Landships II

One product I found at the local craft shop here in Australia that makes good rivets is Micro Beadz, manufactured by Ribtex. They come in a 20g packet that gives you hundreds, or more likely thousands, of rivets. They are not all the same size so you get smaller rivets for 1/72 scale projects and larger ones for 1/35. I drill a small hole at the rivet location, pick up the bead with a pair of tweezers, usually over and over again because they are hard to pick up, place it on the hole and push in. A little cement to hold it in and you're done. I used it on Emhar's 1/72 A7V for the front flap which has rivets for the hinge connection to the body, but none for the hinge connection to the flap (an unusual omission). I don't know if Micro Beadz are available anywhere else except Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. The only disadvantage is that the colours they come in are bright, metallic ones.

I haven't actually tried this yet for real, only on a piece of scrap styrene as a test, but try using stretched sprue (or 10 thou styrene rod - I couldn't get any, though, hence stretched sprue). Drill holes where you want the rivets using a teeny weeny drill in a pin vice. Push in a short length of the rod/sprue, and apply liquid cement to the back of the sheet - capillary action will draw it through without swamping and marking the front surface. Don't worry about getting the lengths sticking out exactly right as you can trim and sand once they're fastened to even them out.