I wanted to stay away from the computer during a week off work so I had a plan to fix up some garden chairs whose wooden slats had gone rotten:
Looking more closely I realised the slats were riveted on. How do you get rivets off? I asked my hackspace buddies and Barney suggested drilling them out. They have an indentation in the back and you don’t have to drill very far to get them out.
The first chair took me two hours to drill out 15 rivets, and was a frustrating and sweaty experience. I checked YouTube to make sure I wasn’t doing anything stupid and tried a few different drill bits. My last chair today took 15 minutes, so! My amateurish top tips / reminder for me next time:
- Find a drill bit the same size as the hole that the rivet’s gone though
- Make sure it’s a tough drill bit, and not too pointy. You are trying to pop off the bottom end of the rivet – it comes off like a ring – and not drill a hole into the rivet itself.
- Wear eye protection – there’s the potential for little bits of sharp metal to be flying around
- Give it some welly – I found it was really fast once I started to put some pressure on the drill
- Get the angle right – it seemed to work best when I was drilling exactly vertically down into to the rivet, and not at a slight angle.
- Once drilled, you might need to pop them out with a screwdriver or something of the right width plus a hammer
PlanB 