Bustin rivets

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theyyounggun

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Ive already had a couple GREAT responses on my thread. But I dont have any chisels. Anybody else have some tricks or tips?
 
If you can get at the head with a drill, you can just use an oversized drill bit and drill out just the head. Do not drill into the rivet hole!
You should be able to push them through, using a snall nail set, or something similar.
 
If you want to drill them out, you need to try to get a good drill bit (made for drilling into metal) about the same size as the rivet shank. (The compressed head (flat, not rounded) of the rivet is supposed to be 1.5 times the diameter of the shank.) I find that it goes much easier if you take a center punch and put an indention dead center of the (rounded, not flat) rivet head. Put the tip of the drill bit in the indention and drill through the head until you are very close to flush with the surface of the material being held together by the rivet. If your drill bit is the right size and your drilling angle was correct, you can wiggle the drill while the bit is still in the hole and the head will separate from the shank. At that point, you can take a punch and tap the rest of the rivet out. Another good way to do this is use a punch about the same size as the drill bit, put it in the drilled hole, and wiggle it. Once again, the head should pop off and you can tap the rivet out with punch. If the head won't pop off, don't keep trying! Aluminum will tear pretty easily and you don't want a hole to turn into a crack. You may need to drill further, or maybe even go up a drill bit size. You shouldn't have to pound hard to drive out a rivet shank either.

I hope I made some kind of sense. I can picture it clearly in my head. lol. If you have to remove several (hundred) rivets, they do make a rivet shaver. It chucks up into a drill and would cost around 75$ Take all of this with a grain of salt. This is how it works for rivets on aircraft. I am sure that much of the same still applies to boats, but we usually don't see huge rivets on aircraft. Most of ours are 1/8 or 3/16 in diameter.
 
I found out my neighbor has an angle grinder! So after grinding all of the heads off and punch a couple out I found out they werent what everybody calls rivets. They were something else but I dont know what. My neighbor knew the name and called them something... There harder to punch out cause there hollow and they just expand.
 
theyyounggun said:
I think he may of called them brads? Ill take pics of the ones I busted out and upload them.

Sounds like a tubular type rivet
 
I have a couple that I can show yall tommorow. It was confusing the whole time till I got the first one out and saw what the problem was #-o
 
They are solid rivets and not brads.

Here's a video that shows the correct way to install them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hB3rIECtxM

or remove them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr24Nvs7fd0&feature=related

and where you can purchase them

https://www.rivetsonline.com/solid-aluminum-rivets-1-4-to-3-8.html
 

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