67 Best way to remove rivets.

[Tom K.]

I am looking for a good way to remove the aluminum body rivets that hold parts to the bottom of the floor pan. I have tied a chisel and was not happy with the results. When I tried grinding them off with a cut off wheel and I was cutting into the steel. I have tried a search, but have not found much help. Maybe I am just not good at searches.
Thanks, Tom

[Robert D.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

Tom
I like to drill them out use a center punch to start the drill and drill the head off its pretty easy.

[Alan S.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

Hi Tom,
I do the same thing Robert does.
Often the shaft of rivet has expanded enough so that even when the flat head has been removed the rivet is still tight in the hole. I then use the center punch to carefully knock the shaft out of the hole trying to not make the hole any bigger.
Regards,
Alan

[Tom K.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

Thanks Alan & Robert. I will give that a try. That was going to be my next try, but I wanted to see what other were doing.
Tom

[Russ S.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

I use a air chisel with a very sharp chisel.

[Dave H.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

Tom
I like to drill them out use a center punch to start the drill and drill the head off its pretty easy.

This is what we do in the aerospace industry...and we do a lot of them. Be sure to center punch the center of the manufactured head and go slow. Speed is not always your friend. Try to drill off ONLY the manufactured head. Do not try to drill thru! You WILL get into the material and egg/oversize the hole, which although not the end of the world, it is undesirable

[Jim T.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

Not on a Corvette, I had good results in just using a center punch to drive the stem out of the rivet when removing factory rivets to remove and repair power window electric motors. The rivets were not small ones retaining the door window lifts.

[Gary B.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

One word of caution that I learned from personal experience. When drilling out the rivet make sure that the entire rivet doesn't spin with the drill stuck fast in the rivet for very long. I had one rivet spin and I wasn't aware of it until I saw and smelled smoke which was causing some padding under the carpet on the inside to smolder. It scared the dickens out of my. In retrospect I should have removed the carpet and under padding before drilling out the rivet.

Gary

[Jeffrey S.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

Dremel tool with a cut off wheel . Use it to grind the heads off , works like a charm . Just got done removing the rivits on the clips that hold the trans. insulator to the trans. tunnel on my 67. Hope this helps. Jeff

[Tom K.]

Re: 67 Best way to remove rivets.

Thanks everyone. I hope to work on it tomorrow and see which method works best for me. These metal plates are about the only thing left on the body. The next step will be to fix the transmission tunnel that Bubba cut out, put back in with fiberglass cloth, not mat, and used some kind of dark colored epoxy or glue. Needless to say that repair didn't hold up well and had to be removed. Not sure why they used a saw and cut it out in the first place.
Tom