Still covering the basics of leatherworking – today I’m going to show you process for punching holes and setting rivets, the tools you need for both, along with the different types of rivets and their pros and cons.
PART 1: PUNCHING HOLES
You can punch holes with a handheld punch, although that limits you to holes that are within ~1.25” from the edge of the leather:
Or you can give yourself more maneuverability with a mallet + hole punch combo:
Hole punches can be sold individually, with each different sized hole on a different stock, or as a kit with various sizes of detachable heads. The latter is much cheaper, and though the heads will bend/break occasionally, they are ~$1 to replace. Tandy’s mini punch set will stand you in good stead for a very long time.
When it comes to mallets, you have your choice of wood, plastic, or rawhide—wood is the cheapest and will do fine for tooling/stamping, but it’s very light and can be hard to punch holes with. Plastic and rawhide mallets come in different weights, for light and heavy work. The lighter the mallet, the more force you have to whack it with, and more force = less control. Lighter mallets are prone to “bouncing,” and stamping off center of where you’d been intending to hit, or striking the leather twice and creating an “echo” indent. Rubber mallets (of any weight) also have a bounce to them, which is why they’re not ideal. Metal hammers can damage your tools and destroy your work surface.
The heads of your stamps/punches will start to deform where the metal hammer strikes them:
And if you have a marble/granite work slab, the force of the blow, focused onto your tool, can transfer straight through the leather and fracture the stone beneath:
In short: don’t use metal hammers, full stop.
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Anyway, before you can start punching your holes, you need to establish where they’ll be, so using an awl and your pattern, mark their locations:
Place a cutting board between your project and your work surface. The hole punch is going puncture all the way through the leather and bite into whatever surface is beneath it. Then, and only then, can you punch them out:
Bagtrio with holes punched:
Kili bracer with holes punched:
The Kili bracer is also a good example of the variety of sizes and shapes that hole punches can come in. There are many different sizes of round punches, from very small holes for rivets or lacing, to medium-sized holes for buckle straps, to large holes for eyelets and grommets:
There are oblong punches, whose uses I’ve covered in a different tutorial:
…And there are chisels, which don’t remove material but just punch a line in your leather, and button stud punches, and ovals, and I believe you can even find little hearts and stars and such for making decorative cut-outs.
But whatever you’re using, for the love of god, make sure you punch them in a straight line. Nothing looks shoddier and more amateurish than a line of holes that’s wobbling all over the place:
So take an extra moment to make sure you’re lining up your holes correctly. It makes a difference.
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PART 2: ATTACHING RIVETS
After you’ve punched your holes, now you can attach your rivets. You can’t punch rivets directly into the leather—there is no rivet gun for leather that does the whole operation in one fell swoop. You have to pre-punch your holes, and then set the rivets.
The most common type of rivet consists of a post (of various lengths) and a cap (of various diameters), and these can be either rapid rivets, where the post side is left kind of unfinished and therefore meant to go on the underside where it won’t be seen, or double-cap rivets, where it looks the same from both sides. (The caps are the same for both types, and interchangeable, only the posts are different.)
The post length you need is determined by the thickness of your leather—the tip should only be poking past the surface a little bit, enough extra that you can snap the cap on without difficulty and together they fit the leather snugly. In the following picture, you can see the indentation in the rivet post, which is where the cap snaps into place before you set it. The indent should sit as close to the surface as possible, neither below it nor too far above it:
If the post is too long, it will slide sideways when you try to set the rivet. If the post is too short, it won’t have enough lip to hold onto the cap, and the cap will be prone to popping off.
General suggestions:
- One layer of light (4-5 oz) leather: XS post
- Two layers of light leather: S post
- One layer of heavy (8-9 oz) leather: S post
- Two layers of heavy leather: M post
- Two layers of extra heavy (10+ oz) leather: L post
The post lengths you’re probably going to use the most are small and medium—long posts are really long, and even two layers of 9-10 oz leather are liable to slide sideways and screw up when you try to set them. (In which case: haul out the pliers, wrangle it off, and try again.)
Cap size doesn’t matter, it’s purely aesthetic—any size cap will snap onto any length post, so simply choose the size that balances best with the other design elements in your project. You can mix and match at will, and leatherworkers frequently do. For instance, in the Kili bracers, the thinness of the leather necessitated XS posts for the decorative rivets, but the slightly larger S cap size looked better with the pyramid spots:
(All those little guys are only going through one piece of leather; they’re not holding anything together, they’re not doing anything except being shiny. The only functional rivets there are the ones holding the straps on. And decoration is a perfectly valid use for rivets—the metal makes a nice contrast with the leather, makes the whole piece more interesting, and rivets are cheap (~three cents apiece) so it’s not going to break the bank to bedazzle your armor a bit.)
After you’ve pre-punched your holes and picked your post length and cap size, you will pinch the post & cap together with your fingers (they’ll make a satisfying little click), and then finish securing them with a rivet setter and mallet.
This person is using an anvil as the base to hammer onto, but if you have a granite block then the anvil isn’t necessary, you can hammer the rivet directly against the stone.
Rivet setters have a concave rounded end and come in different sizes to match the cap size. Too small will leave unsightly dents in your rivet cap, too large will leave unsightly dents in the leather surrounding it.
Tandy sells medium rivet setters (which is the cap size for both medium and long rivets) and extra-small rivet setters (for XS rivets), but none that match small rivets, which is baffling and inconvenient. You can buy rivet setters of any size on ebay or aliexpress, and the size for small rivets is 7mm; they’re not expensive, but you do have to order it special, you can’t just pick it up at Tandy.
Post-and-cap rivets will work for the majority of applications—if set correctly, they are plenty strong (and get stronger if you add more), and very unlikely to pop apart with use.
However, you can never be 100% sure that they set correctly, because you can’t look under the cap to see how well it’s being held on, so for projects where a certain rivet has to be very strong, where it’s going to have a lot of stress put on it and it can’t be allowed to come apart (combat armor, saddle tack, suspension bondage gear), there are a few other options:
Chicago screws – threaded post and a cap that screws onto it. Quick and easy, requires no tools, though you will want to put loctite or something inside it, or else it will unscrew itself with use. It has the benefit of not needing to be hammered, so if you find yourself needing to put a rivet in a place where you can’t get a hammer at it, chicago screws are there to save the day. More expensive (~10x the price of post-and-cap rivets) and very limited in the post lengths/cap sizes available.
Rivets & burrs – usually made of copper, consists of a solid post (unlike rapid/double-cap rivets, which have a hollow post) and a burr, the thing that looks like a washer. You use a special setter to peen the end of the post down over the burr. Used a lot in saddle tack and I’ve seen it a bit in LARPing armor, not common in costuming. The posts are exceptionally long when you buy them because they’re intended to be trimmed down to size before you peen them. Rivets & burrs are the strongest option out there.
Tubular rivets – consist of a hollow tube that is open at the tip, and you use a special setter than splits it into six sections and curves them over backward, like the petals of a flower. They can be a pain in the ass to set (they are even more finicky about proper post length than rapid rivets are, and require you to hold the setter rigidly perpendicular), but once they’re set they are guaranteed not to come out, and they are not much more expensive than rapid rivets. The underside can be sharp and scratchy, however, where the post has been split, so often you’ll want to glue a small piece of suede or fabric over the back to cover it and keep it from chafing/snagging on other parts of the costume.
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THE END