Rivets

This Redfield Gun Sight box does not currently house the original equipment that hunters and shooters trusted for accurate, rugged and reliable sighting.  The Redfield Company grew from its humble beginnings in 1909 to include rifle scopes, mounts, and eventually binoculars.  They closed nearly 90 years later in 1998, leaving behind a remarkable legacy of quality sights for the American Sportsman. 

The handsome little coffer here is now used to house spare rivets.  Rivets are one of those things that we all think we know but aren’t quite sure. They’re the little metal holes, right? Like in a hippy’s ear? Or are those grommets? Wait, what’s a grommet and what’s a rivet? Well, rivets are the solid bits. Now you know. All rivets have one pre-shaped end with a smooth shaft (as seen above) and a distal end meant to be reshaped when put to use joining two materials.  They are stronger and tighter than a screw of the same diameter.  They first appeared in Egypt over 5,000 years ago and were used by Romans in general construction and Vikings to attach planks to their longboats.  The first modern application of the rivet was in boiler making, but became pivotal to commerce during the maritime traffic boom between 1830 and 1940.  The internal structure of the Eiffel tower owes a great deal of its strength to the more than 2.5 million rivets holding it together and could not exist without them.  Welded seams do not offer the necessary resistance to internal stress and bolts are more susceptible to loosening over time.   Even fashion was shaped by the modest rivet when Levi Strauss in 1873 secured patent number 139,121 for ‘waist overalls.’  The now quintessential denim Jean was originally described as having one back pocket with arcuate stitching design, a watch pocket, a cinch, suspender buttons and a ‘rivet in the crotch’.