Who uses pop rivets professionally?

Me? Where are you?

Bum. Sold the cottage in Kintyre years ago. Sorry.

Hmm, we do have a trailer centre locally. Will check them out.

Tim

To be honest I think a rivet is a pretty lousy solution but it's to replace one I want to drill out of the forks of an ElliptiGO. It was put in as part of a product recall as a safety measure.

I want to fit a mudguard but would need to drill right through the fork crown to fit a bolt. If I just replace the rivet then no drilling required.

Tim

Could you put a beefy cable-tie right around the fork, then loop another that's attached to the end of the mudguard through the first one?

I could, but it would look s*it. ;-)

Tim

So? Isn't this on some sort of bicycle thing? I know, cover it in mud!

Also: you've described the rivet as a pretty substantial one. What does it actually hold together at present?

If you can get at both sides, do it the old fashioned way, just rivet a length of round rod with a ball pein hammer with another hammer on the other end of the rivet.

There are other fixings that don't need access to the rear. How about a toggle-type fixing?

Bill

Use a rivnut in place of the pop rivet? Easy to remove the screw from that if things ever need dismantling.

I have one very similar and although it does not get much use, there are times I am very glad to have it. It *is* worth buying steel rivets for it, though. The other gadget which gets more use is a good quality Rivnut tool (I have a new horse-van conversion which needs all sorts of extra fixings, so that was easy to justify).

How about fitting a Rivnut, and then screwing a bolt into that? For a one-off, you can set a Rivnut by just using a bolt and nut without needing to use the special setting tool.

Hmm. Tried this with 3mm rivnuts since the mandrel is easily broken, with no success. Might work with a high tension nut and bolt, though.

It's a few years ago now, but I fitted several rivnuts which had 1/4" UNF threads without using a setting tool. I did use an HT bolt and nut, and a couple of washers - and held the bolt against rotation whilst tightening the nut, so that it exerted a straight pull on the far end of the rivnut.

It a warranty recall "repair" to the steerer tube on an ElliptiGO. The steerer is joined to the forks with four spot welds and on some early machines the welds were failing so they recalled them, drilled the fork and steerer and fitted this heavy duty steel rivet.

As it happens, whilst rummaging in my garage I found an old pop rivet gun (standard rather than heavy duty) and I've ordered a pack of ten steel rivets from eBay. I'll do a bit of experimenting first to see if I can set the rivets with my gun. If not, my local trailer shop has offered me a free loan of their heavy duty gun so it looks like I'm all sorted.

Thanks to all for their suggestions.

Tim