[BrendanB]

Our team has primarily used threaded fasteners over the years. In our years of "design as you go" it required a lot of assembly and dis-assembly during the build process which didn't lend itself well to rivets. While rivets are easy to remove once you have electronics on the robot having a lot of metal chips flying around isn't ideal.

This year we made a bigger move to rivets and ordered 4000 which we've used well over half of them. Compared to last year we used less than 50 on the robot.

We do like to use bolts to keep our systems modular. While it is faster to drill out a rivet with a good drill bit it is a little messier and overtime if you accidentally drill out the hole too much you don't get a nice tight fit. You can still have a modular system with rivets it depends on user preference. For us we'd rather take off key assemblies with a wrench and allen keys.

With this being the first year we used rivets heavily I would advise you keep an eye on making sure the holes don't get drilled too big. When some of the kids catch on that you need to drill out a 3/16" hole a little more to get a rivet in which requires a .19" hole they start going a little more aggressive on opening the hole up which weakens the fit since the rivets have more play. We ordered some extra numbered drill bits which worked well for drilling out rivet holes so we can get the hole size we want without someone trying to expand the hole with a 3/16" bit.