Umbrella Stroller Re-cover, Completed

The stroller is finished. You can read up here about how I turned my Umbrella stroller from it's ugly state into into it's half finished state. The rivets on the sunshade made me work a little, hence the half finished project, so this is a story about rivets.

Before I started this project I examined the construction and that's when I discovered the 6 rivets that held the sunshade in place.  A rivet is a metal piece that looks like a bolt without the threads.  It hold parts together really tight so holes are drilled in both pieces it's intended to hold together and then the rivet is slipped in.  A machine folds the end down tight so that everything is held in place, a lot like grommets only more heavy duty.  They aren't removable though and you need a special machine to put them in.  I figured I'd worry about the rivets later so I went ahead and re-covered the seat of the stroller, it was held on by screws.  That left me with this though, and later was now.

I read up on how to remove rivets and it involved a drill so I waited until Brad could help me and we broke a drill bit.  Not surprisingly our wood bits didn't work so well.  I next took the stroller to my brother and his metal drill and he removed all the rivets for me.

Here's a side view of the sunshade, you can see the 3 rivets there, there's 3 on the other side as well.

We flipped the stroller on it's side and he took a drill bit small enough to fit inside the back end of the rivet.

He started by drilling straight down.

Once that's done the goal is the break the little lip off the back so he made small circular motions until the back of the rivet popped off and we could slide the parts out.  Sounds easy, and some of them were that easy.  Some of them were far more difficult and there were many broken drill bits, go slow.

Also, not surprisingly the metal gets really hot!  If you're using an old picnic table that's covered in plastic as your work table put something between the plastic and the metal.

Here's what I was left with once my rivets were all removed.

I then took everything home and re-covered my sunshade.  In the rivet removal process I'd discovered that my brother has access to a machine to replace them, I just needed to provide new rivets so I headed over to Home Depot to buy some replacements. Then I went to Home Hardware and finally ended up at Canadian Tire.  I needed two different lengths of rivets, the two bottom ones being longer, only they don't sell any that are that long so I switched the bottom two for bolts.  I then purchased a package of 100! rivets for the other 4 I needed, that was the smallest package I could find.  Then I waited two weeks until Rob's work schedule and my schedule lined up.  I headed to his work and we went to add my rivet only to discover that they were too short.  Back to Canadian Tire where I discover again that I can't buy rivets long enough so those 4 were replaced with bolts as well and the two weeks I waited for my Brother was unnecessary.

So it's put together and it's okay.  I would have preferred rivets and the sunshade doesn't open and close as smoothly as before but at least it works and it's really beautiful.  Here's  a shot of the 3 bolts in the sunshade, both of these are views from underneath.  I used rounded caps for the bottom two and I may replace the others with these as well, we'll see.

Here's one more before and after.

I like that my two strollers match now, fun that they're the same pattern.