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I went and watched some people installing hot rivets on youtube, and while I'm not sure it's much more demanding in terms of skill, it does look like an absolut

I went and watched some people installing hot rivets on youtube, and while I'm not sure it's much more demanding in terms of skill, it does look like an absolute pain to do, especially in tight spaces. Working in the guts of a ship next to an open furnace, while people pass red hot metal around, then trying to squash that metal with a hammer (probably a large one) sounds like an absolute nightmare, and I bet it involves all sorts of fiddly clamping. I don't think a blind rivet gun is a good comparison: the difficulty of hot riveting (if anybody has experience, please correct me) look to be around keeping the rivet at the right temperature, getting the other side properly clamped, walloping it just right under extremely adverse conditions, and making sure you don't set anything or anybody on fire in the process.

owenversteeg 5y ago
Yeah, I worded my comment poorly - I agree that the actual process of installing a hot rivet is very difficult manual labor. What I was getting at was that the concept of a rivet is fairly simple, and would not take anywhere near 10 full working days to train. One of the issues is that a rivet is pretty intuitive: the metal rivet holds together two other pieces of metal. Is it in the hole and does it have a head on both sides? It'll hold. It'd be intuitive to a child. But a weld is not as intuitive: you can make a nice looking weld that doesn't penetrate deep enough and fails easily. This can obviously be catastrophic when welding ships, so I can understand training taking 10 days.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  I guess is it's probably tricky to maintain rivet temperature - as soon as it contacts the hull, all the heat is going to flow out and the rivet is going to cool very rapidly. That would presumably have a negative effect on clamping pressure, because the rivet wouldn't shrink so much after it's been hammered in place. I think the guy upthread had it right, however: probably the main difference was the manhours involved per rivet, just because you seem to need like four people working on each rivet at once. And, honestly, if a task is just horrible to do, that's got to have an effect on productivity.

owenversteeg 5y ago

Yeah, I worded my comment poorly - I agree that the actual process of installing a hot rivet is very difficult manual labor. What I was getting at was that the concept of a rivet is fairly simple, and would not take anywhere near 10 full working days to train. One of the issues is that a rivet is pretty intuitive: the metal rivet holds together two other pieces of metal. Is it in the hole and does it have a head on both sides? It'll hold. It'd be intuitive to a child. But a weld is not as intuitive: you can make a nice looking weld that doesn't penetrate deep enough and fails easily. This can obviously be catastrophic when welding ships, so I can understand training taking 10 days.

pasabagi 5y ago
I guess is it's probably tricky to maintain rivet temperature - as soon as it contacts the hull, all the heat is going to flow out and the rivet is going to cool very rapidly. That would presumably have a negative effect on clamping pressure, because the rivet wouldn't shrink so much after it's been hammered in place. I think the guy upthread had it right, however: probably the main difference was the manhours involved per rivet, just because you seem to need like four people working on each rivet at once. And, honestly, if a task is just horrible to do, that's got to have an effect on productivity.