Riveting Using Old Technology

Great fan of them rivets after the restoration of FR No 20 when I had a battle with someone who wanted to use fully welded boiler on a 1863 chassis (I won and it was less £). Anyway these chaps have reserected a useful bit of old kit and their next project is to build 2 boilers in the USA - here is the clip:-



Great to see it in action.

 

Great bit of old kit. You could tell it was a 21 century vigeo. The rivets were carefully passed in the tongs rather tham thrown to a catcher as can be seen in many old films

 

Wonder if they call it Linda?

 

Fair bit of kit!

Although not sure how much longer that smokebox is for this world looking at 5:45.

 

I've got ask have you done any hot riveting?
Throwing a rivet into a smokebox that size is asking for an injury to the riveter and a beating of the thrower. We use an induction furnace and a 'squeezer', a hydraulic version of the tool in the film. Smokeboxes are double gunned or the inside end is held in an air powered 'holder upper' depending on access.
I wonder what formula merkins use for the rivet length, they seem a little long to me.
As you ask yes I do riveting although not so much owing to a bad wrist injury.
Copper stay removal and fitting is more my thing.

Russ.

 

I have only done hot riveting on small rivets.

Perhaps I should have added a smiley as no critisism of the careful handling of rivets was intended. I was more comentating on the slightly dogy way our forefathers used.

 

That's an interesting object - I've done loads of both hydraulic and pneumatic riveting, but I've never seen a pneumatic "squeeze" type riveter before. To be honest I can't really think of any advantage over a hydraulic squeeze, but I can think of any number of downsides - this may be why they aren't exactly common. Still it's in interesting historical curio.

I do a lot of hydraulic riveting solo (basically where I can see what I'm doing on both sides of a job) - get my rivet out of the oven, shove it in the plate, hold the riveter on and press the pedal. No real advantage to throwing rivets to myself!

I think the traditional throwing rivets up thing was more to do with buildings and bridges where the oven has to be some way from the job - I think I'd want a good deal of practice with a cold rivet before trying it hot...

I can recall a couple of years ago going out on a site riveting job putting a smokebox on a well known narrow gauge loco. Two of us were riveting - my mate on the outside knocking down the heads, me on the inside holding the rivets up with a jamming gun. The firm we were contracting to had lent us a lad to run the rivet oven for the day, and he was a bit keen - literally the moment I had let go of the trigger on the gun, another red hot rivet appeared though the smokebox door. If you've never done riveting, it's difficult to describe how hard it is to hold a gun running flat out against a rivet, particularly when jammed in a fairly small space holding the gun up above your head and every time you hope for 20 seconds to recover getting passed another rivet...! It was a fast job, but by the end of it my arms just wanted to go somewhere and die...

 

If you look at the size of the kit and think how big a hydraulic riveter would need to be with that size throat, you can see why it is a pneumatic hammer. A hydraulic riveter squeezes the rivet and needs a substantial force to do so. A pneumatic hammer doesn't, as is proved every time you use one whilst holding it in your hands.

 

That is a fair point I suppose - the arms are comparatively slender compared to a hydraulic squeeze that size (we've a squeeze that deep at work, although it's not been used in years - one day we will get round to refurbishing it). Most hydraulic squeezes that size were firmly fixed, and the job held in them with a crane, so I suppose having a thing that size that's crane-able is more versatile.

Maybe they are more common in the USA, as I don't think they were used a great deal in the UK industry (all the pictures I've ever seen of UK firms show either hand guns or hydraulic squeezes).