[Milsurplus] Riveting...

[Mike Hanz]

Kenneth G. Gordon wrote:

>I need to remove and re-rivet some data plates to the cases of some old 
>ARC-5 receivers. The cases are damaged and need to be straightened and 
>re-painted.  Are the original rivets still available today? If, so, from where? 
>What about tools? I think the original tools were specially made for these 
>small rivets. Are there modern equivalents? Where would one obtain these?  
>What about the posts which hold the top cover on? Are unriveted ones of 
>those still available, or am I going to have to find a lathe?
>

The rivets are 1/16" partially hollow "Thompson rivets" with a brazier 
head and are not usually carried by McMaster or any of the larger 
industrial equipment houses.  I like Don's suggestion of drilling or 
grinding off the backside until the material is thinned to the point 
where you can punch them out without distorting the tag (you need an 
anvil on the other side that will support the tag if you are trying to 
save as much as possible of the stem...I use a small block of nylon 
drilled with the rivet head diameter for that.)  It will help if you can 
make a special short pin punch out of a broken 1/16" punch or small 
nail, grinding down the diameter to .040" or so for an eighth of an inch 
on the end.)

If you are a glutton for punishment and want to use new rivets, the 
solid rivets seem to be more common than the tubular type.  MECI used to 
have bins of solid sizes like these at Dayton each year, and I bought a 
lifetime supply for a couple of bucks.  The creation of a tubular type 
out of a solid rivet is easy - as long as you have a special collet that 
holds the rivet in the lathe chuck while you drill the end...  I had to 
make my own - basically a fixture with a small "coin" of stainless in 
it.  Drop the rivet through a small hole in the center and screw down 
the holder that pushes the head against the disk, and the whole fixture 
is then chucked in the lathe.  You don't want to use this expedient if 
you have 5,000 rivets to modify, though...slow and boring doesn't begin 
to describe it...

The setting tool can be as simple as a center punch (use a small one to 
get started and then a larger one for the final few taps) but you will 
get some splitting with this method and it won't look like the 
original.  If you want to do it right and use an arbor press or the 
chuck in your drill press, the professional rivet sets have a profile 
that I can best describe as what you saw in the old high speed photos of 
a droplet landing in a dish of milk - sort of a crater with a central 
cone in it.  You need a pretty small radius on the tip of the lathe tool 
to get that profile (not difficult to do with the larger rivets, but 
with a 1/16" it's touchy.)  Throw in the fact that they really need heat 
treatment to last any decent number of cycles, and it gets to be a chore 
to make your own.  The angles and depths tend to be proprietary, with a 
whisper of black magic thrown in, so you won't find standards in 
Machinery's Handbook, for example.  The smaller ones in my drawer were 
$50 each from an ebay vendor who normally only sells sets for the 
/solid/ rivets, so that gives you one data point for considering a purchase.

I've never found a vendor for the small snap slide posts.  You can 
easily make them out of brass if you have a lathe, and then barrel plate 
them with a nickel plating kit from Caswell's, but I've gradually 
evolved my approach to simply making them out of stainless to be done 
with it.

Don's suggestion is looking pretty good by now, huh?  :-)

Best 73,
Mike