[PayneTrain]

422 has evolved over the last 3 years to use 90% rivets, 10% bolts and other for fasteners. I think rivets are 1000% worth it in the long run, but you have to be proactive as a team when you design and manufacture parts you intend to assemble via rivets. I can drill out and replace rivets very quickly now because of all the time in 2013 and 2014 that was spent removing rivets on poorly thought out designs. If your parts are manufactured to the specifications of comprehensive, integrated CAD drawings, riveting is crazy easy.

Whether you use rivets or threaded fasteners, you're going to enjoy life more if you make coherent drawings and practice good machining, I just know how much I can hate life drilling out the 20th rivet on an assembly because somewhere along the way there was a screw-up. I do think the positive experiences students have had with rivets, weighed against the negatives, have helped condition better machining practices in house (The build lead and mentors 86'ing poorly done work also helps).

Todd, if you want to look past some ugly quirks of our robot when we're at VA (we sort of had to throw on some nasty looking gussets at the end to beat the snow) you can see where we use threaded and quick release fasteners and where rivets were used. Any static assemblies and subassemblies on the machine like the drive base and super structure, individual subassemblies on the lift with the shafts, grabbers, and carriages are all assembled through rivets. For the purpose of clean, universal replacements on some weird parts of the robot, we used threaded fasteners. Any point where one assembly or sub-assembly connects to another one is likely bolted on, or in the case of moving from transport to competition configuration, fitted with quick release fasteners.