Cutlers Rivets

CRWhit

Member
Last night, I tried to assemble a Green River patch knife kit. When I compressed the rivets, it split the walnut scales. Were my rivets too long? The female side protruded into the other scale by 1/8". I drilled the scale slightly larger than the female side.

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Tricky little buggers huh ?
When I did use cutler rivets, you have to throw precision out the window. The mouth trumpets outwards and the middle bulges. The best remedy was to assemble the whole handle with hidden guide pins, a 3/32 pin just in front and aft of the pin locations sticking up enough to grab both scales during glue up. The easiest way to determine the clearance hole is to pound a rivet together and measure the expanded size then add some more. If you check out old cutlery assembled with cutler rivets, you'll see the holes are big enough to drive a truck through, they relied mostly on compression/ friction fit. Installing the rivet is the last thing I do on a completely finished handle, the heads don't leave much option for shaping unless the scales are left flat.

Rudy
 
Cutlers rivets hold more knife handles on than anything I believe. They are a bit tough to use one knife at a time. The countersinks for the head diameter needs to be at just the right depth. You have some margin for length between the cutler rivet heads but it's worth doing a "test fasten" on scrap.

The advantage of a cutlers rivet is they are about the cheapest way to mechanically fasten a handle. The disadvantage is they require holes/countersinks to be tailored to the rivet. If you are doing a run of knives and the handles will be the same, they work pretty well.
 
I guess I'll have to order some replacement rivets and try again.

Tracy, what is your thoughts on using unstablized dry red oak for scales? Since I screwed up the walnut that came with the kit, l need to make new scales.

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