Making an infill plane from scratch 12, riveting the sides.

Much to my surprise the marshmallow glue seemingly did its job. So technically both infill pieces were now ready to be mounted in body of the plane.
I positioned them and clamped a set of pliers on the sides to ensure that nothing moved during the drilling of the holes.
At first I drilled a new set of holes instead of those that I plugged the other day. After that all the existing holes were bored in the infills as well.

My original plan was to insert some small tubes to function as distance pieces. I had laid my eyes on a piece of stainless steel pipe, but I had to give up the plan because the hole was too large by 1 mm in diameter (3/64") compared to the rivets that I was going to use.
So a quick change of plans resulting in that I assembled the plane without any distance pieces.

The rivets are actually short lengths of round iron bar of 1/4" diameter (6 mm). Those were sanded first to remove the black crust, and one end sharpened just a bit, to make sure that it would engage the hole on the opposite side of the body.
The rivets were driven through and I started peening the metal.
After doing one rivet on one side, I flipped the plane over and completed the other side of that rivet.

The riveting disturbed the look of the sides a bit, I guess that the wood compacted a bit, and the sides naturally followed along. So the bottom of the planes doesn't look quite as nice as it did in the beginning. But the overall feeling is rock solid.

Smoothing the sides again to level out the rivets took some time. Again this is where a belt sander would come in handy, but a file can also do the job if you have a little bit of patience.

A nice trick when filing metal is to pack the file with chalk. This helps to prevent chips to get stuck in the file and make a major scratch in the surface on the next stroke.
You basically just take some writing chalk and rub it onto the file before using it.
It really helps a lot. Especially if you work in softer metals like brass, copper or aluminium but for steel or iron it also helps. These metals aren't as prone to clog the file, but any bit helps to make a nice surface.

The parts ready for riveting.

File packed with chalk.

Almost done with one side.

Body and infills assembled.