The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop Take Me to Rivet School

For the sake of getting this info out to everyone who might be interested, here's the PM I sent to Luke:

You could use solid steel rivets on you signal arm, but they may need to be installed HOT and peened over with a tool with the right shaped cavity. They may have used them on your arm, but based on the one I found on eBay, it looked like they changed to tubular rivets at some point during production, as the tubular rivets can be installed cold. They use a setting tool that has a cavity with a small central protrusion that expands the tubular portion of the rivet and then curls it back to the outside to fasten the two pieces of metal together.
With solid steel rivets, they have to be just the right length for the thickness of the material so there's not excess material when forming the head from the shank of the rivet that goes thru the hole. Tubular rivets also need to be the correct length for the material.
Hanson Rivet also can provide solid steel rivets. I have actually made a rivet for the frame repair I needed to do out of a bolt. I just ground the hex head to the rounded shape, but that would be a pretty tedious task for the number of rivets you'd need.
Here's a link to solid steel rivets at Hanson Rivet. Link There's a lot of info on that site if you browse around.
I remember learning to rivet things in my dad's sheet metal shop. I think they were about 1/8" diameter and were set cold. Larger sizes would probably need to be set hot. The little ones were a 2 step process, first upsetting the diameter of the rivet just a bit to fill the holes in the material, then using a deep hole on the rivet set to push the two pieces of sheet metal tightly together, and then forming the head with a domed shape depression in the rivet setting tool. The tool looked similar to this: Link
If you'd like, I could send you 10 or so of the tubular rivets I have to experiment with. I really think you'd be better off using them as opposed to solid steel rivets. Also, who's going to know they aren't EXACTLY like the originals. Also, I think pop rivets would look completely wrong.
Here's the rivet setting tools I bought from Amazon. Link You can see the shape of the tool for setting tubular rivets. And there's also sets for domed head solid rivets. You also need a bucking bar for the opposite side of the assembly. Any large piece of steel will do for that, either with a depression for the head of the rivet or flat.