How to Hand Set Rivets

We're going to be showing you how to set a rivet, probably one of the most common fastening devices used in leather work.

We're just going to set these two pieces of leather together.

To do so we need the basic tools of a punch, a rivet setter, a hammer, we do use a steel hammer for everything but our good cutting tools because it's a lot easier on the arm than a heavy mallet even though we are aware that it damages the tools but it does make your day-to-day work - if you're using these constantly - a lot easier. We also need a bench anvil and a pounding board.

The first thing we need to do is determine the size of the rivet that we need. This is where a lot of people get confused. What you need to do is you need to hold the two pieces together and slide the rivet up against it and underneath it and take a look at how far it sticks up. It should stick up between 1/8 and 1/16 of an inch. This one we pre-sized and cheated before we started the video so this is the correct rivet.

Then you determine what size punch you need. That's very simple. You start with a small punch and you keep sliding them over until you find one that just slides over the rivet like so and that's the punch you need. The exception to that is if you're using particularly large rivets in heavy leather in which case you need two different punches. You need the punch for this. That doesn't change you size it - the same way. You then take the next larger punch for the part of the leather that the cap is going to go through. That makes setting it a lot easier, but again, this is large rivets and heavy leather. We're not using that in this case but if you were to do so you'd punch one hole for the eyelet and one hole for the cap slightly larger.

We're just going to randomly punch our holes here, not being terribly fancy as to where they're sitting. Oops! There we go. Let me set the poundo board aside, as I drop my rivet, and nothing's going to be any simpler than this once you've gotten past the point of choosing the right piece.

We're going to take the eyelet part and we're going to put it through. Let's do good side to good side so put it through on the good side of the leather here, set it down, take our other piece of leather. Get back here! Set that here, take the cap and press it down with your finger. You don't have to get it to set but just you want to make sure it's on the eyelet and not off to one side or sticking in the leather and so forth.

Just take your setter, which is domed so that it keeps the roundness of the cap a little bit. If you want both sides, by the way, if you want both sides to be rounded you can then use a cap anvil which I had around here somewhere. There it is, and you can use a cap anvil to keep the other side rounded as well. So we can do it either way.

And you simply take a little tap and then you hit it. So just a little tap, everything sets in place, a set, and that's it you just set yourself a rivet and you've got a permanent bond.