The back story for this post starts yesterday with me seeing a video about pop rivets on YouTube. Fast forward to today, and I have built my first Swiss Army Knife using them.

Pop rivets is one “tool” that I have never really paid much attention to because I simply didn’t know how they worked and didn’t take two minutes to google it. I should have. Yesterday I checked out how they work on YouTube, and thought that would be a very quick, easy and cheap way of building Swiss Army Knives, instead of using hard-to-find brass rods that you need to hammer down yourself. I posted a thread about it on multitool.org asking if anyone had tried it. The replies weren’t overly optimistic, listing such reasons as the rivits being too weak, creating too much bulk on the back etc as reasons why it wouldn’t work. I was disappointed, but figured I’d still get a pop rivet kit as it was only 129 NOK ($20) for a rivet gun and a bunch of rivets in different sizes at a local store.

I already had a dismantled 84mm Victorinox Tinker on my shelf; my old beater SAK that has been the first victim for all my “wonder if that work”-s. AFter struggling with the spring for a while I managed to get a single layer SAK put together and riveted, but the result wasn’t too good. Two of the four rivets worked nicely, but the two others were partly destroyed as the natural breaking point of the rivet pin was higher than that of the rivet itself when using such a short rivet. After almost destroying the whole SAK and bending it in several places trying to dismantle it again I put it back together for the second time, and that time I was careful to not tighten the rivets fully and instead cut the rivet pins off manually. That did the trick, and the result was a fully working single layer bladeless 84mm Tinker held together with pop rivets.

Now, what I used was aluminum rivets, and as someone wise pointed out in the forum thread you’d want to use stainless steel rivets for this kind of use. I’ll try getting my hands on some, but this knife isn’t going to be used for anything anyways so it doesn’t really matter what material the rivets are as long as it’s held together securely. Aside from the havoc created by my bending various parts trying to dismantle the knife the first time, it works just as a stock SAK with all the spring action working perfectly, and with just the right amount of force needed to open the tools.

As for the scales, they needed a small addition cutout as one of the original rivets is much smaller than the pop rivets, but otherwise fit perfectly. Both the knife and the scales have been raped by various machines many times so if it works with this, it should work even better with a new or well used SAK.

Now there are of course better ways of doing this, but it’s always nice to have a system that works and doesn’t require special tools (pop rivet guns are very common) in case of…something.

Check out the pictures and video below to see the result of my little project.