Rivets

About the only comment I have to make about rivets is -- I hate 'em.

but we're stuck with them.

I have never used a riveter (pop rivets don't count) and I have no clue what one looks like or how it works.

However, has anyone else used one? How easy/hard is it to manage? Is such a thing practical for home use?

I've thought of this specifically a number of times lately. I'm sure for a few of us, such a thing would be practical when trying to do a perfect radio restoration from the ground up. But my concern is something much simpler: volume controls.

I have to tinker with volume controls on an almost daily basis. Believe me, I keep a stash of them around, and am always buying up lots at swap meets and such. I come across a lot of volume controls with worn out or damaged pads. I frequently find myself searching for another control that's similar, then disassembling it for various pieces. Since every one of these is different, I then find myself cutting, fitting, even using epoxies to fit the controls back together with parts that don't quite fit but will work. If only there was a practical way of dealing with the rivets, I can simply remove the worn carbon pad from its base and install another one from a different control. Who cares how long the shaft is, or how many tabs hold the control together -- on the vast majority of controls, which are Centralab, the pads are physically the same. If the radio is a conversion, I don't even need to be concerned with value -- anything from 5k to 5 megs will do, and even taper is not a problem.

Has anybody used rivets to install a new pad on an old control? Has anyone come up with a good alternative for doing the same thing?

Pop rivets will not work!

Something that might work, and admittedly I've never tried, would be the little tiny small rivets like are used to mount plastic dial covers into escutcheons. You can crimp them down with pliers or any number of 'manual' methods, etc.
My only concern would be their ability to stay tight over the years but even still, the worst case failure might only result in an intermittent tone setting in the case of a tap, or intermittent volume in the case of replacing a complete element. Probably not advisable to do with bias pots controlling expensive tubes!
You can get the little bitty ones at vendors like McMaster-Carr... the dollhouse construction folks use them for electrical wiring and have them on their sites and I imagine Bill Turner has them available too. I got a bunch once from KenG so maybe he has some additional source.

Rivets....
I thought you meant the PRR GG1...

i have been thinking about making a similar tool for tube socket rivets.i think a pair of worn out vise grips would work.you would neeed to drill a hole in 1 jaw and mount a crank device with a round swage end on it then you could snap it on, crank it, if not tight tighten the vise grips a little and crank a few more times.this should work good with any tubular rivet.butch