Traditional rivets aren’t as common on plant floors as they once were. But, they’re still a cost-effective fastening alternative for many assembly applications.
Each fire-breathing behemoth they mass-produced in sprawling plants used thousands of loose rivets. Boilermaking, a key step in steam locomotive assembly, was a very slow, laborious process that required a team of highly skilled assemblers. A rivet thrower would grab a glowing-hot rivet from a furnace and flip it to a “holder-on” crouched inside the boiler that was being assembled. He placed the rivet in a hole and backed it up while a worker on the outside of the boiler hammered or peened the rivet head.