Wink asked that I post a small discription of who I installed the rivets on my Andrea Deck Gun build, so here it is. The planning and most of the prep are very much like that which goes into using the 1/72 scale rivet decals, such as those made by Archer.
I first looked at alot of pictures to ensure I got the correct sized rivets, in this case the 7mm ones from Calibre 35 looked very very close to being the correct scale size. I then measured the distance between the kit rivets to get an idea of the correct spacing between rivets. As this kit's rivets have slightly different spacing between individual rivets I took the average spacing and used that as a guide. Next, I marks the beginning and end locations of the lines of rivets and made a small sketch to refer to once I began marking locations for drilling.
I than sanded the kit rivets off, remarked the ends based on measurements and placed a small strip of embossing tape along the future location of the rivets to act as a guide. After that, I used a pair of calipers that had been setup with the correct spacing, and starting from either the bottom for the vertical rows, or stern for the horizontal rows, used a needle to mark the location of each rivet. Using a .30mm drill bit, I drilled each hole completely through the hull side.
Using a pair of very fine pointed curved tweezers I removed each rivet from its attachment, dipped the stem in some thin super glue, and placed the rivet in the hole, pushing it flush with my thumb nail.
That is pretty much it. Be prepared to lose about 5% of the rivets either to having to discard them due to misalignment breaking the stem or because a rivet goes goes flying off into space off the tweezers.
Hope this helps someone,
Ernest
