I’m sure there are people who have tackled this in many different ways. But I want to do a bit of experimenting with olympic rivets first. That’s what was holding our original walls in place. I am considering pop rivets for the interior walls. And there are rare occasions, such as when I’m riveting the thick curved flair that wraps around the “ultra” on the side of our Avion that I need the 1/2″ long rivets. If I’m riveting aluminum sheet to extruded aluminum, I may need to size up to 3/8″. I have 1/4″, 3/8″, and 1/2″ long rivets that I work with. The question of length really depends on how thick a piece of aluminum and how many sheets you are riveting through. Fortunately, Vintage Trailer Supply produces a 5/32″ rivet with a head that matches the 1/8″. This would generally look odd, since the heads are usually larger than the 1/8″ rivets. When I am riveting old holes where we removed the original rivets and are now replacing them, I size up to 5/32″ diameter rivets. This is a fairly standard rivet and used on Airstreams as well. The standard rivets we use are 1/8″ brazier head buck rivets. If that still does not free the rivet head, step to an even larger drill bit and see if it can free the rivet still without damaging the aluminum sheet. If the rivet head is resistant and won’t pop off, try stepping back down to the smaller drill bit and make sure you have drilled deeply enough and then return to the larger drill bit. Drill into the same hole but, this time, you should not need to drill very much at all for the rivet head to pop free.ĭo not drill into the aluminum sheet itself. This drill bit is wider than the shaft of the rivet. We are using a 5/32″ titanium coated drill bit. But we prefer the small drill bit because it allows us to better see what we are doing.įinally, we switch to the second drill bit. Technically, we could use the rivet removal tool to do this. You don’t have to drill all the way through the rivet, just through the mushroom shaped head, into the level of the sheet aluminum. Use the dimple as a guide to drill through the body of the rivet. You can use other sizes, but the goal is to pick a bit narrower than the rivet shaft. We are using a 7/64″ drill bit because that is smaller than the 1/8″ shaft of the rivet. Once we have the dimple drilled, we switch to the first drill bit. The dimple doesn’t have to be very deep, just enough to guide the drill bits. See how the collar around the rivet removal tool wraps around the rivet head and centers the interior drill bit. First, we use the rivet removal tool to form a dimple in the center of the rivet. We approach rivet removal as a three step process. So, using the right sized bits can be critical! Large drill bit Removal Keeping each hole consistent will minimize complications. Larger holes require larger rivets to be properly resealed. That means that we don’t want to scratch the exterior and (arguably more important) we don’t want to enlarge the rivet holes beyond their current size. We destroy rivets in the de-riveting process but, more often than not, we will be reusing the aluminum sheet. The second is less obvious: to do as little damage to the aluminum sheet as possible. The first is quite obvious: to remove the rivet from the aluminum sheet. When we are removing rivets, we have two goals. Rivet removal tool attached to a power drill.
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