quick question about rivet gun

[kevinmlamb]

I just bought the $9 Stanley model from Home Depot last week, but only for replacing the interior skin rivets that had popped loose over the past few months. It handles 1/8", 5/32", and 3/16" size rivets and will shoot both steel and aluminum rivets. Did the job just fine and has a lifetime warranty. I don't know all the rivet sizes inside and out of my Airstream, but I think this gun would handle light duty work.

By the way, I bought a collection of rivets, as well. Steel and aluminum sets at 1/8", 1/4", and 3/8" lengths. For some reason, only the 1/8" aluminum rivets had white heads on them. Having never used a rivet gun in my life, I thought that, somehow, the white wouldn't show. I was wrong and I switched to the 1/4" size before I shot the others. Good to know that 1/8" and 1/4" work equally well on the interior. Of course, the white rivet is directly in the line of sight as you're walking through the door, so now I'll have a constant reminder of my learning curve.

[HiJoeSilver]

I think something is getting lost here. There are 2 types of rivets, pop and buck. Boubou, you seem to be going back and forth and possibly confusing the two.
You mention avoiding the Olympic rivets, those are pop rivets that are primarily used to replace exterior bucked rivets. They then get shaved to make them look like bucked rivets. The only thing you can avoid those with on the exterior is with new bucked rivets. Bucking new rivets is preferred if you have access to the back of the exterior skins. The process requires completely different rivet gun, a pneumatic bucking rivet gun with appropriate rivet set and bucking bar for solid rivets.
The interior rivets are basic 1/8" pop rivets. Those can be installed with the guns you were looking at in the catalog you linked. But those are not really necessary. I popped well over 1000 new rivets when I replaced all the interior skins in my trailer using a basic manual squeeze pop rivet gun.
There should be no need to go trying to replace all the exterior rivets, you'd just be creating a lot of work and probably end up doing more damage than any positive value added.
The original exterior rivets are 1/8" brazier head aluminum solid buck rivets. When replacing them you drill the hole to 5/32" to get a clean round hole and replace them with 5/32" modified brazier head rivets.
Vintage trailer supply has a good rivet section, you can look at the buck and pop rivet sections to get a little more info on them;
http://www.vintagetrailersupply.com/category-s/5.htm