THE SMALL SHOP NUTTER TOOL

The traditional method of making nuts & bolts & rivet detail is to turn to a punch & die. That will allow you to make endless rivets using plastic card.

There is a limitation though. It’s quite hard to make very fine or very thin rivets. The Nutter is made by US Company The Small Shop & is a precision-engineered device.

It consists of a machined aluminium top plate, or guide, that is essentially a clamp - fixed down by two screws. The lower part contains a working area with an embedded rubber pad.

The Nutter comes into its own making ultra thin nuts & rivets. It comes with a set of brass punches in various sizes. You take the special tri-foil lead sheet that comes with the Nutter, & place it over the rubber mat. Clamp in place & then punch through repeatedly using the punch of choice. The rivet is held on the rubber mat. Then unclamp & release the rivets by tapping.

There’s no doubt that this is an expensive tool, but it is easy to use & reliably churns out miniscule & very thin rivets. If you wanted to recreate the rivet detail on a 1:35th scale Pak37’s trailing arms, for example, this is the tool you’ll need. It’s undoubtedly going to be useful to scratch builders, it remains to be seen if the everyday model maker truly needs it. That is a choice for each individual. However, we all know you can never have too many tools! We think we’ll definitely be using it again & again. Why not watch the video & make up your own mind?