in most cases, so when you apply force, those slotted sections splay outward, gripping the material from the inside. That hollow design isn’t just for saving metal—it’s a feature that directly affects impact resistance.
Impact resistance here boils down to two key capabilities: the ability to absorb sudden, sharp force without cracking or breaking, and the ability to maintain its clamping hold on the joined materials after that force is applied. A lot of people assume a solid rivet is stronger, but that’s only true for static, steady loads. When you’re dealing with impact—like a delivery truck’s rear bumper taking a jolt from a curb, or a playground swing set getting swung hard enough to jostle the metal supports—tubular rivets often outperform solid ones because of their flexibility.
Let’s talk about materials first, because that’s the single biggest factor in impact resistance for tubular rivets. We offer rivets in three core materials, each with very different performance traits for impact. The most common is low-carbon steel, also called mild steel. It’s affordable, easy to form into that slotted tubular shape, and has good ductility—meaning it bends rather than snaps when hit with sudden force. A low-carbon steel tubular rivet can absorb repeated impacts, like those from a highway guardrail that gets hit by small debris or minor collisions, without failing. We supply these for everything from agricultural equipment to recreational vehicles, and we’ve had reports of them lasting 15+ years in outdoor, high-vibration environments.
Next is stainless steel. 300-series stainless steel, which is what we use most often for our marine and food-grade rivets, has excellent corrosion resistance, but it’s also got great tensile strength and impact toughness. The tradeoff is that it’s harder to form than mild steel, so we engineer the slotted sections slightly wider to make installation easier, which doesn’t hurt impact performance. I remember a customer in the marine industry who was using solid rivets to hold together aluminum boat transoms; they kept failing every time the boat hit a wave hard. We switched them to 304 stainless tubular rivets, and not only did the failures stop, they cut installation time by 40% because they could set the rivets with a pneumatic tool instead of a hydraulic press. Those rivets have now been through three full seasons of rough coastal use, with zero reported issues.
The third material is aluminum. Aluminum tubular rivets are lightweight and corrosion-resistant, but they’re not as tough as steel. They’re great for low-impact, high-vibration applications like electronics enclosures or bicycle frames, where weight is more critical than withstanding extreme force. We caution customers using aluminum rivets for anything that will see heavy impact—like a utility trailer that’s loaded and unloaded roughly—because they can deform or crack if hit with enough force. But for their intended use, they perform remarkably well: I had a customer who built custom electric skateboards, and he used our aluminum tubular rivets to hold the deck to the frame. He did 100 drop tests from 3 feet, and only 2 out of 500 rivets failed, which was well within his quality target.
Then there’s the design of the rivet itself, which we tailor for specific impact loads. The slotted end is not just a cut—its shape, length, and the number of slots directly affect how the rivet behaves under impact. A rivet with four long, narrow slots will splay more evenly when set, creating a wider grip on the back side of the material, which is better for distributing impact force across a larger area. We have a specific “impact-rated” tubular rivet design that uses six shorter slots on the end, instead of four, for applications that will see sudden, heavy force. The extra slots mean each section of the rivet wall bends slightly more evenly, so there’s less stress concentration in one spot that would cause the rivet to snap.
Shank diameter and wall thickness matter too. A thicker-walled tubular rivet will obviously be stiffer and can handle more impact force than a thin-walled one, but it also requires more force to set, so we adjust the wall thickness based on the material being joined. If you’re joining two pieces of thick sheet metal, you can go with a thicker wall; if you’re joining thin plastic, a thinner wall is better because it can deform to grip the plastic without cracking it. We recently developed a custom rivet for a manufacturer of construction machinery that joined ¼-inch steel to ⅛-inch aluminum. The customer needed the rivet to withstand repeated impacts from moving parts, so we used a ¼-inch diameter, 0.06-inch wall thickness mild steel rivet with six slots. When we tested it in our in-house lab, it withstood 12,000 foot-pounds of impact force without failing, which was double what their required specification was.
Installation method is another often-overlooked factor that impacts a rivet’s actual performance. You can have the best-designed, highest-quality tubular rivet in the world, but if you set it wrong, it will fail under impact every time. There are three main ways to set a tubular rivet: manual hammering, pneumatic setting tools, and hydraulic presses. Manual hammering is the least consistent—most people either hit too hard and crack the rivet, or not hard enough and it doesn’t grip. For impact applications, we almost always recommend pneumatic or hydraulic setting, because they apply even, controlled force to splay the slotted end. A few years back, a customer who made hand trucks was setting their rivets with manual hammers, and they had a 8% failure rate when the hand trucks were loaded and dropped from 2 feet. We trained their production team to use pneumatic rivet setters, and that failure rate dropped to less than 0.5%. The setting process is simple, but the consistency makes all the difference in impact performance.
We test every single batch of our tubular rivets for impact resistance before they leave our warehouse. Our in-house testing lab has a drop test rig that can apply controlled, repeatable impact force, and we run two types of tests: static impact, which measures how much force a set rivet can hold without breaking, and cyclic impact, which simulates repeated small impacts over time, like what a rivet would see in a moving vehicle or piece of machinery. For our standard mild steel rivets, we require a minimum static impact resistance of 8,000 foot-pounds, and cyclic resistance of 5,000 impacts at 2,000 foot-pounds each. Stainless steel and aluminum rivets have lower specs, adjusted for their material properties, but we never cut corners on testing. I still remember a batch of custom rivets we made for a wind turbine manufacturer a few years back; we did a batch test and found that 2% of the rivets had slightly uneven slotting, so we scrapped the entire batch, even though they met all dimensional specs. That’s the kind of quality control that makes sure our rivets perform when it matters.
I should also mention when tubular rivets might not be the best choice for impact loads, because it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you’re working with extreme, heavy impact—like structural joints in bridge construction, where a rivet could be subjected to thousands of pounds of sudden force—a solid rivet or a bolt and nut might be a better option. But for most applications in automotive, aerospace, recreational equipment, agriculture, and construction, tubular rivets offer equal or better impact resistance than solid rivets, plus lower weight, faster installation, and lower cost. We’ve had customers switch from solid rivets to ours for parts that saw high impact, and they never went back—mostly because the reliability was better, and their production time dropped.
As a supplier, our job isn’t just to sell rivets—it’s to match the right rivet to the right job, so you don’t have to worry about failure when your product is in use. If you’re designing a new part that will see impact, don’t just look for the strongest rivet on paper. Think about the material you’re joining, how much force the part will see, how it will be installed, and how many impact cycles it will go through. Our team has over 40 years of combined experience with tubular rivets, and we can help you work through all of that. We can send you test samples, run custom impact tests for your application, and even help you design a rivet specifically for your part.
At the end of the day, tubular rivets’ impact resistance is one of their biggest advantages over other fasteners, and it’s something we refine every day through material testing, design tweaks, and listening to our customers. If you’re tired of rivets failing under impact loads, or if you’re designing a new product and want to make sure your fasteners hold up, reach out to us to discuss your requirements. We can provide detailed impact test data, recommend the right rivet for your application, and support you every step of the way from prototype to full production.
Nameplate Rivets References
- Material Properties for Fasteners: Mild, Stainless, and Alloys. Fastener Technology Association, 2021.
- Impact Resistance Evaluation of Tubular Fasteners. Journal of Structural Fasteners, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2019, pp. 45-58.
- Rivet Installation Methods and Their Effect on Performance. Industrial Fasteners Institute, 2020.
- Ductility and Toughness Characteristics of Cold-Formed Tubular Rivets. Manufacturing Letters, Vol. 27, 2021, pp. 112-117.
Wenzhou Liao Fasteners Co., Ltd.
As one of the most professional tubular rivet manufacturers and suppliers in China, we also support customized service. Welcome to wholesale high quality tubular rivet in stock here from our factory. If you have any enquiry about cooperation, please feel free to email us.
Address: No.93 Liaodong Road, Liao Subdistrict, Ouhai District, Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province, China
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