teamo

Working on restoring the spare tire tub. There are couple of holes in it that I will need to do some fiberglass repair to. Do these rivets look factory? They sort of look like pop rivets on the head but the shaft does look like it was a peened rivet. I need to drill them out and clean and paint the rusted v bracket and rivet it back on.

69FASTFUN

The original rivets were solid aluminum not pop rivets.

teamo

I have some soft aluminum rivets left over from the body mount reinforcements. Are these the same rivets used on the spare tire tub?

SB64

Hi Teamo, No those are not the correct rivet. True they are Alumn. but they are call hollow rivets. I just purchased the bit for my rivet gun. I will shoot you a picture. It has a dimple in the middle which fits into the hole of the rivet. When punched it creates that small divet in the middle Those type rivets can also be seen on the wiper door. Hope this helps.
ZIO

redrdstr72

I hate to answer your question in post #3 without seeing photos, especially if you're looking to replicate original build. The rivet that best replicates original will be an aluminum "stud" that has a flat head on one end and a stem on the other end. Looks similar to an aluminum roofing nail.

For the tire tub application, install so that the head is on the inside of the tub and trim the rivet's length so that it extends beyond the tub and the "V" frame by approx the same length as is the rivet's diameter. Peening will present nicely like this - at least it did for me.

Hope this helps!

teamo

Sounds like the rivets that I have. They are aluminum and look like a small roofing nail. I'll post a picture tomorrow. I can't imagine that someone even used any type of replacement rivet at all on this thing. Most stuff I find has been super bubba stuff. Like the #3 trans cross member that I was working on last week. Bubba must have lost one of the bolts or stripped out the threads so he decided that the best fix would be to just use an over sized bolt and drive it home until it felt tight. Luckily I was able to drill out the threads and insert a thread repair insert.

KapsSA

Late C3s, in my case 78/79, may have either type.
Both my 79s, my Pace Car and my former 78SA, all real low mileage originals, all had 3/16 pop rivets.
Responding to threads similar to yours prompted me to look under many a 78/79 to verify. Saw both types.
And a Bloomington judge doing Pace cars also verified.

joewill

http://www.zip-corvette.com/catalog/...upport-rivets/

http://www.zip-corvette.com/catalog/...-setting-tool/

Alan 71

Hi,
I believe the original rivets were the typical large flat head soft aluminum rivets used many places on the underbody.
I think though that on the spare tire tub/hanger they were set in a slightly unusual way in that the tool used to set the rivet didn't form the typical 'mushroom' shape. Instead, the tool set the shank in a way that formed a small flat disc. (Smaller in diameter and thicker than the head.)
Regards,
Alan

Sunstroked

Its called a "bucktail" You take a flat rivet set in rivet gun, and a bucking bar on the shank end. The properly bucked rivet will be 1.5 times the dia. of the shank. When bucking rivets in soft materials such as fiberglass you want to use a very soft Aluminum rivet. If you use an alloy rivet you'll possibly destroy your fiberglass. I think some of the corvette sites carry those rivets, but without a rivet gun and set, youre kind of screwed. If pop rivets were used in your year, then thats a no brainer. Fwiw, been an aircraft mechanic for too many years.

teamo

Haven't done much work on the car lately. It's been a very hot summer and I was laid up with a back strain for over a month. I finally finished the spare tire tub. It came out pretty good. I had to repair some holes in the fiberglass and this was my first time doing any glass work. It didn't come out perfect but it's not terrible either. If it was somewhere that was more visible I would have used some body filler to really smooth it out after the glass work. I cleaned up the heavy rust on the steel v-frame and put two coats of POR-15 on it, followed by a coat of silver paint. I really liked the gloss black finish of the POR-15 but I didn't want any issues later without a top coat on it. I had to mask it off at the end and hit it with the silver paint again because the rivet bucking process scratched off some of the paint.

Wee

Nice job....I did the same back in Feb.

Brian