I have a couple saddles (Brooks Pro and Ideale 80) that have small rivets which are a bit proud of the leather surface, both near the nose and back at the cantle plate. I can definitely feel them if my butt or thigh slides over/past them. Is it okay to try and set them into the leather, or am I just going to ruin the leather? (I an take some pix tomorrow, but it's too dark now.) Thx...

smontanaro-

You will probably drive the rivet heads into the leather and damage the strength of the connection. Those hand hammered, flared copper rivets on Brooks Pros and B 17s allow for your kind of moving around on the saddle without the bump you are currently experiencing. RHM might be a good guy to pm and ask as he extensively recovers and rebuilds leather saddles.

^ Yeah, that was my worry. Maybe it's just time to move those saddles on to someone without such a sensitive tush.

Aw, set them already!

The cantle plate rivets are pretty easy. The Brooks Pro has solid copper rivets, while the Ideale 80 has semi-tubular rivets (except for the one on top of the nose, which is solid copper). The two have to be handled differently. With the semi-tubular ones, I'd place the saddle upside down on an anvil* with the rivet head flush against the surface of the anvil, then pound down on the cantle plate with a hammer and punch very close to the rivet, but not on the rivet. You should see the underside of the rivet, which is a splayed star shape, come up a bit. Then punch the arms of the star down a little to hold them in the new location. With the solid copper rivets, the whole rivet has been compressed and there's no way it will move through the cantle plate; so you have to work from the top. Place the cantle plate on the anvil and tap down the edges of the copper rivets with lots of little blows. If your anvil has a corner sharp enough, place the underside of the rivet right on the corner so the anvil supports the rivet, not the cantle plate. If you can do that, you can hit the rivet head as hard as you want, and compress the whole thing.

The nose rivets are not so easy, because they cannot be supported from the underside. Still place the thing on the anvil as firmly as possible, and tap tap tap. You probably can't make it perfect, but you can make it better.

*For an anvil, a cutoff piece of an I-beam girder is a good option. Or maybe a bar bell weight, or the head of a sledge hammer. Or embed an axe into a chopping block and use the back of the axe head as an anvil. Another option is to slam a pickaxe deep into the ground so one of the points is sticking straight up; place the underside of the rivet against that, and tap on the head with a hammer.

rhm, FTW as usual.

This thread reminds me of why I invested in a good bench mounted vice, and its included flat/pounding surface. Something so stone age simple comes in very handy at times.

Bill

I had rivet on my B-17 causing issues. The rivet was raised enough to damage my shorts, but it didn't cause me an discomfort. With the Almanzo 100 right around the corner, I decided I needed to fix it. I tried a woodblock and hammer, thinking the wood could protect the leather. However, the rivet didn't budge, so I used my hammer to lightly pound the rivet directly, this worked. After this 'repair', I have a good number of miles, including 100 miles of gravel and there's no evidence of damage to the leather.

Here are some poor quality pictures of the saddle today, I see no ill-effects from this repair - it was the middle rivet that was causing the issue.


The white you see on the left of the middle rivet is flash reflection