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I am going to be replacing my radius arm bushing in a few days. I will be cutting the rivets out, I'm using a 4 1/2'' angel grinder. What I needed some input on is should I use a cutting wheel or a thicker grinding wheel to cut the head off?
And what size drill bit do you recommend for drilling out the rivet?
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Usually, you can get by by doing one or the other:
1)Drilling the rivets step by step, then punching out
or
2) Grinding the heads flush, then punching the remaining rod portion of the rivet out.
If you're going to be using an angle grinder (I did mine by the same method), I'd use a cut-off wheel to get the majority of the rivet head, being careful not to cut into the frame, and then finish taking down the more stubborn, frame hugging portion of the rivet head with some good metal grinding disks. Expect to go through several disks/ wheels - those rivets are made out of some tough metal.
Once you get the rivet's head removed, an air hammer or big hammer/ chisel combo should knock that sucker right out.
IMPORTANT: The best tip I can give you is go out and buy a can of MAPP Gas. If you heat up the area around the rivet once you get it ground flush, it will make knocking those stubborn things out a breeze of a job!
We used a zip disk on a 4 1/2 angle grinder, took about 20 sec per rivit to get the heads off. Then we drilled them with a couple different size drill bit and used an air hammer to pound them out. One came out and one didn't. We had to use a pry bar and pull the bracket off the rivet then took the grinder to it again. All in all it too about 1/2 hour to get the one side off. We split the bracket in the center by removing the 4 bolts and pulled the complete thing right off. All total it took a couple hours to change the drivers side only but we took our time. The other one will be far easier now that we have done one.
