VICKERS MK6B's resto

[colin jones]

I thought I would put up some pics of a 3/8 rivet former I made this morning. It was a piece of mild steel rod and I used a off the shelf bull nose milling cutter for the shape. A bit of shaping on the lathe to suite my air gun and then some heat and quench in oil for a bit of hardness and it works very well. It's always hard to find tools from a supplier when you want one but some are not too hard to make when you need something specific.

[David Dunlop]

Colin, they both look so tidy now, I think I have lost track of which vehicles I am looking at. Hope you don't run into the same problem and end up thinking 'Wombird' and 'Bower Bat' by mistake one day!

David

[Howard]

Magic!

[James P]

Good lord you folks down there don,t do things half ways do you ?? Both your work and Big Ds M8 certainly rise the bar to new heights.

[Mike K]

Low carbon mild steel: normally it isn't suitable for heating/quenching . MS is usually case/surface hardened in an oven with charcoal or casenite powder. For small items a flame and hardening powder is suitable. These days you can buy the modern less hazardous case hardening powder , they used nasty stuff years ago with cyanide or something in it. The TAFE I went to, they had "casenite" hardening powder and a big oven .

The higher carbon steels suitable for quenching have special elements added , its a science on its own and its a complicated topic !

[Lynn Eades]

I made mine from 4140 and 4340. They work harden and have done quite a few rivets

[colin jones]

Hi Mike, Lynn, I'm familiar with Casenite and other products available along with the hardening process, and the different types of steel. As I'm not going into production and it's about 20minutes to make these, I find they serve my purpose very well. I Quench in oil first, reheat and then in water. I did about 50 rivets last night and my former has not distorted at all, bearing in mind though, they are not very bug rivets and I use oxy/acet to heat the end so there's not much pressure required to form the head. It is a very interesting topic as I saw a demonstration of quenching in oil then water and then in salt water and the salt water was better than the other two. Obviously is't not a deep process at all but it is better than just MS. I bet this could start a complete new topic and discussion of what different methods people have used.