Rivets vs threaded fasteners

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Richard Wallace

We were inspired by a respected mentor's claim, posted here a few years ago, that he could remove a rivet faster than any challenger could remove a nut and bolt. We tried that speed test ourselves, and when we saw he was right, we reduced our threaded fastener use considerably.

Does that include cleanup? And did one, both, or neither of the two removers use a power tool?


We use far more threaded fasteners than rivets; the main time we use rivets is when we don't have enough room for the nut and the material is too thin to effectively tap and get the tension we need. As noted above, rivets can't be passed them through both thicknesses of channel or tubing to get resistance to torque. When it comes down to it, we don't even use many threaded fasteners that are short enough to be effectively replaced by a rivet, and many of those go in blind so that we couldn't get a rivet in or out anyway. And we still haven't figured out how to effectively re-use a rivet.

Agree with MrForbes that if we went into production making dozens of our robot, we would design for more rivets (and welds), and fewer threaded fasteners.