Phil’s Blog

One doesn’t have to be a mechanical engineer to understand how important rivets are. Made from malleable metal such as copper, iron or steel, rivets are smooth cylindrical shafts with a head on one of its ends. The other end of a rivet, the one without the head, is called a buck-tail. Rivets are used as mechanical fasteners to hold together two or more pieces of wood, plastic, metal or other materials. This is done by passing the shaft of the rivet through the holes of the overlapping pieces of materials that are needed to be fastened together and then forming the buck-tail of the rivet into a second head.

Riveting can be traced back to as early as the Bronze Age and has been used in the building of great infrastructures like the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Eiffel Tower, way before the techniques of welding and bolted joints were developed. In today’s modern time, the technique of riveting is still widely used in applications where high strength and light weight are both important factors, such as in the making of aircrafts. The use of aircraft rivets is preferred over welding since welding may cause deformation and even modification of the materials’ properties that may result to lesser quality. A tool or a machine called a pneumatic riveter is driven by compressed air to drive or install rivets.

There are different types of rivets used in aircrafts. These rivets have different markings on the head which may include plain, dimpled, raised dot, raised double dash, raised cross, and three raised dashes to indicate the alloy of the rivet.