Remove a Spinning or Loose POP Rivet With Duck Tape Transcript

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Bob: Welcome back to Albany County Fasteners – Fasteners 101. I’m Bob and today I’m going to demonstrate how to remove a spinning rivet or a loose rivet. One of our subscribers asked, “how do I do this”?

I have a rivet that is spinning on you, as you can see here, the rivet is spinning when you go to drill it out. There you go. Just take a piece of tape, push it on the surface…and then start your drilling. Go to the center and start your drilling. Apply your pressure and your rivet is removed.

A better way actually; I’m going to install another one. Instead of blue tape, depending on the surface that you are using, and I’m trying to set these, so they spin. I want to check if it’s going to spin on me here. Yup, there ya go. Spinning. I’m going to take a piece of duct tape, it will even be better than blue tape if it’s stubborn and it wants to spin out on you and you can’t get enough pressure on it.

Take a piece of duct tape, put that baby on there. Find the center. Out it goes. Take the duct tape off and the rivet is gone. A couple of ways would be one: to be able to wedge a screwdriver behind it.

I don’t know how much room you may have, you may not have the room to do this, but I think that I have a better solution, using a nail punch. A pointy nail punch, not a flat head nail punch, it’s gotta have a point on it and I’m going to demonstrate this for you by just grabbing the edge. I want to show you first, before I do that, that this rivet is spinning. You can see it there it’s just turning with the drill. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to grab the edge of that, with a punch. First, I’m going to set the punch so it creates a little hole in it, so it grabs the head. I’m going to keep my hand here on the side of it until the drill starts to go through.

Then I’m going to take my hand out of the way, I’m not looking to hurt myself but this is one way, possibly, we can do this. I’m going to try and grab it right now and I’m gonna apply pressure on it. Okay, I’m going to apply the pressure…and of course I’m having trouble with that. Nope. I’m starting to get it, give me a second. Okay, it does want to keep continuing to spin and you will have, possibly, some surface scratches but if you work at it, and you hold it, and you push on it, and slowly turn the drill, it will stop it. Another way to try is using a flat head screwdriver, if you have the room; a slotted screwdriver, Okay? You can try with this. I’m going to stick it in here and twist it a little bit to wedge it, to try to remove it and that will give it enough pressure to hold the rivet so that the drill can start to drill through it. I’m almost there. There we go. Right through.

There’s one last way that you could try to remove something, and that would be with a cut-off blade on a grinder. That’s another way to do it. You could try this, but I’ve seen this done before, it’s horrible. It’s going to really scuff up the front of the material and you’re really not gonna want to use a grinder if it matters to the finish, when you’re all done.

Also, a way to prevent any type of scratching when you’re using a screwdriver is to take a piece of blue tape, that you use or painters tape, and put the painters tape…on the tip. That will prevent, when you slip it won’t scratch the surface. I didn’t use it here but that would be something to do to prevent you from scratching the surface if you want to keep the surface nice after you remove the rivet.

Thanks for watching, I hope this helps you.