Do pop rivets get old?

First question first re your header: Yes, everything does. Next, do they get brittle with age: No. Last, should you be using steel rivets: It depends.

The steel rivets are for use in ferrous metals and the aluminum rivets are for use in nonferrous metals.

Yes, and so are you and I.

I recently used a couple that I brought home from work in the 60's and they are perfect. No idea why the metal would change unless it reached a couple hundred degrees.

Use steel in steel, aluminum in most everything else.

Some alloys age harden. Not sure if any are used in pulled rivets, but solid rivets are available both hard and soft - and soft ones are only soft for a limitted time. They may need to be annealed before use.

Is that because of electroylsis or something similar?

Well, I don't know either if such an alloy was used here, but they were

Thanks, all.

Actually, you could use aluminum is steel too, but you usually get more strength with steel and since you are protecting it with paint anyway, the rivet won't rust.

With aluminum, you don't have to add any additional protective coatings.

And alunum and steel are not your only choices. There is also Monel and stainless steel - and likely others as well.

Thanks, Ed, Clare. Sounds exciting. I wish I had more things to rivet. I think I hammered down one real rivet in metal shop in the

Real men use bang rivets. No wimpy blind pop rivets for us Real Men.

Old blind rivets, just don't bang like they used to.

One was to connect one piece of downspout to another. If I could have gotten inside the pipe, I would have. Even a blind rivet had the advantage that little would be inside the downspout. A screw,which I was going to use, would have caught leaves and eventually gotten clogged.

The other was to form one of two hinges on the metal box lid, of the box that dispenses doggie detritus transport bags. The other "hinge" was a very small plastic Xmas tree, that went through a hole in the box and a hole in the lid, but one of them had gotten broken when the whole thing fell over. I thought there would be truck or car tire-prints, but there weren't. Not sure what snapped off the _ _/ \_ metal post.