Best Practice for etched riveting

Paul,

Everything south of Sheff/Donnie is France, everything North of Middlesborough is Scotland and we don't talk about them out west of us, not that Yorkies are bigoted.

 

First results in action.

Looking at the hopper doors 4 of the straps were unannealed on the left, the 4 on the right were annealed.
The unannealed definitely came out best, the annealed strap distorted very badly and took a long time to get somewhere straight, so its unannealed from now.

The coupling hook plate definitely came out best and didn't distort at all.
All up far better than previous results, but very time consuming.



Oh how cruel is extreme close up photograph.

Rob, thanks for the contact details, I need a serious think about buying one of those.

Mossy

 

Paul

Thanks for your suggestions, last night the boss was watching some crap on the tv so I did some experimenting using a slightly different method and after a couple of failures started getting good results and avoiding a lot of the distortions.

Working from the back I drilled out the half etch until there was a small witness mark on the front (pic 1).
A bit tedious and a lot of checking involved but I now have a reliable count of the no of drill twists need.

I then emboss the rivet using the drop riveter, but only using hand pressure, again repeatedly checking until satisfied with the result (pic 2).
The righthand one is going to be rejected as there are spares on the etch and I am getting better each time I do the process.
The only drawback is its just a bit slow going.

The next thing to do is to try the same process on the very narrowest strapping where I would expect a lot more distortion.

Mossy