Re: Hinge Rivets

"Bob La Londe"  wrote in message news:v4sni1$1gisb$1@dont-email.me...
I've headed a rivet with a hammer once or twice.  Once you get over the
initial trepidation its not to hard.
Bob La Londe
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I practiced riveting until I could form a symmetrical dome with a nice dimpled pattern with a ball pein hammer, without scarring the area around. I wanted to learn to make costume armor and got as far as a helmet and chainmail shirt.
Solid rivets are intended to expand to tightly fill the hole, which may be why all of the hinge rivets I've seen were tubular on the end. My attempts to expand the tubular part of shop-made rivets (pulley shafts) without deforming the solid section haven't been promising. Obviously they work, but not with any homebrew hammer setting method I've tried, such as conical center punches, or ball-end ones from a dapping set. Plan B was a custom shoulder screw or a sleeve on a standard screw, as I suggested. I backed away from rivets to avoid having to remove a bad one from otherwise finished work.
The undercut screw head was the easiest to make, with a parting bit so I could set the width with the lathe off after chucking the screw and control diameter with infeed. IIRC I set the width by eye to half the 1/16" thickness of the HSS bit. They were for antenna mast joints, not pivots.
The closest I came to making a successful tubular rivet set was a screw-together setting tool for 3/8" brass grommets, which I could use on a ladder for repairs to hanging tarps, such as aligning the grommets on old and new ones.