Rivet
permanent mechanical fastener
A rivet is a permanent mechanical fastener. Before being installed, a rivet consists of a smooth cylindrical shaft with a head on one end. The end opposite the head is called the tail. A rivet is installed by inserting the tail into a hole and then using tools to flatten the tail into a shape similar to the head. On installation, the deformed tail end is called the shop head or buck-tail.
Because there is effectively a head on each end of an installed rivet, it can support tension loads. However, it is much more capable of supporting shear loads (loads perpendicular to the axis of the shaft).
Fastenings used in traditional wooden boat building, such as copper nails and clinch bolts, work on the same principle as the rivet but were in use long before the term rivet was introduced and, where they are remembered, are usually classified among nails and bolts respectively.
History
Solid rivets are one of the oldest and most reliable types of fasteners, having been found in archaeological sites dating back to the Bronze Age. Rivet holes have been found in Egyptian spearheads dating back to the Naqada culture of between 4400 and 3000 B.C. Archeologists have also uncovered many Bronze Age swords and daggers with rivet holes where the handles would have been.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rivet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.