[Chris Hibner]

Instead of "Is riveting that much better?", a better question would be "what are the pros and cons of riveting?" Just like everything else in this world, there are advantages and disadvantages. I'll post some of each below, but I'm sure there are more that other people can think of.

(btw, I'm referring to pop rivets here)

Pros:
- light weight. We once weight all of our fasteners on a robot and it came out to nearly 20 lb. An aluminum pop rivet weights about one tenth of the steel nut/bolt combo it replaces, so you can save 5 lb pretty easily with good use of rivets.

- Fast and easy removal and replacement. You don't need to track down the 7/16" wrenches and unscrew a bunch of nuts. Grab a drill and the proper drill bit, and two seconds worth of drilling will remove each rivet. You can easily remove 10 rivets in less than a minute, and that includes searching for the drill. Likewise for attachment. It takes about 10 seconds to load a rivet into the gun and do the fastening - no need to figure out how to hold a nut still in a hard to reach location.

- thread locker not necessary

Cons:
- Not as strong as a nut and bolt. They're much lighter and sometimes rely on a bit of friction to do their thing. If it needs to bear a lot of load, you should probably stick with the nut and bolt.

- Special equipment necessary. You have to buy a rivet gun and make sure you have the right drill bit to remove the rivet if you need to.

- Drilling out rivets can sometimes leave rivet remnants in place where you may not want them (like inside of tubes). Usually not a big deal, but something you might want to think about.

I'm sure other people can expand on this, but this should at least get you started.