9/23/25
Most of us are well aware that the A70 supra is turning 40 soon. With age things break and fall apart. I picked up a broken hatch cover with the intention of fixing it. This example had the tabs broken off.
I went about figuring out how to disassemble this without tearing the fabric. These have two steel rivets that hold the plastic clips on to the fabric cover. With a small set of hand tools it made quick work of removing the soft steel rivets.
For this repair you will need the following tools:
- A block with holes to punch the rivets out.
- Metal file (coarse to medium)
- Pin punch
- Hammer
- Hand drill (or a power drill if you’re bold enough)
- 4mm drill bit
- Pliers
This process is fairly straight forward.
Find yourself an open place to work. Use the metal file to file down the bottom of the rivets as far as you can; Like pictured below.
Once the rivet is filed flat against the plastic (maybe a little more) the idea is to “squish” or “fold” the old rivet material inward using the hammer and pin punch(like shown below) so that you can pull the rivet out using the pliers (without damaging the cover hopefully). If you are desperate, you can use a 4mm drill bit to drill out the old rivet however, you risk damaging the cover because the rivets can spin freely in the hole they are set in.
Once the old broken hangers are removed, you can install the new ones (you can buy new replacements here).
Thank you for reading this little DIY how to. I hope this serves you well. Thank you for your time – Austin (owner)
Interstellar Research Systems 