Using a Riveting Hammer to Connect Parts

Using a Riveting Hammer to Connect PartsEvery day we learn about new instruments. Often we prefer the ones we are familiar with and wrongly reject the new ones. The latter are often promising and convenient in use. A riveting hammer is one of such instruments. Riveting hammers are tools designed for connecting two parts. The thickness of the two parts together can be up to 10 mm. They are connected with specially designed rivets. Rivet connections are non-separable. The joining holes of the two parts are filled with metal. This is how they are connected. Usually two holes are made in the parts. Then they are countersunk on the opposite sides. A small piece of metal is inserted into the hole. Then it is pressed so that the metal fills the holes and the cavities made by countersinking. This forms two heads that keep the parts together. Naturally, you can use a rivet to fill a hole in just one part. Rivet connections are very reliable. They are also resistant to vibrations. A rivet will never break suddenly if the load applied to the parts is increased. This is a big advantage over welding. Welded connections break suddenly and all together. A rivet will first stretch. Compared to screw connections rivets are cheaper. A rivet is just a small cylindrical piece of wire. The famous structures built with the help of rivets include the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Shukhov Tower in Moscow and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. After automatic machines were invented they started making rivet blanks out of wire. The classical process of riveting requires that you have access to the rivet from both sides. Metal is also hard to tool. If the parts are small you usually put the part with a ready made head onto an anvil. If the parts are large, there has to be an anvil on the opposite side. It was extremely inconvenient. This is why hammering was only done by professionals or in industry. However, modern rivets allow you to work on one side only. This made riveting easier and more popular.All this happened thanks to the changes in the design of the rivet. Secondly, a specialised instrument was developed - the riveting hammer. A modern construction rivet is a small tube with a head on one side. A piece of wire is inserted into the tube. It also has a head on the other side. If the wire is forced through the tube, the head of the wire will expand the tube. When the head of the wire reaches the component, the wire will simply break leaving the tube flared. Rivets are indispensible for connecting parts that are too thin for self-tapping screws and screw joints. The riveting hammer itself is a hand tool based on a lever with a high advantage of level. The collet mechanism holds the head of the wire. It thrusts against the ready made head of the rivet to pull and break the wire. Riveting hammers can be simple in design. However, some of them have helpful features. For example, a rotating collet head. This allows using the riveting hammer in hard to reach places. The diameters and the lengths of rivet tubes differ. This is why the riveting hammer has a set of interchangeable heads for various wire diameters. It only takes several seconds to set a rivet.Now we want to show you how to set two types of rivets. One will be set using the classical method with a hammer and a fixture. The other one will be set using a riveting hammer. So, now we are doing the first one. Let's put the fixture onto the rivet. Now we set the rivet from the other side. Here we go.Now let's see how we can do the same thing using a modern tool. We take a rivet designed for a riveting hammer. We insert the rivet into the riveting hammer, set the part against the vice and press the hammer. A riveting hammer makes certain construction and assembling operations much easier. It allows quickly making reliable connections between various components.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• connection
• construction
• mounting
• practice
• tool