In the 1950’s I spent a large part of my life -as a Shipwright – replacing such plating on similar ships – downriver in Sheerness.
I would have to centrepunch each rivet on the plate to be removed. Next a driller would come along and, using the centrepunch marks I had made, drill half way through all the rivets.

My ‘mate’ would hold a long handled rivet punch in the drilled hole and I would thump the end of the punch with my maul (a shipwright’s sledgehammer with a spike on one end and a hammer head on the other). this snapped the drilled rivet in two: the head fell into the dry dock and the rest of the rivet fell inside the ship. If I hit the punch off-centre, it would jump out of the holder and crash to the bottom of the dock … my mate would have to climb all the way down and back to retrieve it … and then mutter and curse for hours.

After we had made the replacement plate (in the Plate Shop http://techssimboats.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/life-in-plate-shop.html) It would be swung into place by a crane and we would bolt it in place through some of the river holes.

Then came the riveters you mentioned – they worked like clockwork: On the dockside the rivets were heated to red hot in a portable furnace with compressed blowing through it. “Rivet -ho!” the rivet was thrown by the furnace man to a catcher on on-board who caught it in a bucket. He took the rivet (tongs) and dropped it into a scaffold pole it fell out into a bucket on the next deck down, where it was picked out and dropped into the next pole. The ‘Dolly man’ would pick out the rivet, and poke it into the rivet hole in the plate, and clamp the dolly behind it. The riveter on the outside with the pneumatic hammer would give a double tap on the plate, to warn the dolly man, then he would hammer the still red-hot rivet into the shape you can see on your pictures. By the time he had finished the cry, “Rivet-ho” was already echoing.

Shipwright’s had apprentices, but Titular trades like riveters had ‘boys’.

When I first went ‘afloat’ at 15, I went onboard the Survey ship ‘Shackleton’ . I went below decks to find my ‘gang’ … it was like Dante’s Inferno … gangs of riveters … electric welders turning the air violet … sparks from oxy-acetylene cutters….it was quite a growing up process.

I’ve rambled, sorry.