Luke,
Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke3161
Hi,
My team is working on a practice chassis during the off season using 1/8" sheet metal. To hold it together, we are use 1/4" diameter rivets. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how far apart the rivets should be placed?
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What type of metal and rivets are you using? Also, where in the frame are you looking to use the rivets? Different frames will distribute the loads through the rivets that are holding it together differently. 1/4" diameter rivets sounds like a bit of overkill to me. It was hard to pull our 3/16 rivets with the hand tools we had, and 1/4 would be even harder. The maximum size rivets we have used were 3/16" rivets, and they had something like 400 lbs of sheer and tensile strength. We typically use 1/8" rivets for medium strength stuff, and 3/16 rivets where we need strength.
While this won't answer your question exactly, you can look up the sheer and tensile forces that the rivet can withstand on McMaster or wherever you bought the rivets and use that to determine what you need. A quick search on McMaster found a variety of strengths, but, for example, 98780A412 has a sheer strength of 2450 lbs and a tensile strength of 2250 lbs. Which shows that at least that rivet can withstand a heck of a lot of force, and you won't need very many of them to hold something together.
Hopefully someone else can weigh in on what they would recommend as well.