I’m pretty sure it has happend to everyone when placing a rivet it “breaks” leaving a small tip that is pretty hard to remove, do you have an efficient method to remove them?
Use a drive puch, smaller in diameter than the rivet, to drive the broken part through the hole and out.
Drilling out yhe rivet is an option, but may make the hole misshapened and/or oversized.
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It will do that, if you use an oversized drill or fail to hold it straight. Our students have learned and taught others to do it correctly. We use a lot of rivets in locations that are easily reached by drills and rivet tools. Saves a lot of time compared with threaded fasteners.
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I’m not quite sure that was what was meant.
@osofdez, are you referring to a little metal nub sticking out right where you pull on the pulling part of the rivet? If so, your best bet may be to use a Dremel with a cutoff wheel and grind that down.
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First use a file, and file it flat. Then it’s much easier to punch or drill out. If it’s an aluminum mandrel, it will take a few seconds to file it. Or just leave it in. No big deal.
Sometimes you can use small end-nippers to pull the mandrel out, or at least cut it off flush. I’ve even seen flush cutters used, but I advise against that, especially if the mandrel is steel.
That too!
One problem with leaving it in, if you don’t file it flat, is that it’s sharp and could cut someone.
What our team dose if the mandrel dose not break is to grab it with pliers and twist and bend until it shears, and then file the small point bit flat to the head. Generally the rivet has still held in and will work in that state, and we don’t have problems with drilling it out as needed.
We use an air sander to flatten the tip, then drill it out and try again. It happens often with crappy rivets. We use primarily McMaster Carr 3/16" rivets and they do this about once every 100 rivets
Then what at is it for?
Is this like how Dawn dish soap isn’t supposed to be used on ducklings?
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Isn’t it? Dawn helped save a lot of waterfowl after the Deepwater Horizon leak.
This but pneumatic
One of my favorite tools
I’d vote pneumatic except that you can’t use them in your pit if it’s pneumatic. So… electric we go!
For some reason, we tend to not use powered sanding devices when building FRC robots. Something about all that stuff flying around. But the finger sander sure looks like a helpful tool. A file still works 
I shall offer an interesting situation where a file could work, but… oof… the finger sander made life suck a lot less.
In this image you can see a rivet, which we can pull from inside a ball-handling volume, but we had to remove. Extremely difficult/impossible to drill from inside. Really challenging to drill from outside from the tail. In the middle of a big flat area with a flange next to it, so filing is challenging. The finger sander (with a vacuum to catch grindings) made very short work of it.
For aluminum rivets, we’ve used a small hacksaw or dikes which works well enough. Sometimes we’ll drill them out from the other side if it’s accessible.
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