Posted by chriscase on Friday, August 03, 2007 at 19:46:38 :
First, I chucked a piece of 3/4" dia bar in my chuck, and took a die grinder with a cut off wheel to the end of it. About a two inch diameter wheel matched the truss head rivets that attainable from an Ace hardware in the Servalite bins. The bar was about two feet long, so my 87 year old dad could buck them well.
Then a quick trip to 'K' surplus to get a tool for my standard air hammer. No tools big enough, they are surplus from aircraft making. But at $4 per pound, the fattest three were $1.75. I took them home, and chucked up the likeliest one, and cut the end off with the die grinder, then used a very worn down cutoff wheel to dish the end, about a 1" diameter.
To use, insert a rivet, clamp all the parts tightly and as close to the rivet as the hammer will allow, and heat the end very red hot with an acetylene torch. Then put the torch out, put it down, pick up the air hammer, and squash the bejasus out of the rivet. The rivets cool quickly, try to work fast, but it took me two tries to get a good head on each. The holes had been pre-drilled, but after one was actually installed, I needed to run the drill through each hole in turn. Using bolts, good shop practice is to make the holes oversized, 1/32", but I didn't think that was a good idea for rivets. So 3/8" rivets need the holes drilled at assembly to fit through 3/8" holes.
Hmmm, though maybe I should have drilled oversize to begin with? More room to squash the body, making it shorter and tighter? I dunno, but the original holes were definitely tighter than 3/8"- smaller rivets? 11/32"? ...
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