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Concept
Rivet
Summary
A rivet is a permanent mechanical fastener. Before being installed, a rivet consists of a smooth cylindrical shaft with a head on one end. The end opposite the head is called the tail. On installation, the rivet is placed in a punched or drilled hole, and the tail is upset or bucked (i.e., deformed), so that it expands to about 1.5 times the original shaft diameter, holding the rivet in place. In other words, the pounding or pulling creates a new "head" on the tail end by smashing the "tail" material flatter, resulting in a rivet that is roughly a dumbbell shape. To distinguish between the two ends of the rivet, the original head is called the factory head and the deformed end is called the shop head or buck-tail.
Because there is effectively a head on each end of an installed rivet, it can support tension loads. However, it is much more capable of supporting shear loads (loads perpendicular to the axis of the shaft).
Fastenings used in traditional wooden boat building, such as copper nails and clinch bolts, work on the same principle as the rivet but were in use long before the term rivet was introduced and, where they are remembered, are usually classified among nails and bolts respectively.
Rivet holes have been found in Egyptian spearheads dating back to the Naqada culture of between 4400 and 3000 B.C. Archeologists have also uncovered many Bronze Age swords and daggers with rivet holes where the handles would have been. The rivets themselves were essentially short rods of metal, which metalworkers hammered into a pre-drilled hole on one side and deformed on the other to hold them in place.
There are several types of rivets, designed to meet different cost, accessibility, and strength requirements:
Solid rivets are one of the oldest and most reliable types of fasteners, having been found in archaeological findings dating back to the Bronze Age. Solid rivets consist simply of a shaft and head that are deformed with a hammer or rivet gun. A rivet compression or crimping tool can also deform this type of rivet.
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