Riveting tutorial?
Rivets and bolts and weld seams are part of the fun for me. Before the Academy M3 Lee kit was released, I seriously considered scratchbuilding one using tons of Tichy rivets and sheet styrene. As you see, I went the chicken route going for the welded M3A3 -- I still like it because it's not a subject one sees modelled much at all.
For this subject, there's really only two concentrations of rivets -- the upper rear engine bulkhead and a small angled piece at the right rear of the fighting compartment. Here's how I do it. I mark off with a hard lead pencil or a permanent extra fine line marker the axis on which the rivets will go. Then I see if the rivets are an odd number (yes, I'm officially a proud "rivet counter") which makes things easier.
The upper rear engine bulkhead had 17. Because so many of the unused kit parts had spare rivets, i just shaved them off to supply me. On my drawn line, I just eyeball the two end rivets. Their location is very key -- both in alignment and equal distance from the outer edge. Then I measure the distance between these two outer rivets. I bisect them on the drawn line and place the center rivet head. I check its alignment with the first two rivets by just looking down the length of the drawn line.
Then, it's just repeating the same process -- placing another "center" rivet head, aligning and repeat again. As the distances between the rivets gets smaller, I just eye-ball the central point and go with that. For my 17 rivet array, I only used a ruler for the first central rivet. Everything else was just eye-balling. 17 rivet heads get applied rather quickly.
Also, more pics can be seen in my Photobucket account HERE