I tested something interesting today. I took some white glue on a needle. I used the needle to make a very small rivet on a piece of styrene. I repeated the process and got some very nice rivets. I know that this is not a new method but it works.
I’m looking for people on this list that have tried this and have some close up pictures to show. Please post a picture and describe your method.
Here are approximately 1500 rivets on this scratchbuilt double ended CN snowplow I made:
(click on photo to enlarge)
They were applied one at a time using an NWSL Rivet Tool.
Only the Canadiens would make a double-ended wedge plow! How’s it powered? A couple of Canuks running in the middle?![:O]
After inventing the rotary snow plow, this just had to be next, so— if you have to turn the engine around, why not turn the snow plow also??? and it’s Canucks.
It’s CanadIANS. How are regular wedge plows powered? They are not powered, are pushed by engines.
Double ended plows were used on small branchlines where there were no facilities to turn them around, they could be used both ways.
This looks like one of those armored trains from the German army. Nice details and paint on that thing.
I’ve used 5 minute epoxy for rivets.It sands easy (for the screw ups) and dries quick so you can paint sooner.
Bob, I’m very impressed!
Do you need both tools to do this, sensipress and riveter?
Are you satisfied with the tool? How thick styrene can you rivet?
BATMAN, please tell me how you placed the glue.
You need both the NWSL Sensipress - it holds and moves the male and female rivet punches; the Riverter is an add-on table that can be moved using the calibrated screw knob. You turn the knob the same number of revolutions each time to get the same spacing between rivets. You could use just the Sensipress I guess, but you’d have to find some way to hold and move the material in a uniform fashion.
I haven’t tried very thick styrene as it isn’t practical with the smaller sized rivets I used. I actually did the rivets on this plow on .005" styrene that I laminated over the basic structure of the plow which was made from heavier material. I imagine the larger rivets could be used on thicker styrene for larger scales.
I really need to invest in a NWSL Riveter one of these days. Hand applying Tichy rivets and NBWs by the hundred on scratchbuilt cars can be a pain!
I’ve got a few tenders that I need to scratchbuild, and those projects have stalled out because I refuse to hand apply 12,000+ rivets one at a time!
Bob,
Is it possible to make the same sized rivets every time? The thing I really mean is, can the depth be adjusted so you can’t go behind a certain depth?
You sure can, that’s the benefit of the NWSL system. There is a punch and a die, so the rivets are the same size each time. And with the Riveter indexing table, they can be placed uniformly.
It does take some effort, as you need to mark a line where the rivets will go. Then do a practice rivet at one end and traverse the table to the opposite end to make sure it is properly in line; material is kept on the table with masking tape.
They have quite a few choices of rivet punches and dies, but I’ve mostly used the .015" ones for HO scale. They may actually be a bit oversize, but using smaller ones results in rivets that are hard to see.
I was very lucky to get my whole setup with a variety of punches and dies from a correspondent many years ago for nothing. He was doing some kits in resin and asked if I might do some masters for him. I told him I didn’t have a Rivet tool, so he sent me his. Never heard from him again. I did hear in a roundabout way that he was doing kits while in university, and graduated as a lawyer and was working with a big firm in New York. Sure would like to thank him!
Some years ago I experimented forming N Scale rivets in .005 inch brass sheet with some success, I might add.
I took a rather large sewing machine needle and ground the tip to a flat surface; I then chucked this in my (then) wife’s sewing machine - wish I had chucked it in her - and brought the needle tip down against the (backside) of the brass sheet with enough pressure to impress a nipple in the front side. I was only moderately interested in spacing but more with pressure. After a couple of dozen rivets with increasing pressure - and watching my wife grimace everytime I manually brought the needle down onto the brass - I examined everything.
I drew a couple of conclusions from my experiment:
five mill brass is absolutely too thin to efficiently work with although I seem to remember Carl Traub doing so - my prime motivation for this experiment was to see if I could not come up with a methed of making either boiler or tender wrapping;
a sewing machine is not really the proper platform for exerting pressure on a needle or for rivet spacing - a drill press with the needle chucked in a collet would probably have served me better; I concluded that if I were going to procede in this direction I would need some sort of jig to hold things in alignment while some kind of uniform pressure was placed on the end of the needle; and lastly
care needs to be exercised when preparing the needle tip for use; when I got done my “nipples” ranged all th
I also applied them with a needle. The work was actually glued together, but just needed rivets for a real look. A little practice and once painted over looked great. I wanted to build a steel arch riveted bridge and just put together a few H and I beams to see how it would look. The bridge is still on the to do list.