Aluminum repair on Jon boat

Hi Guys,
My old 14' has some leaking rivets and a crack or 2. I've lived with it for awhile, not a big deal as I'm wanting to get a bigger/wider jon, so I can build the decks up like I've seen on this site. Mine is way too narrow and shallow, heck, with just me, my wife and the 5hp Merc., the fish could walk in. lol.
Anyway, I've seen these "magic weilding" rods, that allow you to repair aluminum w/o a wire-feed machine.
Are these any good? Is there a better way?
Thanks for the info and all the builds to admire.

You should try re-bucking the rivets then have the cracks tig welded.

Don't expect any acceptable results with those. Might work on a small bench top piece, but a boat is far too large of a heat sink.

The better way is to replace the leaky rivets, and get the cracks TIG welded. Rebucking sometimes works, but overall is a bad practice. I've been known to rebuck a few here and there, but if it takes more than ONE hit, it needs to be replaced. The rivet works by not only tightening down on both sides, but also expanding in the middle, to be a very tight fit in the hole. Once the rivet has worked loose, it has either worn the rivet down, or egged the hole out. Rebucking an already tightened rivet doesn't expand the middle out - only squeezes the 'heads' tighter, and in the process, stress cracks the aluminum around the hole.

Replacing rivets isn't hard, and overall, is fairly inexpensive.

Those rods suck. I tried repairing about a 1" crack on my old 1232....I ended up turning a small crack into a large hole....still not sure how...all I know is a torch and those rods do not fix a boat very well. I ended up finding a friend that could TIG weld to fix it. I have heard that those Cabelas rods work good though.

As for rivets...as mentioned above, either rebuck, or replace with closed end pop rivets and 5200 sealant.

The magic welding rods are made of zinc. Zinc and aluminum do not play well together and it will eventually result in galvanic corrosion on the aluminum.