Riveting @museum.de

Whether it's shipbuilding, the aerospace industry, manufacturing jeans or of course metal roofing – without rivets, nothing goes. If you have something that mustn't be allowed to fall apart, you need those unremarkable little pins to hold everything together. For most non-detachable joints, rivets are the fasteners of choice.

Driving a rivet is very simple. First, a hole is drilled or punched through the materials to be riveted. To ensure that the rivet stays in place and doesn't end up crooked, the edges of the hole must be neat, in other words, deburred. Then the rivet is passed through. It consists of a shaft and a round head that snags in the hole. Next, the rivet is shortened to the right length, and the protruding tail of the shaft is hammered until it spreads out and closes the hole from the other side. And you're done riveting.

Even if you want to join materials in hard-to-reach places, there's a remedy: what's known as a blind rivet, which is also a pin with a round head. It's topped with a kind of metal sleeve with a disc-shaped end. The blind rivet is inserted until the disc sits on top of the material, and then the rivet gun comes into play. It grips the stem, or mandrel, and pulls, and that compresses the metal sleeve, which gradually moves from the bottom to the top. Once the rivet joint is tight, the stem breaks off. It's quite simple, even if it may sound a bit complicated.

If you'd like to see all that demonstrated by real professionals – the film shows both types of riveting.