Aviation Forum / General / Homebuilt / September 2008

You could clamp it in vice.  There is a process called back riveting
in which the rivet gun and a flush set is used to directly upset the
buck tail while the manufactured head is held against the bucking bar;
I have seen it used when someone is riveting flush rivets in thin
skins and the flush head is held against a flat plate. This would be
similar to what you propose.  The key is to keep the slamming effect
to a minimum by keeping pressure through the rivet from the gun to the
bucking bar.  Once the bar or the set or the rivet really move around
that is when you will have smiles at best or tool strikes at worst.

John Dupre'

The "slam back" of the bucking bar is classroom theory, in reality a
vice-mounted bucking bar will make the same shop head as a hand-held bar
(try it).

Picture a bulldozer pushing a Mercedes into a concrete wall, same process as
when using a hand-held or pneumaric rivet squeezer.

In article
<f87aa49b-0b32-4d5e-b964-b9fd3ca519ae@k30g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,

I would not clamp my rivets in a vice. What kind of vice do you have in
mind?
Gambling?
Drinking?
Sloth?
Gluttony?
Fornication?

Or, do you mean "vise"?

Not in my experience, and I would dispute the assertion that the
bucking bar actually has to move. I've done plenty of rivets with a
bucking bar clamped in a vise, and have found it a perfactly
reasonable way to go. The dynamics are a bit different than with the
bucking bar held by hand, but plenty workable.

Where I found it necessary to control the dynamics of a bucking bar, I
constructed a machine that uses a Bilstein shock absorber to rebound
and reposition the bar. That was for riveting HP-18 sailplane box
spars. There's a page about it at Wayne Paul's Screder Sailplane
Designs web site:

http://www.soaridaho.com/Schreder/Construction/Spar_Riveting_Tool.html

Thanks, Bob K.