Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/13/riveting-video-compilation-of.html
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Squish squish squish.
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I must say, from beginning to end, I was ... engrossed.I see what you *didn't* do there!
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Rivet. Rivet.
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So hot… totally crushing…
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i was pressed for time, so only watched the beginning.
Did I miss a tight finish?
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Is this process (minus they hydraulic press, insert hammer) how skyscrapers were built back in the day or did they weld or use nut and bolt to join steel beams?
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I wish I had the iron to watch this with steely abandon.
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I’ve had the pleasure of doing this manually…I was the “bucker”, the “riveter” being the person on the other side with a pneumatic rivet gun. As the bucker, you’d would take a hot rivet and insert it, then pick up a heavy steel anvil (that was narrow to fit in the channels of I-beam or whatever) and force it against the hot rivet, then the riveter knurls the rivet over from the other side. If the riveter is not a jerk they will start slow so the rivet plumps up a bit first, otherwise they’ll give’er and the first few hits will make your eyeballs rattle. Nevertheless, a strangely satisfying job to do, although noisy and dirty (as are most satisfying things ).
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Does the inside of the head of the press spin? It sounds like it is spinning, but it doesn’t look like it. Or is the sound coming from the motor working harder to press down?
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This is upsetting.
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Rivets, definitely. You see a lot of them on old photographs or in old (1850~1930) steel bridges.
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I doubt it is spinning. Torsion would do no good there. It’d only weaken the rivet.
yes - at the outset of iron and then steel construction riveted joints were the common method. But they were replaced by high-strength steel bolts which generate stronger connections per fastener.
Rivets when the cool shrink a little and clamp the work together, but not with the same clamping force of a bolt. So the joint strength would be limited by the shear strength of the rivets.
A bolted connection is tightened to the point of deformation - meaning the bolt begins to stretch. At this point the strength of the connection is being generated by the friction between the joined plates and shapes resulting from the high clamping force, and not the cross sectional shear strength of the bolts. This kind of clamping force can not be generated with rivets.
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According to my research (Looney Tunes) this is exactly how cartoon dogs built skyscrapers a century ago.
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Why? Why is this so compelling and truly beautiful? Because it is.
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Highly underrated metalworking pun!!! 
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I’m so old…
I remember as a kid watching a steel frame building being constructed with rivets. One guy with a forge at street level would pick up a red-hot rivet with tongs and fling it two or three stories up to another worker who would catch it in a sort of conical bucket, then place it in the hole and put a heavy block behind it, while a third guy used a jackhammer-like tool to set the rivet.
At least in the short time I watched, no rivets were dropped.
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Whichh makes it somewhat weird that whatever’s being constructed here is first assembled with nuts and bolts, which are then replaced by rivets.
I don’t think it’s strange at all.
We did riveting in our Brooklyn Tech HS machine shop. (I somehow doubt riveting’s still done there.) Our rivets (heating was unnecessary) were of the ‘solid type’ and quite small – perhaps 3/16" (?) across the rivet heads – and I clearly remember the extreme tactile pleasure of holding the buck against the shaft end as it deformed. Also, the sight of that would give me a feeling of power and control (much more so than when I was the one operating the rivet gun) as the shaft end squished down. If you flattened the end too much or too little, the rivet’s holding ability would be compromised. So, the buckers had to be vigilant. What were we building? Small structural beams of all types, made from thin 2024-T3 sheets. Later, we would load-test the beams in our shop’s Tinius Olsen machine then compare the results to our calculated predictions! Fun, fun, fun!
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